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Until 2006, San Diego County remained one of two counties in California that did not have a resident population of non-native wild pigs. Since that time, three or more introductions of pigs resulted in the establishment of several populations of wild pigs that grew and were believed to span the backcountry of San Diego County. Feral pigs have the potential to harm sensitive habitats, compete with native species, negatively impact drinking water quality, damage agriculture and rangelands, destroy archeological sites, and transmit diseases. They also pose a significant threat to the network of protected areas in San Diego County. In 2009, affected public land management agencies began working together to address San Diego’s pig problem in an alllands approach by forming an Intergovernmental Pig Group. The Group determined that eradicating pigs was feasible, especially given recent drought conditions, and should be the ultimate goal of the project. In the summer of 2014, USDA APHIS Wildlife Services began a large-scale effort to remove pigs across San Diego County. We provide an update on the status of the eradication effort and share information we have gathered on the San Diego pig population from remote cameras and samples collected from pigs taken during this effort. We also outline our strategy for the future to achieve eradication, including how an independent monitoring study will be used to certify that eradication has been, and remains, successful.

Spatially heterogeneous landscape factors such as urbanisation can have substantial effects on the severity and spread of wildlife diseases. However, research linking patterns of pathogen transmission to landscape features remains rare. Using a combination of phylogeographic and machine learning approaches, we tested the influence of landscape and host factors on feline immunodeficiency virus (FIVLru) genetic variation and spread among bobcats (Lynx rufus) sampled from coastal southern California. We found evidence for increased rates of FIVLru lineage spread through areas of higher vegetation density. Furthermore, single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) variation among FIVLru sequences was associated with host genetic distances and geographic location, with FIVLru genetic discontinuities precisely correlating with known urban barriers to host dispersal. An effect of forest land cover on FIVLru SNP variation was likely attributable to host population structure and differences in forest land cover between different populations. Taken together, these results suggest that the spread of FIVLru is constrained by large-scale urban barriers to host movement. Although urbanisation at fine spatial scales did not appear to directly influence virus transmission or spread, we found evidence that viruses transmit and spread more quickly through areas containing higher proportions of natural habitat. These multiple lines of evidence demonstrate how urbanisation can change patterns of contact-dependent pathogen transmission and provide insights into how continued urban development may influence the incidence and management of wildlife disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying sites with refugial capacity can inform conservation efforts to assess the degradation status of global ecosystems (Keith et al., 2013), and it can guide landscape conservation planning (e.g., Moilanen, 2007). Although climate-change impacts are of mounting concern (e.g., Araújo et al., 2006; Scholze et al., 2006; Halsch et al., 2021), climate change is only one of many anthropogenic stressors contributing to biodiversity declines (Morris et al., 2020). Environmental stability is a key concept often applied when describing refugia for species and ecosystem persistence or resistance to change (Keppel et al., 2015, Morelli et al., 2020) under current and future climate change (McCullough et al., 2016). Keywords: amenazas; biodiversidad; cambio climático; cambio global; gestión y planificación estratégica; paisajes; sur de California; biodiversity; climate change; global change; landscapes; Southern California; strategic planning and management; threats; ; ; ; ; ; ; EN amenazas biodiversidad cambio climático cambio global gestión y planificación estratégica paisajes sur de California biodiversity climate change global change landscapes Southern California strategic planning and management threats 1 11 11 03/02/22 20220201 NES 220201 INTRODUCTION The specter of biodiversity loss due to human activities is widely recognized and well described in natural systems (Maxwell et al., 2016). [Extracted from the article]