Our goals are to reduce human-wildlife conflicts, with emphasis on cougars, and promote education and learning of Puma concolor. We accomplish this by engaging, educating, and empowering diverse stakeholders and partners to build awareness, understanding, appreciation, and tolerance of cougars. Our focus is on human-cougar conflict prevention and mitigation using interdisciplinary, sustainable, and innovative approaches.
For the first 4.5 years of our organization's inception, we prioritized programming in the state of California, with a focus on Southern and Central Coast cougar populations, where cougars are candidate species under the California Endangered Species Act (CESA).
While we continue our work with California communities, we now also provide coexistence support throughout the cougar’s range, offering resources and educational opportunities to communities seeking to prevent or resolve conflicts that may arise between cougars and people in the landscapes that we share together.
The CESA-designated boundary remains a key focus area for our work in California to conserve the following subpopulations:
Our Human-Cougar Conflict Task Force is conducting work on-the-ground to intervene, directly assist, and empower local communities through training and education before and after human-cougar conflicts occur. The Task Force collaborates across multiple agencies, with local scientists, and with a coalition of organizations in order to achieve effective and long-lasting conflict resolution.
Our team provides expert advice on the available conflict prevention measures as well as the efficacy of such tools, based on the property and specific geographic area. Community members are given site-specific recommendations for reducing human-cougar conflict in their backyard or neighborhood. Our team assists communities with hands-on training and technical assistance such as cougar-proof enclosures.
Prior to founding the Cougar Conservancy, our Director Korinna Domingo co-led efforts with the Mountain Lion Foundation and the Center for Biological Diversity to list Southern and Central Coast mountain lions under the California Endangered Species Act. In April of 2020, these imperiled populations were granted temporary protected status.
The Cougar Conservancy will be supporting this listing effort by engaging in the listing process at key intervals, galvanizing public support, building diverse coalitions, and generating supportive media.
The Cougar Conservancy offers wildlife coexistence support as an official partner of the National Wildlife Federation’s #SaveLACougars campaign.
All cougar photographs on this page are courtesy of the National Park Service.
The Cougar Conservancy is in affiliation with Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs (SEE) a non-profit charity exempt from federal income tax under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. (EIN: 95-4116679)
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