Just after the 24,000-acre Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve was established by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in 2017, dozens of conservation-savvy scientists convened to discuss its highest and best use. Mark Reynolds — a UC Berkeley-trained biologist and cofounder, in 1997, of the Sedgwick Reserve in the Santa Barbara backcountry — was among that meeting of the minds.
“Part of the concept,” Reynolds remembers, “was to protect it as a place of learning — a living laboratory.” The establishment of the Point Conception Institute (PCI), the preserve’s research division, emerged from the process. Reynolds oversaw the PCI in the interim before becoming director in 2021.
For more on the preserve as “a unique merger of conservation, academia, and technology,” Reynolds sat down for a Q&A. He speaks to the lay of the land and some of the research happening across the vast and untrammeled property stretching from the ocean’s edge at Point Conception to the oak woodlands high along the Santa Ynez mountains…