The Cereus Fund of Trees Foundation has been funding Lost Coast Interpretive Association’s invasive plant programs since 2016. Since that time we have worked to strengthen our partnership with California State Parks, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the community of Shelter Cove, and other partners in order to address the problems invasive plants cause on public and private land. Th e loss of native habitat and ecosystem services, increase of fi re threat and degradation of sense of place is now better understood by our public land managers and much of the community, and eff orts at eradication are advancing! In 2019, we used the Cereus Fund award to forward community outreach and provide opportunities for service work to the community of the Lost Coast Region. We are grateful to the Cereus Fund for providing important funding to help us advance this work.

Most recently, we held a broom pull on October 27 at the Sinkyone Wilderness State Park. We had 14 people come out to enjoy a beautiful day of service work as we cleared about an acre of broom that was taking over the coastal prairie. Th is was the third and best attended broom pull we have held there. Thanks to our ongoing eff orts over the last three years to bring them in, State Parks personnel are now involved and want to partner on even more events!

Just north of the Sinkyone lies the King Range National Conservation area and the community of Shelter Cove. We are very active with the BLM King Range management and the Shelter Cove community in providing resources to stop the pampas grass invasion happening there. Th rough our partnership in the Shelter Cove Invasive Plant Project, SCiPP, we held an Earth Day event involving 60 volunteers (please see our article in Forest & River News 2019 summer issue), two school field trips which brought 80 elementary students out to pull invasives through our bounty program, had community members cut 17,000 pampas seed heads to prevent spread, and are piloting a landowner rebate program to help landowners remove large pampas plants.

All in all, our volunteers have logged over 1,200 hours pulling invasive plants in 2019. We are a small organization with a small budget, but through volunteerism we have a large impact in bringing environmental education and stewardship to the Lost Coast Region. Thank You to the Trees Foundation’s Cereus Fund for making our work possible!