- Author: Gregory Ira
The California Biodiversity Collaborative correctly identifies “engage and empower” as one of four key strategies for biodiversity conservation. Together with “knowledge,” “protection, “and “restoration,” the state seeks to put people at the center of its strategy to protect the genes, species and ecosystems that sustain our society and economy. The emphasis on engagement and empowerment is well founded as it is one of the most challenging but necessary elements of the strategy. The UC California Naturalist program provides an excellent example of how the state can engage and empower more people to support this important statewide initiative.
Biodiversity conservation can't be accomplished without mobilizing a good percentage of the 40 million people in the state whose daily choices and actions directly affect biodiversity. The decentralized nature of biodiversity means that its conservation requires the participation from many - not just elected officials, agency personnel, and scientists. The challenge of engaging a large percentage of the state's population in any form of normative behavior has been illustrated nicely by the COVID-19 pandemic. Knowledge and information alone will not bring about changes in behavior. The experience of the UC California Naturalist program suggests a few approaches that may help catalyze meaningful public engagement and empowerment: 1) transformative learning experiences; 2) participation in locally relevant efforts, and 3) building relationships and cultivating a shared identity that reinforces and sustains participation.
Many of our course participants describe their experience in their California Naturalist course as something that “opened their eyes” or “gave them a whole new way of viewing the environment around them.” Talented instructors, hands-on learning experiences, and opportunities for reflection – such as journaling – help participants critically examine long held assumptions and beliefs and rethink old habits. These changes are primed and amplified when we experience disrupting, disorienting, and discrepant events such as record breaking wildfires, extreme weather events, and pandemics. At the end of their course, California Naturalists don't simply walk away with new knowledge and a certificate. With new eyes, they see the world differently, with new beliefs they understand their environment differently, and with new skills, they contribute in new ways. The manifestation of these changes is often in the form of increased volunteer service.
Engagement is another important part of the California Naturalist learning experience. Every California Naturalist completes an eight-hour volunteer service project and a class participatory science project. These projects combine learning with service, and typically focus on locally relevant issues that are important to the individual naturalist or community. Projects include everything from participation in bioblitzes, to designing native pollinator gardens, to removing invasive species, to supporting environmental education efforts. These experiences not only support learning, they often support scientific research, and in many cases they result in California Naturalists reaching and engaging others.
While engagement is important, sustaining that engagement is even more important. The California Naturalist program doesn't require volunteer service hours from its naturalists. Instead, it seeks to incentivize engagement by building a shared culture and identity. By promoting volunteer service opportunities, by celebrating the success of our naturalists and network partners, by building and inclusive and diverse community, and by promoting lifelong learning through convenings and other continuing education opportunities, the California Naturalist program advances a culture of conservation for all.
The California Naturalist program supports the mission and efforts of the California Biodiversity Collaborative. Our tag-line “Discovery, Action, and Stewardship” alludes to the importance of transformative learning, engagement, and empowerment. Together with our decentralized network of over 55 partners around the state, we believe our program is a model for advancing the goals of the California Biodiversity Collaborative.
September 4-12, 2021 is California Biodiversity Week. Join us in celebrating the unique biodiversity and renewing our commitment to stewarding the state's incredible natural heritage! During the Week, CalNat is posting blogs authored by members of our community, ending in our September 14th CONES event from noon-1:00 PM. Be sure to also check out a list of activities and resources online from the CA Natural Resources Agency!
Guest author Karan Gathani is a certified Grassroots Ecology California Naturalist, and writes about the San Francisco Bay and Delta Biogregion for California Biodiversity Week 2021. You can follow more of Karan's writings posted on California Naturalist Diaries.
What things do you love about your bioregion?
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area/Delta Bioregion which means there is more to life than just paying Jacksons for your Avocado Toasts and artisan brewed coffee. For starters, it is one of the few bioregions on the Pacific coast where you can spend the morning tide pooling, get humbled while hiking through a redwood forest during the afternoon and still be on time to watch the sunset from the top of a mountain on the same day. And since the weather is usually cooperative for such outings, one can go exploring all year-round.
What are the highlights in terms of wildlife, geology, watersheds, beloved cultural resources, iconic species, etc?
San Francisco Bay is among the largest estuaries on the Pacific coast. This makes it an invaluable rest stop along the Pacific flyway. Hence, every winter you will see all the tidal wetlands swarmed with thousands of migrating shorebirds and waterfowl. The scene is reminiscent of the town of Indio taken over by selfie-obsessed kids during the annual Coachella Valley festival and then abandoned at the end of the festival.
Another fascinating thing about this area is the presence of North American beavers residing inside a popular neighborhood park in the South Bay Area. Trying to convince people that a beaver is residing in the creek 50 ft from where people are walking and biking makes them wonder if I believe in unicorns as well.
What natural phenomena do you look forward to annually?
There are so many things that I look forward to at different times of the year, but I will be mindful of the people reading this and list just one, which is not fair, but so is life.
San Jose being one of the largest and most populated cities in the United States has a remarkable event occurring every year in its Guadalupe River. The Chinook Salmon make their journey back swimming upstream from the Pacific Ocean to the place they were born. It is a sight I wish every resident gets to experience when the exhausted Salmon is using its last ounce of energy to power through the obstacles in hopes of passing along its genes. They die soon after mating and spawning. It is one event that makes you appreciate the struggle for life, the tragedy of death and joy of birth all in one landscape. It is a sober reminder to why it is so important to keep our watersheds clean and healthy, if we ever want to sustain a healthy Salmon population for future generations.
Favorite guides and/or local naturalists that helped you to learn more about the bioregion
I owe a debt of gratitude to all the naturalists I get the opportunity to share the space with and constantly learn about new things. Among those, Dr. Merav Vonshak, Jan Hintermeister and Colter Cook are some people who have influenced me in looking holistically at the ecosystem rather than concentrating on a few species.
Activities you love to do to explore the unique nature of your bioregion
I try to participate in every local BioBlitz, and lucky for me that BioBlitz.club and Keep Coyote Creek Beautiful organize one every month. Other than that, exploring with docents by going on bird walks organized by San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory and Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society. And finally, explore a different world by going on night hikes with Grassroots Ecology and MidPeninsula Regional Open Space Preserve docents.
September 4-12, 2021 is California Biodiversity Week. Join us in celebrating the unique biodiversity and renewing our commitment to stewarding the state's incredible natural heritage! During the Week, CalNat is posting blogs authored by members of our community, ending in our September 14th CONES event from noon-1:00 PM. Be sure to also check out a list of activities and resources online from the CA Natural Resources Agency!
- Author: Cameron Barrows
A "Natural History Note" From UC California Naturalist's lead scientist, Dr. Cameron Barrows, in celebration of California Biodiversity Day.
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” - E.F. Schumacher
Asking questions about patterns in nature, or perhaps the sometimes apparent lack of patterns, can seem to lead to more confusion than answers. Why is this species here but not there? Why are there so many species here but not there? Why is this population growing while that population seems to be in decline? The number of questions one can ask is nearly endless, but solid answers are far scarcer. For those wanting a future that includes existing natural assemblages of plants and animals for their own sake, for a resilient earth, as well as for awe, enjoyment, and inquiry of future generations, these sorts of questions are more than just an intellectual exercise, they are critical for knowing the impact of our footprint on this planet, and with that knowledge how we might step a bit more lightly and soften that footprint.
Knowing where species occur and ideally some measures of their abundance are often the first questions. If you know those answers for some point in time, you can return later to see if numbers or occurrences have changed. Growth is good, declines are bad. Simple, right? Or is it too simple? Darwin and Wallace were inspired by economist Thomas Malthus' essay on population growth. Malthus was speaking about people and showed mathematically that unless there were wars, famine. or pandemics, human populations would grow geometrically until they had consumed all available resources. Darwin and Wallace extrapolated that prediction to the rest of nature and recognized that species were not growing until they had devoured all available resources. Rather species' populations ebbed and flowed. Nature is always in flux. For Darwin and Wallace, survivors of times when resources were scarce represented individuals that were better able to survive and pass those traits onto future generations. Ipso facto, survival of the fittest.
Changes in population abundances occur with seasons, between years, between decades, and beyond; the difference might be due to the vagaries of temperature, precipitation, food supplies, vegetation cover, or even the abundance of a competitor or a predator. In a laboratory you can try and control variables. In nature everything is a variable. The size and location of populations of plants and animals reflect the strength of those variables. Recording only the occurrence or abundance of a species without the context of the most important variables is almost meaningless. Long ago, when I first started surveying Coachella Valley fringe-toed lizards, I noted that the populations had been declining for several years. There was an immediate uproar claiming that the conservation design for the lizard was clearly inadequate and we needed to start over before it was too late. In arid environments drought is common, while consistently wet conditions are rare. Yet rain inputs and the plant and insect populations those rains catalyze are essential for positive population growth in desert species. It had been three years of drought and I argued that before starting over we need at least one wet year. The next year was wet and the lizard population doubled. Context is everything.
I (along with an invaluable cadre of community scientists) still keep tabs on those fringe-toed lizards. The last couple years, 2019 and 2020, were a bit wetter than average and so there should have been positive population growth. For populations in the western Coachella Valley, north of Palm Springs, that was certainly what happened. However, for populations in the eastern-central portions of the valley, north of Palm Desert and La Quinta, those populations did not grow. How could I explain the lack of response to what has been the strongest variable influencing the lizard's population fluctuations? Was there some missing variable that required better management to restore, or was this a long-anticipated decline, a symptom of hyper aridity catalyzed by modern climate change? For most other lizard species there is an option for their populations to incrementally expand into cooler less arid habitats at higher elevations as lower elevations become increasing arid and less productive. Because fringe-toed lizards are inextricably tied to their sand dune habitat, moving up a mountain slope is not an option. There is a strong east-west gradient in rainfall in the Coachella Valley, with the western areas receiving up to and sometimes exceeding twice the rainfall of the central-eastern regions. Was this different response between the western and eastern/central fringe-toed lizard populations a signal that we had reached an aridity tipping point dooming those central-eastern populations?
That western-eastern difference in response to rainfall levels is precisely what I would have predicted if climate change was the culprit. But are there other possible explanations? Another variable that we measure is sand compaction. Fringe-toed lizard populations are more abundant where sands are less compacted. Sand compaction results from reductions in new sand inputs from sand sources. One of the greatest challenges in crafting a system of protected areas for the fringe-toed lizards was to include corridors that would deliver sand from sand sources to sand deposition areas. Sand movement through the corridors occurs due to both floods and high winds, both of which are antithetical to human habitation. By the time the fringe-toed lizard conservation plans were being developed, all the sand corridors were compromised by human development to one degree or another, but one of the most compromised regions was that central-eastern dune system.
So, while the western-eastern difference in response to rainfall levels is precisely what I would have predicted if climate change was the culprit, so would it be if a lack of new sand inputs-increasing sand compaction was the culprit. Our sand compaction measures did indicate increasing compaction in the central-eastern sand dunes, but that does not rule out climate change. What may be the best evidence for determining the relative strength of sand compaction versus increasing aridity in dictating the fringe-toed lizard abundance, was the abundance of other species, species that were not so tied to low sand compaction. Flat-tailed horned lizards occur of the central-eastern sand dunes, but they prefer sites with higher sand compaction. If they too did not increase their populations in response to the 2019-2020 wetter years, the scales would tip in favor of hyper aridity reducing food and overall habitat suitability for insectivorous lizards. On the other hand, if the horned lizard populations increased as did the fringe-toed populations on the western sand dunes, then sand compaction-lack of new sand delivery was more likely the stronger variable. The 2020-2021 horned lizard population was the highest we had measured in almost two decades. Context matters.
Nullius in verba
Go outside, tip your hat to a chuckwalla (and a cactus), think like a mountain, and be safe
September 4-12, 2021 is California Biodiversity Week. Join us in celebrating the unique biodiversity and renewing our commitment to stewarding the state's incredible natural heritage! During the Week, CalNat is posting blogs authored by members of our community, ending in our September 14th CONES event from noon-1:00 PM. Be sure to also check out a list of activities and resources online from the CA Natural Resources Agency!
- Author: Cameron Barrows
A "Natural History Note" From UC California Naturalist's lead scientist, Dr. Cameron Barrows.
“Climate change is the greatest threat to our existence in our short history on this planet. Nobody's going to buy their way out of its effects.” - Mark Ruffalo
The environment is changing. There is a daily cycle governed by the earth's rotation – warmer days and cooler nights. There is a seasonal cycle governed by the tilt of the earth toward the sun – tilting toward the sun gives us summer, away from the sun and it is winter. Within those cycles there can be changes in the jet stream resulting in wetter or drier periods that can last weeks, years, or even decades. Then there are more stochastic changes, earthquakes governed by shifting plate boundaries, floods, and wildfires. These natural changes are fodder for biodiversity, changing opportunities (niches) over space and time for animals and plants to occupy. Within the backdrop of all these changes, changes that we nearly hairless apes have little or no control over, how then do we distinguish changes that are born from a climate change catalyzed by human-caused emissions of greenhouse gasses?
Wildfires are a case in point. We know that for at least the past decade every year the wildfires burn more acres and burn across more months of the year. A Euro-centric perspective holds that fires are bad, destructive, and should be stopped at all costs. That belief has its roots in historical and current patterns of our species inhabiting dense clusters of tinder dry wood-structured homes within villages by forests, as well as the economic value of timber for centuries of home and ship building. Smokey the Bear has waged a decades-long campaign to teach us all about the overwhelming negative impacts of wildfire. Up until recently we have been largely successful at reducing the numbers of acres burned each summer, with a result of increasingly dense forests and chaparral, landscapes where fire control has been ever more difficult to achieve.
In contrast, an Indigenous American perspective sees fire as an essential tool for rejuvenating the landscape, catalyzing new growth of beneficial plants, and supporting wildlife, and probably for preventing larger more catastrophic wildfires. Early Spanish explorers seeing California for the first time described a multitude of fires burning across all the landscapes they could see from their sailing ships. An ecological perspective is more in line with that of the Indigenous people; a patchwork of burned and unburned lands does support higher biodiversity. There are many plants and their pollinators that have evolved as “fire followers”, taking advantage of the open spaces and enriched soils present after wildfires. Some birds, such as black-backed woodpeckers, are burned forest specialists foraging on beetle grubs in fire charred trees, and the snags created by forest fires provide nesting sites for birds, bats, and flying squirrels. Rufous-crowned sparrows are only found in open, sparsely vegetated landscapes. Once shrubs or grasses become too dense, these sparrows are gone. For evolution to have resulted in so many species that either benefit from wildfires or that are restricted to recently burned areas, wildfires fires have clearly been natural ecological process, a regular part of California's natural patterns and rhythms far longer than people have lived here.
The difference today is the timing, location, scale, and intensity of the fires. So, is climate change to blame? Maybe, but it is not that simple. A century of fire suppression, leading to overly dense stands of trees and layers of fuels leading right into the forest canopy could explain scale and intensity. The introduction of non-native invasive grasses (fertilized by the nitrogen in Los Angeles' smog) certainly explains the incursions of wildfire into the deserts, where previously the lack of continuous fuels impeded fires from spreading beyond just a few feet from where, say a lightning bolt truck a Joshua tree. But how about the length of the fire season? The fire season – defined as the time elapsed between the first large fire ignition and last large fire control – went from 138 days in the 1970s to 222 days in the last decade, an increase of 84 days or about two and a half months. The effect of climate change in California and throughout the southwestern states is to increase aridity. Droughts are more common, but even in years or close to average rainfall, higher temperatures mean that regardless of how much rain falls, more and more of that rain evaporates before reaching the roots of trees and shrubs. The plants dry out faster and the burn season becomes longer and longer. That is the climate change effect.
Using width of individual tree rings to estimate the effective levels of aridity, scientists have estimated that the currently level of aridity in the South Western United States exceeds any other period in the past 1300 years. The effect of that aridity goes beyond increasing the length of the fire season. Young trees and shrubs are especially vulnerable to perishing due to heightened aridity; larger plants have greater water storage capacities that can buffer them from moderate periods of drought, whereas the young plants do not, and so more easily succumb to dry conditions. Where this is occurring, we can see stands of what appear to be healthy pines, junipers, Joshua trees, and manzanita, but if there is no successful recruitment of young cohorts, those stands are doomed. Think of a town or village with no children. Using recruitment as a metric is an effective was of identifying whether a particular site is, at least so far, resilient to the effects of climate change.
At its extreme, longer periods of aridity can kill the adult plants as well. My wife and I were recently driving a road in northern Arizona, a road that follows an ecological gradient that starts in a ponderosa pine forest, passing through a pinyon pine-juniper zone, then just junipers, and finally into a grassland. It's a road we have driven a dozen times in recent years, only this time the juniper zone was different. Except for thin strips along the road where the plants benefited from added road-runoff during rainstorms, all the other junipers were dead. Mature plants that were certainly half a century or more old were now dead. Thousands of acres of junipers, all dead. All the ecological interactions between the junipers and birds, insects, and mammals were now severed. That is the climate change effect.
Just this past week I was hiking with a group of community scientists along a north facing slope above 8,000' to a ridge below the +10,000' peak of Mount San Jacinto. North facing slope, high elevations, this should be a place that is resilient to the effect of climate change. We noted many saplings of sugar pine and white fir, the dominant overstory trees there, so good recruitment. Lots of birds and lots of southern sagebrush lizards, all indicating a healthy forest. And it was healthy, but even here we detected subtle indications of recent increases in aridity. The understory shrubs were comprised of currants and gooseberries, and bush chinquapin (a relative of oak trees, one of several species that was probably dropped on this sky island during one of the glacial maxima during the Pleistocene – otherwise ranging throughout the Sierra Nevada and into northwestern California). Most of the understory looked healthy, but we noticed one large patch of chinquapin that was dead – but was it a climate change effect or perhaps a disease? Then we came across a forest opening with a thick stand of currants. Forest openings spawn questions – why no trees? Particularly wet soils maintain meadows of grasslands, or currant thickets and keep conifers from becoming established. Except this this currant thicket had a dozen or more sapling white firs poking through the tangle of berry branches. The firs were likely no more than a decade old, and there were no mature trees of any kind within the opening. One explanation for understanding both the dead chinquapins and the sapling fir invasion is that some of the soils here are becoming increasingly dry. Even at this elevation, even on a north-facing slope, there appear to be climate change effects.
Nullius in verba
Go outside, tip your hat to a chuckwalla (and a cactus), think like a mountain, and be safe.
Climate Stewardship focuses on regenerative approaches to energy, agriculture, and land and water use across forested, agricultural, and urban landscapes. Climate science that justifies these approaches is woven throughout the book, making it easy to learn about Earth's complex systems. “It's science in a narrative form to share what can be done and why,” says Merenlender.
The shared experiences of climate stewards featured in the book, including volunteers, Indigenous leaders and community members of color addressing climate justice, reveal that connecting with others to prevent climate disruption transcends self and provides a path to joy and hope for a better future.
Become a certified UC Climate Steward and discuss the stories with others interested in climate action.
