CalNat Team, L-R: Sarah Angulo, Greg Ira, Sabrina Drill, Brook Gamble, Adina Merenlender. Missing: Eliot Freutel and Sarah-Mae Nelson.

It's an exciting time of transformation for the UC California Naturalist community, and for our leadership team! With the ongoing exceptional work of Brook Gamble and Sarah Angulo, and the recent additions of Sarah-Mae Nelson heading up our Climate Stewards Initiative, and Eliot Freutel joining us to support our Southern California community, we've never been stronger. Now it's my honor to announce that (after a rigorous internal selection process), Greg Ira has been identified as the new Director. For the past several years Greg has been responsible for management and operations of the program and its many partnerships. Prior to that, he had a long career in environmental capacity building in Florida and the Philippines. Greg is interested in field-based environmental education, community and citizen science, empowering communities to address climate change, and methods for integrating culture into environmental programs. He excels in strategic program planning and evaluation.

Over a decade ago, Dr. Adina Merenlender had a vision - a vision for a corps of Californians dedicated to appreciation and stewardship of our natural heritage, with UC California Naturalist building the capacity to care for it. I was deeply honored when she invited me to join forces in 2012 to engage with expertise around the state, and together with an advisory group of extension, education, and conservation experts, we built a solid team with strong commitment from a growing network of partners. I served as the Associate Director for the program beginning in 2014 and as the Interim Director since the start of 2019, and I am incredibly proud of having built up the program in Southern California, expanding efforts to diversify participation, and encouraging the application of CalNat as a tool for conservation workforce preparation.

Adina returns this summer from a sabbatical leave spent re-focusing her energy in conservation and climate education at Cambridge University, and will be coming back to the CalNat community as Chair of the CalNat ANR Workgroup and lead investigator on the UC Climate Stewards initiative. I am heading out on my own sabbatical leave at the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma Biological Survey, during which I will be investigating the nexus between urban nature conservation and responses to extreme weather events. Next year when I return to my duties as Natural Resources Advisor for Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, I look forward to continuing to support our CalNat urban community with the results of my research.

The word sabbatical comes from the concept of rest on the sabbath, which itself comes from shmita, an agricultural concept which essentially means a fallow period when soils can rejuvenate. We both wish to thank the University of California for supporting these opportunities to reflect and re-focus.  What a gift this time was for Adina and will be for me, and how wonderful to leave the program in Greg's capable hands!