The Coast Range Land Trust holds land for the long view. We work alongside ranchers, tribal nations, agency partners, and rural neighbors to keep working landscapes working — and wild landscapes wild — from the redwood fog belt of the Mendocino coast to the inner ridges of the Mayacamas and Vaca mountains.
We do this through three instruments: conservation easements that retire development rights without changing ownership; fee-simple acquisition of parcels of exceptional ecological value; and long-term stewardship monitoring that does not end when the ink dries. Our staff includes restoration ecologists, range scientists, GIS analysts, and accredited conservation negotiators. Our board includes fifth-generation ranchers, foundation trustees, and tribal cultural-resource leaders. We are accredited by the Land Trust Accreditation Commission and rated four stars by Charity Navigator.
Marisol Otero-Brennan, Executive Director
Three programs. One landscape. The Coast Range is a mosaic — not a wilderness, not a working ranch, not a watershed alone, but all three at once. We protect it as such.
Ranches that have been grazed by the same families for four and five generations are the connective tissue of the Coast Range. We hold easements on 31 working ranches totaling 28,400 acres.
Old-growth blue oak woodland, serpentine chaparral, and the last unfragmented mountain lion corridor in the inner Coast Range. We hold these in fee, in trust, in perpetuity.
From Outlet Creek to Putah Creek, the watersheds we steward feed coho, steelhead, and a million human downstream users. Riparian restoration is patient, granular work, and we are in for the century.
A working atlas of every parcel we hold or co-steward. Hover a pin to read the file card. Maps are reviewed annually by our GIS team and audited every third year by the Accreditation Commission.
The McCoys have been running cow-calf operations on the same ground since 1881. Last fall, after eighteen months of conversation around the kitchen table, the family signed a conservation easement that retires the development rights on every acre — in perpetuity — while keeping the ranch in the family, on the tax rolls, and in production.
For the McCoys, the easement payment will fund a generational transition: the fourth-generation patriarch Bob retiring, his daughter Lisa stepping into management, and her two kids growing up knowing the ranch will be there when they're ready. For us, it adds 4,420 acres of intact blue oak woodland, vernal pool complex, and ephemeral creek system to the conservation portfolio of inner Mendocino County.
"We don't need to be told how to take care of this place," Lisa said when we walked the property line in February. "What we needed was a way to make sure nobody else could decide to put it under a row of vacation cabins after we're gone. The easement does that."
Read the full case study →Excerpts from our staff's working notebooks across one calendar year. Click an entry to read the full field note.
First superbloom on the south slope since 2017. The vernal pool fairy shrimp came back ahead of the flowers, which is what we hoped.
47 active coho redds in the lower three miles of restored channel. That is more than triple what we logged in 2019, and roughly equal to the high-water count from 1998.
Targeted summer grazing took medusahead cover from 38% to 11% in the south paddock. The ranch handled it; we monitored. This is what working-lands conservation looks like.
The tule elk herd that we've been tracking via collar since 2021 used the modified fence crossings 23 times in the last quarter. The herd is now 84 animals. We started counting at 31.
Our microclimate stations logged 312 fog-drip hours on the west face of Cahto. The redwoods stay because the fog comes. We are documenting both, year over year.
A working summary of the 2025 stewardship survey. Full annual report published each April in The Watershed Quarterly.
Source: CRLT 2025 Vegetation Inventory, cross-referenced with CALVEG and CDFW BIOS layers.
A partial roll of fiscal year 2025 contributors at the $1,000 level and above. The full annual report names every donor of record.
Five honest ways to participate. None require you to be a millionaire. One of them does, eventually, and we'll be glad to talk.
A monthly gift of $25 funds one acre of stewardship monitoring per year. Tax-deductible. EIN 94-1234567.
Give monthly → 02Bequests and charitable remainder trusts have funded a quarter of our largest acquisitions. Our planned-giving director will sit down with you.
Speak with us → 03Landowners with 100+ contiguous acres of intact habitat or working land: we'd like to walk your property and talk options. No obligation.
Start a conversation → 04Restoration plantings, fence-line monitoring, citizen-science transects. Six weekends a year, no experience required, lunch included.
See the calendar → 05The Watershed Quarterly is our 24-page print journal of field notes, science, and place-based writing. Free with any membership.
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