UC Berkeley

Recent state-level legalizations of recreational cannabis across the US have created a large-scale policy experiment that could alter land use patterns and shape wildlife communities. Cannabis legalization provides a rare opportunity to study the consequences of land use change in a rural agriculture frontier. This dissertation explores the ecological outcomes of cannabis legalization by approaching cannabis landscapes as social-ecological systems and combining multiple disciplinary approaches. My research takes an interdisciplinary approach to quantifying land use change and contributes to our context-specific understanding of wildlife responses to human development. Ultimately, this research provides results that are timely and may be useful for policy, management, and land use decision-making.

I begin with an introduction on cannabis landscapes as social-ecological systems. I outline a brief history of cannabis farming in the western US, as well as an explanation of my focus on small-scale legacy cannabis farming. Then, in Chapter 1, I produce baseline distribution data on cannabis land use in southern Oregon, and examine the overlap with sensitive ecological features. This chapter addresses the questions: How is cannabis production distributed? Where might we be concerned about its environmental impact? In Chapter 2, I use cannabis farmer interviews to generate model covariates which contextualize the cannabis land use data from the first chapter. Here, I ask: What drives cannabis land use over time? What is the socio-ecological context for these drivers? In Chapter 3, I use wildlife camera data to examine the outcomes of cannabis land use for animals on and surrounding cannabis farms. This chapter focuses on the question: How do wildlife respond to cannabis farming? In Chapter 4, I detail the methodology for field experiments that address specific mechanisms of wildlife response to cannabis cultivation, asking: What is the role of light and noise disturbance in multi-taxa wildlife response to cannabis? Finally, I conclude with a summary of the broad implications of this work, as well as future research and policy recommendations.