Mission

Ecostudies coordinates the Cascadia Prairie-Oak Partnership (CPOP), a community of people and organizations involved in prairie-oak conservation and species recovery efforts. CPOP strives to improve outcomes by facilitating increased collaboration, idea sharing, and information transfer in order to promote conservation action, leverage funding, and expand recovery efforts throughout western Cascadia.

 

Community

CPOP promotes prairie and oak conservation from British Columbia to northwest California, including the Willamette Valley–Puget Trough–Georgia Basin (WPG) ecoregion. The CPOP community is large and diverse, including people and entities from all sectors across the ecoregion: practitioners, policy makers, researchers, landowners, land managers, and many other individuals inspired to conserve prairie-oak ecosystems.

Interested in getting involved with the CPOP community?

Resources

Visit the CPOP website to:

  • Explore 500+ documents in the Technical Library, including management guides, field guides, journal articles, fact sheets, species reports, and more.
  • Sign up for the CPOP ListServ and join over 1000 members in discussing best management practices, sharing newsletters and publications, posting job announcements, and learning about upcoming conferences, workshops, and other events.
  • Learn more about species-specific working groups.
  • Review materials from the most recent CPOP Conference, which occurs biennially and brings together conservation practitioners from northern California to southwestern British Columbia to discuss the protection and restoration of the critically important prairie-oak ecosystem.

Across the Pacific Northwest, from California to British Columbia, dozens of partners are working to protect and restore prairie-oak habitats and implement recovery actions for species listed under the United States’ Endangered Species Act (ESA) and Canada’s Species at Risk Act (SARA). For many species, population and habitat objectives based on science quantify the magnitude of work needed. Although the required investments are substantial, and available funding remains far short of levels needed to achieve objectives, public and private funding are beginning to flow into conservation efforts across the region.

To attract investment, partners across Ecostudies Institute/CPOP, American Bird Conservancy, Klamath Bird Conservancy, Pacific Birds Habitat Joint Venture, and the Willamette Partnership presented conservation action and investment strategies in the form of the Prairie, Oaks, and People Conservation Business Plan, published in 2017. This Conservation Business Plan is intended to showcase our vision for healthy and abundant populations of native prairie-oak plants and animals within the context of human needs and a changing climate. The business plan demonstrates our collective capacity to respond to real-world demand for products and services around prairie-oak conservation and generate outcomes that are important to people as well as to a naturally functioning ecosystem.

Click here to explore the Business Plan and its companion document: Prairie, Oaks, and People – Profile Projects.

In 2025, the Pacific Northwest Oak Alliance and CPOP published and announced the Prairie, Oaks, and People Investment Strategy as a follow-up to the 2017 plan. The Investment Strategy offers an action-oriented five-year strategy with over $300 million of ready-to-implement projects. Developed by partnerships across the Pacific Northwest, this effort brings together Tribes, conservation organizations, community groups, private landowners, businesses, and government agencies in a nonpartisan commitment to conserve prairie-oak landscapes while advancing key natural disaster risk reduction strategies. This strategy identifies priority areas for investment, the strategic use of funding to achieve critical outcomes, and key sources of funding support.

Goal:

The goal of this Investment Strategy is the protection and restoration of healthy prairie and oak ecosystems across the Pacific Northwest so their important biological, cultural, and economic values are sustained over the long term.

Objectives:

We identified three primary objectives to help achieve the goal of the plan:

  1. Protect 100,000 acres of at-risk prairie and oak habitat and restore 10,000 acres of degraded habitat over the next 5 years.
  2. Downlist 5 imperiled species over the next 10 years and establish the ecological and social foundations to support their persistence over time.
  3. Effectively communicate the benefits and capacity needs of prairie-oak habitat restoration and conservation to build a broad collaborative community focusing its resources on ecological and community well-being.

Click here to explore the Investment Strategy