Major Land Owners

Land Map

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Kamaole Ahupua'aHaleakala RanchOprah Winfrey entities

Boundaries simplified for display. Parcel data: Maui County Real Property Assessment records, Oct 2026; ahupua'a boundary: State of Hawai'i Statewide GIS. Acreages are computed from verified parcels over 20 acres.

Together, one storied 138-year-old ranch and one of the world's most famous media icons steward about 60% of the land between Kamaole's beaches and the slopes above. For a community that thinks in ahupua'a — the traditional Hawaiian land division running mauka (mountain) to makai (sea) — the uplands matter: they feed the gulches, the groundwater, and the green backdrop that makes Kamaole what it is.

The ecological balance of the ahupua'a depended on species that had evolved together over millions of years of isolation. When plants and animals arrived by plane and ship instead of by wind and wing, that balance broke. Today some of the most urgent work on Maui is the slow, ground-by-ground fight to push invasive species back out of the watershed — a modern echo of the konohiki's old duty to keep the land in order.

The Maui Invasive Species Committee (MISC) leads much of this work. Crews hike deep into the East Maui rainforest to find and kill miconia — a towering tree with giant leaves that shades out everything beneath it, turning diverse forest into single-species stands. Each mature miconia can shed tens of thousands of seeds, so the strategy is to find the trees before they fruit, map them by GPS, and cut them one at a time. After decades of effort, the Hāna and East Maui populations are now suppressed enough that MISC treats more seedlings each year than mature trees — a sign the tide is turning.

In the lowlands, the fight is against the coqui frog, whose nighttime calls reach 90 decibels and have driven residents from their homes in infested areas like Māliko Gulch. MISC crews spray citric acid on infested vegetation and hand-treat individual frogs to hold the line so the frog does not spread island-wide. The little fire ant — barely visible but delivering a sting like a wasp — is treated neighborhood by neighborhood, with bait that the workers carry back to the queen to collapse the colony. Each known infestation is mapped and revisited until surveys come back clean.

In the uplands, the threat is feral ungulates. Axis deer, feral pigs, and goats tear through native forest, uproot seedlings, and spread invasive plants in their wake. Conservation fences — some of them miles long — now enclose intact native forest above the deer line, and crews hunt the animals out from inside the fence before sealing it. Once the pigs and deer are gone, the understory recovers on its own, and the birds and insects that depend on native plants follow. It is the same principle the old ahupua'a held: protect the mauka forests, and the whole watershed below stays alive.

Cattle pose a slower but no less serious version of the same problem. Introduced to Maui in the 1830s and run across the upcountry slopes ever since, cattle are not feral — they are fenced, managed, and counted — but on steep volcanic soil they can still overgraze. When stocking outpaces what the land can regrow, cattle strip the ground bare, trample fragile soils, and compact the surface so rain runs off instead of soaking in. The result is erosion: gulches widen, topsoil washes downslope, and the watershed loses its sponge. Overgrazed pasture also opens the door to invasive grasses and shrubs that move in where native cover has been thinned, and it can foul the streams below with sediment. The old ranches have learned this the hard way — rotating herds, resting pastures, and fencing off riparian corridors — because a hillside that stays green under careful grazing can turn to bare dirt under careless grazing in just a few seasons.