About: Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area (SVRA) sits on California’s Central Coast in southern San Luis Obispo County, in and around the communities of Grover Beach and Oceano, within the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes complex, the largest remaining coastal dune system south of San Francisco, stretching some 18 miles from Pismo Beach to Point Sal. It is the only California State Parks unit where vehicles, including off-highway vehicles, are permitted to drive on the beach and dunes, drawing more than 2 million visitors a year for camping, riding, swimming, and surf fishing across roughly eight miles of coastline shared with Pismo State Beach. The park’s open beach, active foredunes, and vegetated back-dunes support a suite of listed species including the Western Snowy Plover, California Least Tern, California Red-legged Frog, and tidewater goby, along with rare dune plants such as La Graciosa thistle, Nipomo Mesa lupine, and surf thistle.
Conservation Efforts: Oceano Dunes hosts one of the most intensively managed Western Snowy Plover and California Least Tern nesting programs on the West Coast, and it operates under a unique constraint, as the same open sand that makes ideal plover habitat is also the park’s primary recreational surface. Each March through September, State Parks erects mesh fencing and closes roughly 300 acres of the Southern Exclosure and other nesting areas to all public access, with staff and contractors conducting monitoring of threatened and endangered species, managing wildlife management, and enforcing buffers around the closures. The results of such efforts have been substantial, with the park’s minimum breeding population of Western Snowy Plovers growing from 32 adults in 2002 to 281 in 2024, the highest recorded in 23 years of monitoring
Our Role: Plovers and terns at Oceano Dunes nest on open sand with little cover, and some avian predators can be particularly detrimental to their survival during this critical time. WI monitors birds of prey activity across the nesting areas, utilizing a variety of diurnal and nocturnal and direct and digital surveillance techniques, to evaluate the level of threat individual predators pose to nesting success. Our biologists then target the highest threat predators through an array of live-trap trapping techniques, with each individual banded and relocated to preselected sites, each comprising sufficient habitat and distance to help prevent their return to the site; this approach addresses problem individuals while helping prevent negative impacts to the broader non-problematic population. Data collected helps WI and Park staff evaluate predator presence and adapt management approach accordingly during each breeding season and over time.