Exceptional PI status for Jeff

Today, the UC Berkeley Office of the VCR granted Exceptional Principal Investigator status to Jeff. The reason it's "exceptional" is that Jeff is not a Ph.D., nor Berkeley faculty, so until today we have been unable to compete directly for research grants.

Typically, this is not a problem, since researchers find their own funding. But, as part of the wider research into the effects of the Sagehen Forest Project basin forest restructuring, we are looking at a broad spectrum of wildlife and watershed effects and we had an important funding gap. The project provides an opportunity for some critical hydrology work and the Sierra Nevada Conservancy generously stepped in to fill the void with a $50,000 grant to Sagehen.

New York Times article on LCTs

A Lahontan Cutthroat Trout fattens up in the Forest
Service office aquarium.

The New York Times has a great article today about the Pyramid Lake Lahontan Cutthroat Trout recovery.

Slideshow.

More information about Sagehen's LCT program.

Lahontan Cutthroat Trout on Sagehen TV.

Hwy-89 Stewardship Team update

Here's a great recent article from California Deer explaining the Highway-89 Stewardship Team's genesis, mission and history.

This summer, the Team is offering it's first professional development course, August 12-16, 2013: Innovative Approaches to Wildlife/Highway Interactions. See the link for more information and to register.

• More info about the Team.
• Videos and links.

Bear cub update.

This week, I pulled the cameras installed during the bear cub reintroduction in January.

Looks like the cubs slept until late February, came out, then returned in mid-March. The camera trap caught the pair romping playfully around the den.

A couple weeks later, it caught a coyote trolling in the area for a few days.

More photos here.
KGO-TV's coverage of the event.

Additionally, we released two more cubs this week. Unusually, we just opened the trailer and let them go, rather than placing them in a hibernation den under the snow.

Watch the video to learn more.
Photos of the release.

Weislander Vegetation Surveys moving online

A Weislander survey photo from Gold Lake.

As part of a massive data library effort (BIGCB), the Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology has started uploading historic photos from the Weislander Vegetation Surveys of the 1920's to CalPhoto. You can do narrow queries to pin down specific locations like the Sagehen area.

These photographs can provide (and are providing) information about vegetation and landscape changes over the past 100 years or so.

More info about the surveys.

Sagehen and the other Berkeley field stations are working with the BIGCB to identify, coordinate and make available historic datasets that can be used to produce new understanding of environmental change over time.

Indeed, these datasets are the only way to detect and quantify these changes. Sagehen researchers are already producing new publications from narrowly rescued data found in old binders and shoeboxes.

New book on the UC Reserves

New book from UC Press includes
Sagehen.

A new book highlighting the UC Natural Reserve System (including Sagehen!) is now available from UC Press.

The Environmental Legacy of the UC Natural Reserve System includes photos and descriptions of the 38 reserves, which are little-known, and scattered throughout California's diverse ecosystems.

More bear cubs!

Sarah Holm and Jason Holley of
Cal. Dept. of Fish and Wildlife get a cub ready
for it's new home in the wild.

Two more bear cubs entered the wild at Sagehen this week. Thanks to the volunteers and agency folks who helped make the event a great success!

In this case, the sibling cubs' mother was killed with a predation permit after causing structure damage. The cubs were discovered later and someone attempted to sell them on the side of the road, which is a big no-no. Fish and Wildlife confiscated the animals and they were rehabilitated at a facility in South Lake Tahoe.

A cub sleeps in the sled that will transport it to the den site.

We installed the orphans in a den and covered them last Thursday. The cubs typically wake up when the drugs wear off, come outside and take a look around, then either go back in and fall asleep again, or wander off and find a different den site.

• More photos.
• More information about Sagehen bears.
• Sagehen bear videos.

Send us your links of you have photos posted of the event. KGO-TV will be running several stories covering the entire process of rehabilitation. I'll post the links when they become available, as well as any later camera trap photos letting us know what the cubs are doing. 

Naturalist observations yielding big fruit.

Here's a great article about how current research is benefiting from the phenology observations of environmental icons Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold and his family.

Here at Sagehen, we are beginning to collect similar observations using iNaturalist and willing volunteers. You can use our iNaturalist observations to assist with your own local plant and wildlife IDs.

Get in touch if you'd like to join us!

View more observations from Sagehen Creek Basin UC California Naturalist Project on iNaturalist »

Happy Holidays!

Most significant Sagehen science

We recently fielded a short turn-around request to provide a list of the three most significant papers ever produced at Sagehen.

This was a really hard decision to make. Who decides value? How do you measure? This challenge gets to the heart of a question we've been asking ourselves for years: how do you stitch a bunch of scientific facts into a narrative that has meaning?

Here's what we came up with. What do you think?