For more than 60 years, the UC Natural Reserve System has supported research, university-level education, and public service at its field stations and outdoor laboratories across California. On April 7, the organization relaunched itself as UC Nature at an event held at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley.
The UC Nature Symposium demonstrated how the network has long provided a platform for long-term field research, but is now expanding its goals to spur ecological, cultural, and institutional change that will keep nature strong. Speakers including University leaders, government agency partners, UC faculty, and students described how UC Nature inspires them, and why they support the organization’s rebirth as a champion of environmental matters into the future.
Janet Reilly, Chair of the UC Board of Regents, welcomed attendees by reflecting on UC Nature’s outsized impact on young people. She noted that more than 36,000 university-level students per year get immersed in nature during reserve visits, and that the network has been helping connect people with the environment for generations.
UC Nature Executive Director Steve Monfort began his remarks by stating that it was fitting to hold the event at UC Berkeley. The founding director of Cal’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Joseph Grinnell, was instrumental in establishing UC’s first field station, Hastings Natural History Reservation, in the 1930s. Monfort went on to note that the world has changed dramatically in the decades since, and that UC Nature will meet the new challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and intensifying pressures on land and water systems with an expanded scope of purpose.
“We intend to serve as a front door for UC’s engagement with the natural world—linking research, education, stewardship, and public service,” Monfort said.
California’s Secretary of Natural Resources, Wade Crowfoot, moderated the next session, which explored how UC Nature could help California attain its conservation goals. The state’s partnership with UC Nature “has never been more important than now,” he said. He recalled visiting the town of Borrego Springs the previous weekend, and admiring how UC Nature’s Steele/Burnand Anza-Borrego Desert Research Center enlisted visiting scientists and students to provide science education and outreach to the local community. “As those UC students are getting educated, they’re also welcoming others from the region into that learning,” Crowfoot said. “My wish for UC Nature is each research station becomes known as a community asset in the regions they’re located in.
Crowfoot then led a discussion with panelists that included conservation philanthropy leader Michael Mantell, Coastal Commissioner Caryl Hart, Wildlife Conservation Board member Jen Norris, and Vice President of Research for the University of California Theresa Maldonado.
“I have often said that UC Nature is probably the most under-appreciated, undervalued asset that California has. It needs more attention in the public’s eye,” said Mantell, whose work with donors helped establish two UC Nature reserves, Merced Vernal Pools and Grassland and Blue Oak Ranch.
“The reserve network is an outdoor shared facility, like a clean room for semiconductor research, that covers virtually the entire biodiversity of the state of California,” said UC Vice President Maldonado. “I think it provides an invaluable laboratory to do system science studies that really no other university system in the country has the capacity to do.”
As a University unit, student education has always been a central purpose at UC Nature. Reserves prioritize student and class visitors, but often also provide classrooms and staff to help guide instruction. Assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Roxanne Beltran of UC Santa Cruz used the next session to describe how field experiences at UC Nature are helping engage and retain more young people in STEM fields.
Beltran described how her own research found field study opportunities increase persistence of students majoring in science, close opportunity gaps, and increase graduation rates. The effect was especially strong among students who were the first in their families to go to college, or come from minority or socioeconomically challenged backgrounds.
“It turns out that you can’t train environmental leaders without putting them in the environments that they’re meant to protect. That’s why immersive field experiences like those that happen at UC Nature are the perfect solution,” Beltran said, identifying herself as someone whose research career in marine mammal biology was ignited by field experiences at UC Nature reserves.
Beltran then went on to interview two graduate students whose experiences at UC Nature reserves turbocharged their academic careers. Ishana Shukla did not grow up exploring the outdoors. But as a UC Santa Cruz undergraduate, she received a UC Nature Field Science Fellowship to do field research at Año Nuevo Reserve while being mentored by Beltran and Beltran’s own mentor, UCSC Professor Dan Costa.
“I have spent my entire career trying to chase that wonder and that curiosity and that awe that I first felt in the Natural Reserve System,” Shukla said. She is now studying apex predators as a PhD student at UC Davis .
Sam Sambado credited her experiences in UC Nature’s California Ecology and Conservation supercourse to opening her eyes to the joys of field science. “I grew up in a farming community outside of Stockton, and my community didn’t value what UC Nature stands for. So for me to go from that to now, ten years later, I’m a postdoc in ecology [at Stanford]—that’s what UC Nature is really great at.”
These stories of how UC Nature inspires students were followed by another way the network changes perspectives: by enabling paradigm-shifting science. Gary Bucciarelli described the California Sentinel Sites for Nature, the nation’s largest biodiversity monitoring network. Initiated by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the project systematically detects the presence of wildlife at more than 120 sites across the state. Each site uses a standard protocol of camera traps to photograph both large vertebrates (such as mountain lions and deer) and smaller animals (such as salamanders, chipmunks, snakes), while audio recorders detect bird and bat calls and amphibians. UC Nature helped the develop network technology while doubling the number of project sites. The information gathered will help guide California’s conservation efforts and is already inspiring similar networks far beyond state borders.
Other highlights of the Symposium included an overview of why UC Nature is so uniquely suited to answering questions about nature, by UC Berkeley professor emerita and National Academy of Sciences member Mary Power; a panel discussing how UC Nature reserves provides science and educational outreach to communities in far-flung, underserved corners of California; and lightning talks by seven graduate student recipients of UC Nature’s Mathias Graduate Student Research Grants.
Peggy Fiedler, former executive director of the organization, summed up the impetus behind UC Nature this way: “We come from all walks of life, from many cultures and traditions, and from an astonishing array of academic disciplines. We strive to understand, to appreciate, and to steward the magnificent landscapes of California. We do this for its citizens, for its students, for the global research community, and for those who seek to understand the magical biodiversity that is this great state.”
