- Author: Gregory C. Ira, Director, UC Environmental Stewards
In 2012, the California Naturalist certification course became a statewide program within UC Agriculture and Natural Resources known as the California Naturalist Program. For 10 years, the course and the program have shared the same name. In 2020, we added the new Climate Stewards certification course. Both courses use education and service to inspire and empower individuals to create more sustainable and resilient communities and ecosystems.
Unfortunately, our program name only reflected one half of our work. To better reflect the scope of both the California Naturalist and the Climate Stewards certification courses, we've renamed our program “UC Environmental Stewards.” This new program name reflects the overarching importance of environmental stewardship to both courses.
While the program name is new, the two courses remain unchanged. The California Naturalist course still proudly focuses on California's natural history under the emblem of the California sister butterfly, and the Climate Stewards course still builds community resilience under the emblem of the lupine. Anyone certified as a California Naturalist or Climate Steward is still a California Naturalist or Climate Steward. UC Environmental Stewards is simply the new programmatic home for these two courses, and potentially any others we may add in the future.
Along with our program name, we are excited to announce additions to our small but growing program team. Jill Santos joins the program in Ventura County at the end of the month and next month we welcome Michelle Peeters, who will support our partners in Northern California.
The growth of the Environmental Stewards program reflects the demand for our courses and the growing need for community and ecosystem resilience. As Californians search for ways to productively engage in local solutions to the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss, they are finding our courses. Through community education, civic engagement, and the cultivation of a shared identity as environmental stewards, the program builds the adaptive capacity of individuals and communities to address the impacts we are already experiencing, as well as those yet to come.
Our collective impact network of 67 local partner organizations has conducted 422 California Naturalist and Climate Stewards courses and trained over 7,600 participants since the program started. These certified naturalists and stewards have gone on to volunteer over 240,000 hours of service across the state since 2018, worth over $6 million. The UC Environmental Stewards program continues the legacy of the original program started in 2012, and opens the door for many more Californians to effectively engage in discovery, action and stewardship.
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
At UC ANR's July Town Hall, Jaki Hsieh Wojan, UC ANR's chief information security officer, explained ANR's recent website and portal issues and the steps being taken to solve them. Below are questions that were asked during the town hall.
Why are we keeping physical servers in Davis? Have you considered transferring from local modems to cloud-based methods?
We are working on a long-term project to move some of ANR's data to the cloud: Integrated Web Platform. IWP will be deployed on Google Cloud. Because we have nearly 1,300 websites, it's taking time to implement a common platform to fit everyone's needs. It is not as simple as picking up our webpage sand moving them to a cloud host, that would just move the existing problems into a new location. The IWP project is rearchitecting the entire web content management system. You can see the progress at https://iwp.ucanr.edu.
Will ANR publications be preserved?
Yes
Before archiving are you asking permission from the owners of data? Is the data available after archiving if needed?
Active sites won't be removed in our first pass. Before data is archived, owners will be contacted or leaders of the units, if the owner isn't available. Archived data will be kept and can be restored, if needed.
We can't change owners of websites so some of our sites belong to people who are no longer with ANR. How will IT handle this?
IT can change website owners. You can submit a ticket for that request at help@ucanr.edu
What are our options for taking credit card payments online?
Aventri is an option for taking credit card payments. IT is looking into additional options.
We use some of those websites that are not updated often as a resource of information for the community after an academic leaves. It will be unfortunate to lose that resource.
Archived data will be preserved and can be made available. You will be able to contact help@ucanr.edu if you need access to archived data.
How can I help reduce the volume of data on the servers?
Please maintain your SiteBuilder sites. Remove images that are no longer being used on particular pages, deactivate or delete outdated info, etc. Send a message to iwp@ucanr.edu if you need assistance.
Why are we purchasing new onsite equipment if the goal is to move to the cloud?
Moving to cloud is a multiyear, complex project and it encompasses far more than the website and portal. A “lift and shift” of our current environment to the cloud would just move our current problems to a different location. We need to modernize on a local level before we can fully migrate everything.
Can we have an all IT Town Hall?
Yes.
I am worried about refresh rates when the Content Delivery Network (CDN) is in place.
The refresh rates can be granularly configured to treat each type of content with different refresh rates. We will be working on optimizing these rates once we start using the CDN. We will communicate how best to request a different refresh rate when we get closer to implementation.
A recording of Jaki Hsieh-Wojan's presentation can be viewed at https://youtu.be/wAQGGimS3Rg.
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
For decades, Cooperative Extension across the country has frequently used the name “Nutrition Family and Consumer Sciences” to refer to locally driven efforts that strengthen our public health in concert with the federally funded nutrition education programs that support individuals to make healthier food choices. In 2020, UC ANR senior leadership identified the need for a name change, in parallel with similar repositioning other states are undertaking, to more accurately reflect our work across California and open new pathways for our future. They brainstormed with the health-related advisor network and landed on the term “Community Nutrition and Health.”
In February 2022, this name was reflected in the title of the newly hired Statewide Director of Community Nutrition and Health, and has since become the title of several newly recruited UC Cooperative Extension advisor positions.
By changing our name to Community Nutrition and Health, we are bringing more attention to the ways our programs support community health outside of nutrition education, such as increasing physical activity, spreading awareness about flu and COVID-19 vaccines, and working with strategic partners to advance policy, systems and environmental changes that support public health.
This new name is more understandable and resonant with our audiences and also points the way to our work ahead: reaching more Californians and strengthening healthy communities in newer and deeper ways. It coincides with an internal strategic planning process that will help us advance integrated approaches to promote holistic health and equitable communities for all Californians.
The Community Nutrition and Health network of researchers and educators advance local research and extension work focused on improving human health, and often work within theCalFresh Healthy Living, UC program and Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program, with lots of collaboration with the UC Master Food Preserver Program, the UC Master Gardener Program, the 4-H Youth Development Program and the Nutrition Policy Institute.
If you are an active member of the Community Nutrition and Health network, please keep reading for important actions to support this name change.
For all Community Nutrition and Health advisors, specialists, supervisors and educators
Please update your ANR Profile:
- Log into the ANR Portal
- Click on “Profile” in the top, left corner
- Click on “Unit(s)” in the left side menu
- In the Search bar, type “Community Nutrition and Health” and select as Primary Unit
- In the Search bar, type the statewide program you work with and select as Secondary Unit
For all Community Nutrition and Health advisors, specialists, supervisors, and educators – please update your email signature:
- Open Outlook and click on the File tab.
- Click Options and then choose Mail.
- Scroll down to the Signatures section and click the Edit button.
- Make your changes in the Signature Editor and then click OK.
- Your changes will be saved automatically.
- Your new signature should appear like this example with “Community Nutrition and Health” beneath your statewide program name:
Christie Hedrick, MPH
Statewide Coordinator
Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program
Community Nutrition and Health
UC Agriculture and Natural Resources
2801 Second Street, Davis, CA 95618
Office: (530) 390-9753
Email: clhedrick@ucanr.edu
EFNEP | UCANR
For all Community Nutrition and Health advisors and county-based website administrators – please update your websites. (Site Builder does not have a search and replace function built in, so we'll use Google.)
- Open a new browser tab.
- The site owner/admin should log in to their portal, and navigate to Site Builder
- Open another new browser tab, and go to Google.com and search for “site:ucanr.edu/sites/NFCS_CA/ “Nutrition, Family, and Consumer Sciences (NFCS)”
- Google will return search results for all instances of “Nutrition, Family, and Consumer Sciences (NFCS)” on the site.
- Click on the first link of search results and you'll go to a page you can find in Site Builder to make your changes.
- Find the Search terms in the proper Text Box Asset, then replace them. You can search the Text Asset by using Ctrl F for Windows or Command F for Mac.
- Scroll down to the bottom of Edit Page and click the Update Asset Button.
- Test your changes by scrolling up on the page and clicking View Current Site tab in the green tab row.
- If everything looks good, go back to Google and click on the next link in your original search results.
- Repeat Steps 5-9 for the remaining search results pertaining to your webpage.
Don't worry about updating blogs or news articles.
Rest assured these changes will be adopted into the exciting new Integrated Web Platform site to be launched in the coming months.
Please complete all of these changes by Aug. 31, 2023.
If you have any questions about these actions, please contact Amira Resnick, Statewide Director of Community Nutrition and Health, at arresnick@ucanr.edu.
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
The Climate Smart Agriculture Program published an interactive online story map highlighting the program's focus areas and team of experts.
Esther Mosase, Climate Smart Agriculture community education specialist for San Diego and Riverside counties, used ArcGIS to create a story map for people to explore the program and personnel.
Climate smart agriculture promotes activities that address the risks that climate change poses to agriculture. It encompasses management practices to
- Increase soil carbon
- Reduce greenhouse gas emissions
- Improve on-farm efficiencies
- Promote sustainable land practices
“The story map was developed as a way to summarize and visualize the history, activities, and staff involved in the Climate Smart Agriculture Program,” said Hope Zabronsky, academic coordinator for UC ANR's Climate Smart Agriculture Program. “Each staff member's bio is included along with the regions and counties they serve. This is useful to both growers and stakeholders who support our programs.”
In 2019, the California Department of Food and Agriculture partnered with UC ANR to place community educators throughout the state to provide technical assistance and outreach with the goal of increasing adoption of climate-smart farming and ranching practices.
The community education specialists help growers find appropriate resources, educate them about financial incentive programs, assist them in applying for grants, implement climate smart farming practices and more.
The program recently released an impact report that shows the community education specialists have served clientele in six languages across 25 counties in California, through 100 workshops attended by more than 2,300 participants. Technical assistance and grants support a wide range of projects – from cover cropping to water efficiency upgrades – that have saved an estimated 8.3 billion gallons of water and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equivalent to taking 68,000 gas-powered vehicles off the road for a year, based on impact modeling.
To explore the Climate Smart Agriculture story map, visit https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/db4de0f145574ed5b7fac4a51e14125c.
- Author: Grace Dean
For the past four years, Kim Ingram has been listening closely to the private forest landowners who participate in her Forest Stewardship Workshop series. During the workshops, landowners share their experiences clearing thickets of vegetation, replanting post-wildfire and tackling invasive species, and their concerns of who will take care of their forest when they're gone.
To alleviate their stress, Ingram–Forest Stewardship Education coordinator with University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources–turns to natural resource professionals from CAL FIRE, local Resource Conservation Districts, and the U.S Forest Service who can share knowledge and resources with participants. Recently, Ingram developed a story map that aims to provide landowners with a platform they can use to share their experiences and ways that they have been empowered to manage their land.
"It's not uncommon for small forest landowners to feel overwhelmed with their forest management responsibilities and uncertain over what steps to take first," said Ingram. "Through the Forest Stewardship Workshops and this story map project, we hope to show that there is an entire community of forest landowners in the same situation, learning from each other and moving forward towards their management goals."
The Forest Stewardship Story Map team used ArcGIS StoryMaps to design the project, with 15 participants providing interviews and visual content. StoryMaps provides a user-friendly interface where website visitors can either click on a county to view specific interviews or scroll to view the stories.
The forestry team plans to interview at least one landowner and natural resource professional in every forested county in California so private forest landowners have a local contact or can become inspired by a project in their area.
Theresa Ciafardoni, a forest landowner in Nevada County, said that the UC ANR Forest Stewardship Workshop helped her manage postfire restoration and long-term land use planning.
"It opened up so many options and possibilities," said Ciafardoni. "All the individuals who presented in the Forest Stewardship Workshop were open to phone calls for specific questions and provided invaluable technical assistance."
Involving landowners and forestry professionals with this project was an early decision made by Ingram, who believed it was important that the map held appeal beyond hosting stories. Now, the project functions as a networking tool for landowners seeking professional assistance, too.
Past Forest Stewardship Workshop presenters shared their contact information and the motivations behind their forest management work so that landowners could find assistance in their area. The professionals currently hosted on the map include Resource Conservation District managers, UC ANR forestry advisors and private contractors.
"The most motivated landowners are invested not only economically, but their heart is into it," said Ryan Tompkins, UC Cooperative Extension forestry advisor for Plumas, Sierra and Lassen counties. "The natural world is full of uncertainty, but they're committed to continuing education and learning about how to be a good land steward. This takes a certain level of humility recognizing that our tenure as a steward on the land is a very short period of a forest's lifetime."
Looking ahead, the team envisions the map as a working document that will eventually include interviews with indigenous tribal members who focus on traditional ecological knowledge projects, interviews and information from the UC ANR Postfire Forest Resilience Program, and a feature that will filter stories by topic (e.g. reforestation or prescribed burning).
"This isn't a project that could be completed by one person," explained Grace Dean, Forest Stewardship communications specialist. "The same way that Kim and other presenters explain forest management as a collaborative process holds true for this project."
The Forest Stewardship Workshop series gives participants the ability to start as beginners and build upon their knowledge and experiences. In the same vein, this story map provides the Forest Stewardship team a solid base of real stories to add on to over time. The hope is that it will grow into a multifaceted tool reaching new forest landowners, eventually enveloping their stories within the small forest landowner community.
To view the Forest Stewardship Story Map, visit: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/bd062108d9894da7920d7aef06fe2c2c.
