ARC-Sedgwick Program has a new blog

The new Santa Barbara-based Adventure-Risk-Challenge Program is just finishing up a successful first season at the UCSB Sedgwick Reserve marked by normal new program stress & not-so-normal wildfire evacuations!

ARC-Sedgwick has built a blog to share their adventures & it looks fantastic. Take a look to see samples of student writing, pictures of the students & descriptions of their exciting adventures.

New moss identified, added to Sagehen plant list

We have a new addition to the Sagehen plant list!

Chris Wagner, District Botanist for the Willamette National Forest adds another new bryophyte from collections at Mason fen during the US Forest Service fen workshop held on 6-22-05. The newly identified moss is Plagiomnium rostratum.

This is a big deal for us because mosses are notoriously challenging to identify. Due to this difficulty, many of the mosses that occur in the Sagehen basin fens remain unidentified.

Bear update

Everyone always asks, "So, how are the bears doing?". The good news is that it's hard for us to tell, since they are ghosts & don't bother us as we are very cautious about food & trash. We see their tracks & scat all around us, but rarely the bears themselves.

We should be able to radio track the collared bear from the "Bear Research in Sagehen Basin" movie [watch a short web version on our vlog], & we had been doing so successfully all fall, winter & spring. But then a logging operation moved in to harvest timber in the private parcels that encroach into the basin near her territory & she vanished. Jennapher & I tried again to track her last week with no success. Hopefully she will return now that the cut is completed & the noisy, heavy equipment is gone.

Some good news: I was on Carpenter Ridge this week working on weather stations & saw a line of tracks along the road near the top. Then this week, a geology student surveying rocks in the upper basin spotted a lot of sign, including a fresh day-bed down along the creek. Next, she stumbled on the bear itself--a big cinnamon one--crunching around in the thick alders. Fortunately, she was able to withdraw before alarming the bear.

Even though it wasn't the same one, it's nice to know that the logging didn't chase all the bears away.

"Mechanical Turk"

Amazon.com has an interesting new on-line service in beta-testing that may be of interest to researchers & educators.

The new service, called "Mechanical Turk", manages micropayments for small jobs that require human intelligence. For instance, a researcher might offer to pay $.02 for each web link to a specified topic, or might offer to pay $1.00 for a transcription of a short interview, or pay $.50 for identification of roads in an aerial photograph.

The requester deposits the required funds with Amazon, which then lists the task on the Mechanical Turk web-site. Anyone who is interested can accept the task, and when completed to the satisfaction of the requester, the funds are transferred.

The ants are raiding!

The ant raid is on! On July 10, the "pet colony" behind the library stormed out for their first raid of the season. They raided again on July 16 & made an aborted foray on July 19. Interestingly, all raids were in the same direction.

One of the basin's most fascinating residents is the slave-making ant Polyergus breviceps. Every summer about this time, these red ants leave their nest en masse to attack a colony of black ants (Formica argentea). They'll travel 50 yards in a bee-line, overwhelm the defenders who are typically trying desperately to fill in the entrances, then steal the black ant pupae. They run back to their own colony with the booty, where their black ant slaves then take over care & feeding.

The red ants are obligate social parasites. They have to do this because at some point they lost the ability to tunnel, gather food, care for their babies. And the black ants don't know any better--they hatch out & assume they are where they should be, then go right to work. It's an amazingly sophisticated relationship that is not a little scary.

This season, we have two Ph.D. students looking at the ants for their thesis work. Hopefully we'll know a lot more about these insects in about 3 years! You can watch an on-line video about the ants on our vlog.

Improvements to Basin communications this week

Kevin Browne, the Technical Advisor from the UCNRS just left after a four day visit. Kevin has been helping us develop the data communication network in the Sagehen Basin. This has been a very tricky, involved project.

Thanks to the Keck Hydrowatch Project, we have finally resolved the power supply problems that have plagued us for years by upgrading our solar arrays & separating the battery banks for communication from the banks powering data collection. That way, we don't lose all our data gathering ability every time the communications go down. We also added Compact Flash cards to the systems so we can back up the dataloggers & manually collect the files without having to drag a laptop & cables up the hill. This is a huge benefit since the enclosures are mounted on high towers & it can be dicey & somewhat inaccurate clinging up there trying to read a faint laptop screen & input new IP address settings in a stiff wind. The cards also allow us to quickly grab data during bad weather by simply swapping cards. These system improvements resulted in our first complete winter data set for the extremely exposed Carpenter Ridge site. Yeah!

Getting the sites to through-talk via the internet is another matter, however. It turns out that most communication transmission hardware relies on hard-wired power, so there are very few options for 12v-DC powered radio bridges. Poor Kevin is tearing out his hair trying to figure out why the bridges we have don't seem to do the things they are advertised as being able to do.

But thanks to Kevin's help, we are now completely functional at two site, meaning they can talk to each other so that you can even surf the internet wirelessly in the upper basin. We are getting very close on three other sites, so keep your fingers crossed!

Dry, hot, windy conditions lead to forest fire threat.

There is a pretty decent fire burning in the Sedgwick Reserve area, home of the recently expanded ARC program. Sedgwick has been evacuated.

Here's the link to the website about the fire.

We had 3 fires in the Sagehen Basin last week (Tuesday evening) and around 20 more burning around us. Fortunately we received .2" of rain just before the lightning machine gun attack occurred and this kept the fires small. All were extinquished within a day. Only one of the total is still burning and it is well north of us on the Little Truckee river side of Mt Lola. We had around 247 documented lighting strikes in the Sagehen basin during that event.

Going to be a looooong summer I think!


Jeff Brown

Carex Workshop - July 31 to August 2

Please join the California Native Plant Society and University of California Santa Cruz Arboretum for a Carex identification workshop to be held at the Sagehen Creek Reserve in the northern Sierra Nevada.

Target audience: Professional and student botanists, ecologists, land managers and other Carex lovers. Participants should have knowledge of plant terminology, experience with plant keys, and some knowledge of Carex morphology (will send handout to registrants).

Click here for more information or to register [1MB PDF].

Berkeley e-giving adds Sagehen to system!

The CBC has been pestering Berkeley to add the Field Stations to its on-line e-giving program & it's finally happened. Would-be sponsors can now donate to Sagehen generally, or specifically to the Sagehen Graduate Student Research Fund or the Adventure - Risk - Challenge Fund.

Use this link for more information or to make a secure on-line donation.

New book by Sagehen researcher

Sagehen researcher Dr. Pam Ronald is holding a UC Davis botany course here this month. She is also the featured speaker at this week's Summer Speaker Series discussing the hot topic of "GMO's & organic agriculture". You can pick up a copy of Dr. Ronald's new book, if you are interested in the subject:

Tomorrow's Table: A Marriage of Genetic Engineering and Organic Farming
Pamela C. Ronald and R. W. Adamchak

Masters Thesis on Lahontan Cutthroat Trout Completed

Jon Stead has finished his study of Lahontan Cutthroat trout reintroduction into Sagehen Creek. Read his thesis here.

New Berkeley Wildfire Toolkit

Wildfires affect communities around the world. This online toolkit provides interactive, science-based tools to help homeowners, decision-makers, and researchers better understand where wildfires occur and how to protect homes and neighborhoods, as well as get up-to-the-minute wildfire news.