Portfolio

Key Insights

One of the most valuable long-term levers for scaling ACR’s impact was “top-down” supply chain partnerships with beef brands and institutional buyers (described above). A single such partnership can bring ACR access to five to fifty-plus ranches and thousands to over a million acres at once — the kind of scale ACR needs to reach its 10-million-acre goal. Similarly, certifying rancher members of landscape conservation initiatives to distinguish their management of priority habitats and migratory corridors adds large acreages to the total.

Lessons Learned

• Diagnosing barriers to program success sometimes surfaces uncomfortable findings. The program struggled to even get added to Audubon’s website navigation — reachable only with what one staffer called “a roadmap”. It had also only recently won permission to establish its own Instagram account. The downstream effect of ACR’s inability to effectively promote its value proposition was concrete: one certified rancher reported never getting a single inquiry that referenced the certification. The value of an outside advisor is being trusted to trace a symptom back to its actual structural cause, honestly, while still protecting every stakeholder’s confidence. Our final report clearly conveyed the value to both the program and Audubon’s mission of ensuring ACR has the resources and approvals needed to build public awareness of and trust in its certification seal.
• One early ACR value proposition element promised prospective customers something outside the program’s control — a price premium for certified beef. This backfired when the premium didn’t materialize for every rancher. The fix was reframing ACR’s targeted value propositions around what the program could guarantee: improvements to soil health, resilience to drought, improved grass and livestock productivity, and overall ecosystem health – including and beyond bird populations. ACR could promote these valuable benefits through multi-media marketing like video footage of degraded pasture turning into thriving bird habitat. A value proposition should only promise what you’re confident you can deliver.

Transferable Ideas

• External diagnostic input surfaces what insiders can’t see on their own (or feel held back from expressing openly and honestly). The same logic behind the Grasslands Alliance’s multi-stage external review — via input from scientists, producers, NGO partners, and pilot audits — shows up again here, applied to program strategy instead of technical standard design. A survey of staff, partners, and funders did for Audubon’s program what external review did for a certification standard a decade earlier.
• As marketing guru, Seth Godin advises, “if you need to water down your story to appeal to everyone, it will appeal to no one.” The targeted value propositions completed for ACR — informed by outstanding ideas from interviewees — customized pitches by priority audience: national leadership needed to hear bird habitat and mission, not beef; ranchers needed a case that certification’s benefits exceeded its costs; brands needed access to beef sourced from credibly bird-friendly ranches and benefits to brand reputation; environmentally-minded consumers needed a way to distinguish beef produced on certified bird-friendly ranches. Targeting pitches across audiences who each have their own reasons to say yes is essential for creating a remarkable program.

Key Insights

• Aligning wildfire-resilience philanthropy turned out to be a coordination challenge as much as an investment decision. Participating in the Wildfire Resilience Funders Network mattered nearly as much as grantmaking itself, since duplicated or misaligned funding wastes scarce philanthropic dollars.
• Tracking emerging science and policy is what surfaced Rewild’s highest-priority funding gap: the shortage of locally adapted native seeds and seedlings needed for post-wildfire restoration projects. The National Academies of Sciences report identifying that gap was led by my Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Susan Harrison — a genuinely welcome reconnection. We integrated her team’s recommendations into the Rewild strategy.

Lessons Learned

A philanthropic vehicle’s own lifespan doesn’t determine whether its work mattered. The Wildfire Resilience Funders Network relationships built during the Rewild engagement are what put me in the room as a fellow reviewer for the Conservation XPrize Fire Grand Challenge, a Funders Network participant. That’s how I met Seth Shalet, CEO of the Santa Clara County Firesafe Council: he posted on LinkedIn about the judging role with a line from the song, “Fire on the Mountain.” I wrote back with a Grateful Dead lyric of my own, and we became fast friends. A few months later when BurnBot needed help, Seth made the introduction to their CEO — but it was the wildfire-resilience expertise built designing Rewild that made the referral actually land. The network, the friendship, and the science all traveled forward together after the Embers Foundation stopped operating when its parent company was acquired by a competitor.

Transferable Ideas

A three-pillar structure — Replant, Reduce, Research — works because each pillar targets a distinct critical component of wildfire resilience solutions: prevention,  restoration, and knowledge-generation.  The same multi-benefit thinking that shaped the BurnBot fuels-treatment analysis and the Grasslands Alliance standard shows up here too: value multiplies when a strategy incorporates a diverse suite of potential benefits to nature and people.

Key Insights

Our recommendation of three new value offerings for utility, agency, and other landowner customers reflected an urgent, sector-wide gap: fuels treatments are too often designed without integrating science-based best practices for maximizing benefits and minimizing risks at each site. Aligning treatment timing and type with site-specific science enables planners to substantially increase the ROI of precious fuels-reduction dollars — generating co-benefits including invasive plant control, native species and habitat restoration, and advancing wildfire research. The report is now a key resource for BurnBot’s Caltrans partnership. It identified the critical need for a multi-benefit fuels reduction framework and protocol – an idea that we are currently working to advance with multi-stakeholder partners.

Lessons Learned

BurnBot is a wildfire resilience robotics technology company, not a land trust, agency, or NGO. So the value question wasn’t only “is this scientifically sound?” but also “what is this actually worth, and to whom?” Naming three new service offerings meant translating ecological rigor into targeted value propositions that a utility, agency, or other landowner customer could act on — a different kind of translation work than the standard-setting or policy analysis elsewhere in this portfolio.

Transferable Ideas

One management practice, several kinds of value at once — the focus on maximizing conservation value found in the Earthjustice riparian-corridor finding and in the Grasslands Alliance’s targeted value propositions shows up here in a different medium. Designing a precision burn well doesn’t just reduce fuels. When treatment planning incorporates the full range of potential benefits at a site, it can also manage priority invasive weeds, facilitate the restoration of native species and habitats, and advance fire research. Where planning focuses only on fuels reduction, the resulting treatment can produce the opposite of a co-benefit: a poorly-designed burn that clears fuels, but inadvertently accelerates invasion of fire-promoting weeds.

Key Insights

Three enforceable recommendations: (1) update the stocking rate of each allotment to reflect current forage and animal conditions; (2) update the grazing schedule to reduce emissions and enhance resilience; and (3) employ an adaptive management framework — pairing the flexibility ranchers desire with monitoring that verifies whether it’s working (“flexibility with accountability”). The adaptive management framework (sourced from the Conservation Measures Partnership) compared four existing monitoring systems: Interpreting Indicators of Rangeland Health, the NRCS National Resource Inventory, BLM’s Assessment, Inventory and Monitoring program, and the Sustainable Rangeland Roundtable’s Criteria and Indicators.

Lessons Learned

Adaptive management has a design flaw baked into its own name: adapting is the part far too many skip. Agencies set objectives, collect monitoring data — but translating that data into improved management is where they stall. This report named that gap directly, calling it adaptive management’s own Achilles heel. It’s why the frameworks built now explicitly detail how to use monitoring data to achieve targeted outcomes, from improving management to reporting and amplifying valuable benefits generated.

Transferable Ideas

The biggest untapped lever in this space isn’t more research — it’s coalition-building. Conservation groups fighting poor federal grazing management have largely stayed disconnected from the sustainable food movement’s consumer and retail leverage campaigns. This gap was flagged directly in 2017 stakeholder consultations for Earthjustice, and highlighted in Part VII of the 2018 beef sustainability blog series: NGOs could trace which retail and restaurant buyers source beef from public lands, and apply the same supply-chain pressure that’s worked in forest products and soy to drive management improvements across millions of acres.

Key Insights

Facilitation is its own craft — closer to conducting than instructing. The best sessions weren’t the ones with the most to say; they were the ones where reading the room’s energy and getting out of the way enabled participants to synergize. Without knowing the term “global warming,” local land managers and herders from around the world were independently describing the same phenomenon: Mongolian herders reported over 1,400 dried springs and the loss of four million head of livestock since 1999; Andean farmers described potato cultivation climbing 300 meters in elevation in fifty years, chasing a retreating frost line. It was clear that people didn’t need the vocabulary of climate science to know something fundamental had shifted — they needed a framework for what to do about it.

The passage worth quoting directly, from the chapter’s discussion of implementation barriers: “The most effective options for maximizing resilience may not always appear socioeconomically feasible, may not be legal, and may meet with considerable political resistance… ecologists and land managers will need to work together with economists, sociologists, communication specialists, policymakers, and the public.” — Buying Time: A User’s Manual, Chapter 1 (WWF, 2003). Ecological science, communication, and stakeholder engagement — the same three disciplines on the Approach page — named as the path to successful implementation in 2003.

Lessons Learned

What does adaptation guidance written in 2003 look like in 2026? The multi-benefit thesis has held up — and matters more now than it did then. A framework that survives two decades of practice while the field around it professionalizes isn’t nostalgia; it’s evidence that naming conservation value clearly isn’t a nice-to-have argument, it’s the argument.

Transferable Ideas

The strongest evidence that a framework like Buying Time actually works isn’t that it travels to unfamiliar places — it’s that it holds up when applied to a landscape already known intimately. The California contribution to the group came from years studying grassland invasion ecology: predicted increases in rainfall threatened to worsen weed invasions already costing ranchers millions. Buying Time didn’t only reflect what herders in Mongolia and farmers in the Andes already knew from lived experience — it was aligned with the types of management recommendations made in multiple peer-reviewed publications.

Key Insights

The standard was benchmarked against four existing certifications using actual counts — a specific, defensible gap analysis. It is the first sustainability standard to include the full range of climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies available to the North American ranching sector. Fencing and off-stream water to keep cattle from polluting streams also produces more even grazing distribution — meaning cattle consume more upland forage and gain more weight, generating both environmental and business benefits at once.

One framework, two validations. The same indicator set was independently recognized by federal policy (Earthjustice’s 2016 analysis built its recommended metrics on the same 2013 Workshop indicators) and peer-reviewed science (Ahlering et al. 2021, Rangeland Ecology & Management, invited Jonathan specifically because these indicators were already shaping industry standards).

Lessons Learned

The clearest lesson from a decade of work: developing a science-based solution and motivating people to actually adopt it are two very different challenges. What actually motivates a rancher to improve stewardship usually isn’t science-based recommendations — it’s social proof (seeing a neighbor’s grass stand taller through drought) and appeals to identity (shifting from livestock producer to land steward). Ecological science hasn’t consistently shown the results these behavior-change strategies should produce — likely because benefits are context-dependent, underscoring the importance of flexibility paired with certification that verifies whether the outcome was actually achieved.

Transferable Ideas

The same systems-thinking “cogs” logic that shaped the Audubon strategy in 2024 first appeared in writing in Part VII of the beef sustainability blog series: “the machinery of change is composed of interconnected cogs. If even one cog becomes stuck, the whole machine grinds to a halt.” Chris Wille once described how Rainforest Alliance’s first major retail breakthrough came when Greenpeace’s pressure campaigns motivated a retailer to seek certification — activist pressure created the opening certification then filled. That market pressure was a missing piece for Grasslands Alliance adoption: American conservation NGOs working on ranching impacts were largely absent from the sustainable beef conversation, unlike comparable campaigns in the tropics and in feedlot supply chains. A credible certification is one cog in the machinery of positive change — without market pressure to get each cog turning, even the best-designed certification won’t reach the scale it was built for.

Key Insights

Variation in soils and habitat types drove not just species diversity, but how responsive the land was to management improvement — with direct implications for prioritizing where restoration efforts pay off fastest.

1. A single weed can tell you a landscape’s management history. Yellow starthistle showing up on a hillside means the soil is fertile enough to recover — not ruined, just degraded. Its absence in the ranch’s serpentine grasslands means the opposite: soils so mineral-poor that even aggressive invaders can’t establish, making these habitats de facto refuges for native wildflowers found nowhere else on the property.
2. Field surveys caught three early-stage medusahead infestations before they could spread, enabling eradication recommendations while the problem was still relatively inexpensive to control.
3. The most remote habitats surveyed — island grasslands isolated within dense shrublands, likely never grazed — had strikingly soft, low-bulk-density soils, a visceral marker of how much California’s grassland soils may have changed since European arrival and the introduction of livestock grazing. This observation echoed Part III of a Ph.D. dissertation, which found the same unusually soft, sponge-like soils in isolated island grasslands on ranches in Napa, Lake, and Colusa counties nearly two decades earlier — the same framing (“islands of biodiversity within a sea of Eurasian annual grasses”) arrived at twice, nearly two decades and one county apart.
4. The invasive plant management work here counts as climate adaptation by effect: healthier, less-invaded plant communities build climate resilience whether or not “adaptation” appears in the contract.

Lessons Learned

The ethnobotanical guide became a deliverable in its own right — compiling the edible, medicinal, and Indigenous uses of identified species turned a biodiversity survey into a fascinating record of generations of applied and cross-cultural ecological knowledge. Good management doesn’t undo history by itself: blue wildrye should be common in Hicks Mountain’s oak woodlands, but overgrazing wiped out the local seed source, and no amount of improved grazing since has brought it back on its own. Sometimes the fix isn’t only better management — it may require active restoration, or sufficient time (often 1-2+ decades) for a seed source to return.

Transferable Ideas

Pairing rapid biodiversity assessment with documented traditional and applied ecological knowledge can turn a one-time survey into a durable, standalone applied knowledge product — worth repeating anywhere a property has deep Indigenous or long-tenured land-management history. The soil-condition finding also points to a broader opportunity: using rare, never-grazed reference sites as baseline calibration points for rangeland condition assessments elsewhere.

Key Insights

A small, targeted marketing spend can produce outsized returns in this category — Vermont’s Habitat Stamp program saw sales grow from $50,000 to $80,000 after a single $5,000 advertising push, a data point that directly shaped this program’s marketing budget. The real innovation wasn’t the stamp itself — it was expanding who could fund conservation. License-based funding caps an agency’s revenue at the size of its hunting and angling population; a voluntary stamp opens the door to non-hunters, tourists, and collectors. Directing revenue toward non-lethal predator-conflict prevention gave both hunters/ranchers and non-consumptive wildlife advocates a reason to support the mechanism — a rare point of alignment.

Lessons Learned

A program so well-designed it markets itself is a much higher bar than designing a stamp and encouraging people to buy it. This wasn’t the state’s first attempt at a wildlife-funding stamp — an earlier proposal specifically for wolves drew real public enthusiasm (nearly 50,000 public comments) but also legislative opposition. The redesign had to address two separate challenges at once: broaden past a single politically-charged species to reduce risk, while still finding a legitimate way to reach that same enthusiastic audience. Public appetite and political risk are very different problems, and the funding mechanism had to survive both.

Transferable Ideas

The “everybody wins” framing — a funding mechanism that lets people who care about wildlife but don’t hunt or fish become paying stakeholders — widens a conservation program’s funding base. Benchmarking against “bright spot” precedents before designing anything new is the same due-diligence habit built into every other engagement on this site. The annual art contest and Savings Guide discounts aren’t add-ons to the funding mechanism — they’re what makes it worth talking about in the first place.

Key Insights

The market gap this work first named publicly in 2011 — that no independent third-party certification existed for a mattress company to verifiably communicate its full suite of environmental and health attributes — is the same gap that later led to building the Grasslands Alliance Standard: the same systems-based approach, applied to two very different industries. Building visibility — celebrity endorsements, national press — only followed after the underlying full-lifecycle evaluation was complete.

Lessons Learned

This was the first engagement that applied what has since become the Five Key Questions Framework — proving effective for preventing greenwashing and generating benefits via accurate, verifiable marketing claims, a discipline that shows up in every engagement since, including the standard later built with NRDC, Rainforest Alliance, and Food Alliance. What this engagement uncovered was the need for a fifth key question: how do you do it? — focused on successful implementation.

Transferable Ideas

A thought leadership blog series calling out a market gap can double as business development — Spaldin, and later NRDC, both approached directly on the strength of writing that simply named a problem clearly, without pitching a solution. Sustainability communication benefits from the same science-based, stakeholder-involved framework later structured into the Grasslands Alliance’s due-diligence arc: verify each claim — ideally via independent third-party certification — before it goes into marketing. Outcome: coverage in O, The Oprah Magazine and Good Housekeeping’s The Daily Green; the company remains a market leader today.