The annual UC Natural Reserve System, Mildred E. Mathias Graduate Student Research Grant Program provides grants to support graduate students at UCB, UCD, UCI, UCLA, UCR, UCSD, UCSB, and UCSC for their independent and field science studies at NRS reserves.
The application and all required attachments must be received no later than midnight on October 18, 2007. Awards will be announced on or about December 17, 2007. The maximum award is $2,500, with a total of $30,000 to be awarded overall each year.
See the NRS website to apply.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
"The Sierra Nevada Now and Then: Revisiting the Grinnell Survey" - October 6, 2007
Update!: Due to early snowfall in the Truckee area, this event has been moved to the Sierra College North Campus, 10725 Pioneer Trail, Truckee. Click on map for larger image.
Sponsored by the Institute for Sustainability at the Sierra College Tahoe-Truckee Campus, and UC Berkeley's Sagehen Creek Field Station, the event will include an informative afternoon presentation by Dr. Craig Moritz and Dr. Stephen Long from UCB's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and a workshop that will focus on the Sierra Nevada habitat, human impact, and change through time. The Grinnell survey is an environmental and mammal assessment that was completed nearly a century ago. The survey is now being revisited in an effort to assess the changes that have occurred to the natural environment in the past 100 years. An explanation of the survey, speculation concerning the cause of these environmental changes, and evaluation of the human impact will all be addressed.
Admission is free and all ages are welcome.
Saturday, October 6th at 1:00 p.m. at Sagehen Creek Field Station. Find downloadable map and directions to the station here, or meet at Sierra College's Pioneer Center by 12:30 to carpool. For more information, call Frank DeCourten at (916)789-2933.
* * *
In addition to the lecture, Frank DeCourten from Sierra College, Rocklin, will be giving a presentation on the Institute for Sustainability at the Tahoe-Truckee Campus. The Institute for Sustainability at the Sierra College Tahoe-Truckee campus is associated with the Center for Sierra Nevada Studies. The "Center" is an official entity of Sierra College and has been established under the Vice President for Educational Services and Programs. The Center has a strong reputation for its dedication to conservation and environmental issues, including the Sierra Nevada Virtual Museum and "Saving the Sierra", an award-winning oral history project. The Center provides an organizational placeholder for the growth and development of our sustainability efforts, which may someday develop into a separate district-wide initiative.
Within the current activities of the Center is a new sustainability initiative called the "Institute for Sustainability at the Sierra College Tahoe-Truckee campus". This "Institute" will concern itself with the promotion and implementation of the five point plan known as the Seventh Generation Project which addresses sustainability ethics and principles in five arenas of college activity: Policy, Educational Programs & Services, Educational Requirements, Operations, and Outreach.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Annual Meeting of the Organization of Biological Field Stations
Jeff & I returned earlier this week from the annual meeting of the Organization of Biological Field Stations, held this year in Junction, Texas.The hill country of Texas turned out to be a really great place, with really interesting botany & hydrology. And Sagehen's ARC Program was nominated for a Human Diversity Award.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Geology Course Maps Sagehen & Independence Basins
One of the most interesting things that happened this summer was that Art Sylvester of UC Santa Barbara led a field geology course at Sagehen.
For the past 20 years, Dr. Sylvester has been mapping the surface geology around Lake Tahoe as a summer field camp for geology students on the verge of graduation. This work has never been done before because it's hard--we have a lot of dirt & pine needles obscuring the rocks in this region. Jeff met Art last year when he was finishing up the North Fork of the American. Jeff suggested that the course should come to Sagehen next &--despite expecting a boring field season--Prof. Sylvester agreed.
Turns out that it was anything but boring, with the Sagehen & Independence basins providing an incredibly compelling story that is leading to investment in additional research by the State of Nevada.
For example, it turns out that the Sagehen Basin is an unusually persistent landscape which appears to have retained it's current configuration for anywhere from 700,000 to 4 million years. This is highly unusual in mountainous areas, and doubly so here because glaciers scoured down to bedrock granite in the two basins adjoining [Prosser & Independence], whereas in Sagehen there is only one tiny cirque showing previous glacial ice in the basin. Something split the historic weather patterns, even before the Sierra Crest existed. Do those conditions still exist? We don't know.
Another amazing thing discovered by the team is that Sagehen Basin was a series of lakes over the millenia. Using our LiDAR digital elevation model created for the SPLAT project, Professor Gary Raines was able to discern the ancient shorelines, which are stunningly obvious once someone points them out. The presence of these lakes explains the thick clay layers underlying the riparian areas, which in turn explains why Sagehen is so wet--the impenetrable layer holds the water in, allowing the fens to form & persist.
So, since we have thick clay deposits that are potentially millions of years old, Sagehen appears to have a climate record for a mountainous area. Since mountains do not generally last this long, there is no other place known that offers this.
And apparently there was a missing volcano in our area. Volcanic activity tends to space the cones at regular intervals along crust boundaries. There are paleo-volcanos roughly 100 miles south & 100 miles north...there should be one here. No one has been able to pin down where all this volcanic rock around here actually came from. Turns out it was Carpenter Peak. The feature we call Luse Rock appears to be the cinder cone.
There's plenty more--keep an eye out for upcoming features in the UCNRS Transect & on KGO-TV ABC 7 News.
For the past 20 years, Dr. Sylvester has been mapping the surface geology around Lake Tahoe as a summer field camp for geology students on the verge of graduation. This work has never been done before because it's hard--we have a lot of dirt & pine needles obscuring the rocks in this region. Jeff met Art last year when he was finishing up the North Fork of the American. Jeff suggested that the course should come to Sagehen next &--despite expecting a boring field season--Prof. Sylvester agreed.
Turns out that it was anything but boring, with the Sagehen & Independence basins providing an incredibly compelling story that is leading to investment in additional research by the State of Nevada.
For example, it turns out that the Sagehen Basin is an unusually persistent landscape which appears to have retained it's current configuration for anywhere from 700,000 to 4 million years. This is highly unusual in mountainous areas, and doubly so here because glaciers scoured down to bedrock granite in the two basins adjoining [Prosser & Independence], whereas in Sagehen there is only one tiny cirque showing previous glacial ice in the basin. Something split the historic weather patterns, even before the Sierra Crest existed. Do those conditions still exist? We don't know.Another amazing thing discovered by the team is that Sagehen Basin was a series of lakes over the millenia. Using our LiDAR digital elevation model created for the SPLAT project, Professor Gary Raines was able to discern the ancient shorelines, which are stunningly obvious once someone points them out. The presence of these lakes explains the thick clay layers underlying the riparian areas, which in turn explains why Sagehen is so wet--the impenetrable layer holds the water in, allowing the fens to form & persist.
So, since we have thick clay deposits that are potentially millions of years old, Sagehen appears to have a climate record for a mountainous area. Since mountains do not generally last this long, there is no other place known that offers this.
And apparently there was a missing volcano in our area. Volcanic activity tends to space the cones at regular intervals along crust boundaries. There are paleo-volcanos roughly 100 miles south & 100 miles north...there should be one here. No one has been able to pin down where all this volcanic rock around here actually came from. Turns out it was Carpenter Peak. The feature we call Luse Rock appears to be the cinder cone.
There's plenty more--keep an eye out for upcoming features in the UCNRS Transect & on KGO-TV ABC 7 News.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
KGO-TV ABC 7 News revisits Sagehen, Part II
The Bay Area's ABC affiliate, KGO-TV 7, visited Sagehen last year to report on the new Experimental Forest. Last month they returned for a follow-up. You can read &/or watch the second report of this series, ARC Program Helps Teenagers Thrive on the KGO-TV website or watch with different formats [including iPod] on Sagehen TV.
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