The Watershed Restoration Program at White Buffalo Land Trust

https://youtu.be/4-dfhdVp4g8?si=Rb2XULNeHHEpHNrQ

In this nutshell talk, Jesse Smith discusses the Watershed Restoration Program at the White Buffalo Land Trust - a nonprofit land trust in Santa Barbara County, California. Jesse is the Director of Land Stewardship at White Buffalo Land Trust, where part of his work includes guiding the development of the Jalama Canyon Ranch, a 1,000-acre ranch that the Land Trust is stewarding and restoring. In the talk, he describes how the ranch is implementing landscape-scale restoration strategies that reconnect soil health, vegetation systems, and hydrology. He also discusses how monitoring, adaptive management, and long-term ecological data collection help inform restoration decisions and measure progress over time. Much of White Buffalo Land Trust's Watershed Restoration Program centers around diversifying and perennializing the land for both production and conservation purposes. Jesse explains how Jalama Canyon Ranch is applying principles drawn from agroforestry and agroecology to restore hydrology, including by rebuilding riparian corridors, establishing native tree and shrub plantings, expanding perennial groundcover, and integrating livestock in ways that support soil biology and water infiltration. He emphasizes how restoring plant diversity and soil structure helps slow, spread, and sink water across the landscape, improving drought resilience while reducing erosion and downstream sedimentation.