Teams sometimes hike into sites for covert operations, but more often, they rappel down from a helicopter into the nearby area. Officers face major disadvantages when raiding sites because cultivators have been living at the location for months. Covert operations involve the most risk because hiking conditions and landscape characteristics can subject officers to ambush and provide cultivators with vantage points for armed engagement. While no officers have been fatally wounded during remote operations, there have been various cases involving gunshot wounds. During helicopter raids, cultivators generally flee from the scene while law enforcement officers are lowered into the area. While living on-site for months, cultivators develop elaborate escape routes and hiding spots. Hiding places can be as close as one hundred feet from a grow site, and are rarely found without K-9 assistance. The cultivators that are obtained are generally low-level employees with minimal knowledge about the larger organization that employs them. To complement tactical operations, government agencies have developed another significant long-term goal to develop an understanding of commercial scale, remote marijuana cultivation, within the broader public. Regional leadership conducts public education programs by presenting PowerPoint demonstrations about DTOs at meetings, forums, and presentations for politicians, government employees, and the general public. Law enforcement organizations facilitate information sharing with the media and local contacts, and have developed “bi-lingual material to be distributed in high risk areas seeking information and offering rewards.”These programs aim to increase the awareness in an effort to increase reports of suspicious activities. When marijuana related activities are reported early, enforcement agencies gain a strategic advantage in combating individual sites. In addition, vertical grow systems for sale early detection allows more sites to be discovered and raided throughout the year because enforcement efforts are spread over a longer period of time. Public education creates an understanding of the consequences of marijuana production on various scales.

This can provide political support for the prevention of DTO related activities in California, as well as alter patterns of marijuana acquisition and consumption within the general public.This means that carefully planned and executed cultivation systems are crucial to developing quality marijuana harvests, and that cultivators manipulate the environment to optimize conditions for Cannabis plants. The widespread influence of Mexican cartels on outdoor cultivation in California causes similar processes to be performed at separate sites dispersed across large geographic distances. DTO operated grow sites have developed systematic patterns of behavior that occur with regularity and make their efforts distinct. Cultivators inhabit remote sites over long periods of time to develop plantations, and create a multitude of adverse effects in the process. Site selection is a crucial aspect of the cultivation process. DTOs often choose prospective locations long before they enter into a site. Some key elements that they look for on maps and aerial photographs are isolated water sources, slight canopy cover and adequate sunlight exposure. Sites are created in areas such as logged landscapes, conservation reserves, remote areas of national parks, and other places with difficult access and visually indistinct features from a birds-eye view. These are often areas where people rarely go because entry is made difficult by physical barriers such as cliff faces, steep talus slopes, dense clusters of vegetation such as poison oak, and even man-made berms. Due to the rugged and highly vegetated condition of most prospective sites, preparing land for marijuana planting is both labor intensive and time-consuming. Laborers work long hours to provide Cannabis plants a monopolistic domination of the landscape. The dynamics of landscape alteration depend on site-specific characteristics, but many similar practices occur throughout DTO operations. During the site supply process, cultivators cut or wear trails into the landscape that weave back and forth making site access for material transport easier. In order to avoid detection, laborers try to avoid leaving evidence of their presence up to a certain point, such as a major physical barrier, after which distinct paths are worn into the ground. The sheer weight of laborers’ equipment loads combined with regular use of the trails is enough to trample and kill small vegetation. Dense stands of brush and trees are removed with saws and machetes.

The paths connect site entry routes to the food preparation area, sleeping area, latrine, and various marijuana plantations. One site may contain 30,000 plants, but within that site the plants are often divided up between multiple smaller plots. Laborers’ movement along the paths is responsible for the introduction and distribution of non-native plant species to new areas. Laborers accumulate and transport seeds or spores on their bodies, clothing, shoes and equipment. In the California central coast region, cultivator movement along self-created paths is cited for the spread of Sudden Oak Death syndrome in Tan Oak, Black Oak, and Coastal Live Oak trees.Studies conducted by the Santa Lucia Conservancy show that the occurrence of SOD is facilitated by remote inhabitance through transmission of the plant pathogen responsible for SOD, Phytophora ramorum. Marijuana cultivators contribute to the spread of Phytophora ramorum to uninfected oak trees and exacerbate the effects of Sudden Oak Death syndrome by moving throughout affected landscapes that are part of their widespread system of sites. Movement by any person or animal can effectively transmit this pathogen to uninfected oak trees, but cultivators navigate through these areas more frequently than other people who may pass through. Their movements are also responsible for the spread of a variety of harmful invasive species including thistles, Vinca, Periwinkle, English Ivy Yard, and others.Invasive organisms often out-compete native species because they possess adaptive characteristics and lack natural competitors when introduced in new areas, which results in widespread alterations to the food-web, nutrient cycling, fire regimes, and hydrology of otherwise well preserved ecosystems. Many attributes of remote ecosystems are not ideal for agriculture, so laborers invest much time and energy in altering land to make it suitable for Cannabis cultivation. Workers clear under story vegetation to eliminate potential competition and prepare the soil for Cannabis plantations. The cleared vegetation, referred to as “slash piles,” are discarded in stream beds, causing impediments to hydrologic flows, or used to create berms up to 8 feet tall in order to bar site access.Throughout the growing season, cultivators use chemical techniques to maximize THC content and bud production. These intensive methods change soil dynamics, nutrient levels and chemical makeup, thus creating the opportunity for a new composition of vegetation to emerge. Landscape alteration may awaken seed banks in the soil that have sat dormant for up to hundreds of years, alter the ability for some plants to re-grow because of changes in soil-chemistry, destroy habitat for a variety of organisms, and have many other adverse affects on otherwise preserved ecosystems. In short, remote Cannabis cultivation forever changes the ecosystems in which it takes place.

In highly mountainous areas, growers dig out terraces on hill slopes to create planting beds. In the process, soil is displaced leading to accelerated rates of hill-slope erosion. Some terrace beds are stabilized by falling trees, trimming them into logs, and inserting the logs into the terrace walls to hold the dirt in place. This is an important step to provide somewhat stable access to individual plants on steep slopes, and to prevent landslides that could destroy entire plantations. However, when these are removed, the stock of topsoil is greatly diminished. On slight grades or flat surfaces, cultivators mound soil around Cannabis stems to optimize nutrient uptake. For plantations with high percentages of gravel or sand,vertical grow system growers will bring in loamy soil to provide proper soil composition and nutrients. The affects of these changes on the natural environment can vary. For instance, fall entrees naturally promote the growth of under story species; however, the cutting of trees can disturb soil and impact the ecosystem services that they once provided such as habitat, nutrient cycling and moisture retention. Many land alterations remove perennial root structures that stabilize sediment causing the hillsides to lose stability and become more susceptible to small landslides and sedimentation of water sources during precipitation. Sedimentation alters water flow, reduces the capacity of water stocks, degrades the habitats of various species, and makes waters turbid – reducing the capacity for organisms to photosynthesize. Further, chemical toxins and metals bind to clay particles in fluvial sediment, are consumed by bottom feeding organisms, and bio-accumulate in higher order predators throughout the food chain. Cultivators approach land alterations with utter disregard; falling old growth trees, discarding of brush in stream beds, and littering the ground indiscriminately with waste. In sites intended for continued cultivation, laborers dig deep holes that are used to dispose of trash at the end of the harvest season in order to reduce the chances of detection between one season and the next. While their grow operations are usually restricted to between 5 and 10 acres, according to the National Park service, “for every acre of forest planted with marijuana, 10 acres are damaged.” In other words, the adverse effects of remote Cannabis cultivation reach far beyond the borders of the plots in which the plants are grown. An isolated water source is essential for the success of the marijuana plant to produce market grade buds. Mendocino County Sheriff, Tom Allman, claims that “one marijuana plant requires approximately one gallon of water per large plant per day,” meaning that a typical remote grow site can consume approximately 7,000 gallons of water each day over a period of three to four months. This makes water diversion no simple task. Finding a reliable water source that is available year round is especially crucial because the growing season occurs during the summer months. Ideal water sources include springs, creeks, and small bodies of water that do not dry up even during the hot California summers.

Cultivators enact a variety of methods to exploit water sources high in the watershed, some of which include makeshift dams, cisterns, storage tanks, on-site reservoirs, and gravity based PVC pipe flow systems. These systems are built to utilize gravity-based pressure to extract water from natural or man-made pools. The water is then transported through PVC pipes to cultivation sites. These water diversion systems connect water sources to marijuana plants up to four miles away. The resources that cultivators possess to build these extensive systems include shovels, pumps, sheets of plastic, tarps, string and large quantities of PVC piping. Other necessities are extracted from the nearby environment and include logs, rocks, clay, brush, and moss. One site in Carmel contained a makeshift cistern that was dug out, lined with black plastic, and held in place with rocks. Water flowed from the cistern through the 1.5 miles of piping and dropped 700 feet in elevation en route to the site. Once water reached the grow site, the large PVC fed into progressively smaller tubing that connected drip irrigation lines to each plant. This system utilized control valves to prevent over watering and to regulate watering schedules. In the case of small operations, the water is sometimes stored at the site in large plastic lined reservoirs or large storage tanks. The water is then pumped from the reservoir on regular schedules through drip irrigation lines in quantities that optimize growth. Water diversion practices create adverse effects for humans and the environment alike. When the natural flow of water from springs or ephemeral creeks is modified, the preexisting flora and fauna that rely on it are deprived. As surface level water disappears, riparian vegetation and animals have limited access to the water that they depend on. More seriously, keystone fish species die from degradation and loss of habitat. The death or removal of keystone species from ecosystems creates a void that affects the entire food chain. As one species cannot sustain its diet, it dies off, leading to the death of other species that predate upon it. Water diversion practices significantly impact human society as well. The state of California has abundant water resources that are necessary to sustain its vast population, economy, and natural environments. Though the overall fresh water supply from precipitation is immense, the public demand for fresh water far exceeds the natural supply.