Mission Statement for the Carrizo Plain

Manage the Carrizo Plain National Monument so that indigenous species interact within a dynamic and fully functioning system in perpetuity while conserving unique natural and cultural resources and maintaining opportunities for compatible scientific research, cultural, social and recreational activities.

Facts about the Carrizo Plain National Monument

On January 17, 2001, the President of the United States signed a proclamation designating the Carrizo Plain a National Monument.

Lying adjacent to the southwest edge of the San Joaquin Valley in eastern San Luis Obispo County, the Carrizo Plain is the largest remaining tract of the San Joaquin Valley biogeographic province with only limited evidence of human alteration. The 250,000 acre area is a diverse complex of habitats similar to those in the San Joaquin Valley that have become fragmented or destroyed. It includes the largest remaining contiguous habitats for many endangered, threatened and rare species of animals such as the San Joaquin kit fox, the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the San Joaquin antelope squirrel and the giant kangaroo rat, and also provides habitat for many listed plant species including the California jewelflower, Hoover´s wooly-star and San Joaquin woolythreads. The Carrizo Plain has been a focal point identified in U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service recovery plans for land acquisition and management of these species. In addition, the Carrizo Plain National Monument contains "critical" habitat for California condors as well as being the first area in California to reintroduce both the pronghorn antelope and the Tule elk, native ungulates had been hunted to extinction by the late 1800s. Both sandhill cranes and mountain plovers use the Carrizo Plain as either a roosting place or as their winter home. A wide variety of raptor species also use the area for nesting, foraging and wintering. The area is also rich with evidence of its prehistoric and historic past. Painted Rock, a sacred, ceremonial site of the Chumash People, rises majestically from the grassland while remnants of homesteads, farms and mining operations dot the remainder of the Plain. Separated from the San Joaquin Valley floor by the Temblor Range, and the Cuyama River valley and the Sierra Madres by the Caliente Range, the size, resource and cultural values, isolation, and relatively undisturbed nature of this region distinguish it as ideal for a National Monument that promotes the long-term conservation of the vanishing San Joaquin flora and fauna.

Carrizo Home