Blog Post
Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation: working hard to restore California
By Jessica Yost: Restoring the Laguna Nestled in the countryside of western Sonoma County is a 22-mile-long wetland that drains a 254-square-mile watershed and includes most of the Santa Rosa Plain. Nearby is a two mile trail and an abundance of birds and wildlife. The non-profit Laguna de Santa Rosa Read more
Blog Post
Copeland Creek Riparian Restoration: Perfect Planting Day!
By Hector Garcia: On December 5th, 2018, a chilly, wet day, the Restoration Ecology class made their last visit to the restoration site the group began to work on earlier in the semester. Up to this date, the group had collected data by monitoring vegetation with transect lines and taking Read more
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Restoration in the face of Climate Change: Thinking big
By Irina Zhuravskaya: Risks are on the rise Coincidentally, our trip to Point Blue Conservation on November 9, 2018, to participate and discuss Climate-Smart Restoration practices occurred just one day after the start of the Butte County Fires. There is a dire need to enhance our preparation for the consequences Read more
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My Analog Digital Adventure
Earlier this week, I went in search of a new notebook to carry with me, to jot down notes during meetings and whatnot. Why? Well, for years, I used a Franklin Planner, but I gradually moved away from that, as I spent more and more time on a computer. Now, I have my laptop with me most of the time, and my smartphone handy always, so it seemed that going digital would be the way to go, in terms of daily planning and note-taking. It’s a bit awkward to pull out my cell phone during a meeting, but I just assume everyone knows I’m taking notes, and not sending random texts. It was a system, but it wasn’t really working as well as it could. More often than not, I find myself grabbing whatever is handy for jotting down notes when I’m in a meeting, or chatting with students. Blank paper, post-it notes, restaurant napkins – whatever is nearby, I’ll grab it. Sure, my phone and computer are nearby, but it’s just less disruptive to write things down on paper.
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Copeland Creek “Clean-up”
Last weekend, we had the first Copeland Creek event of the fall semester: a clean-up sponsored by JUMP and the Friends of Copeland Creek campus club. We had a small turnout, but it was a fantastic day out on the creek! Originally, we’d intended to pick up garbage and go after some of the Himalayan blackberry that’s creeping back into the restoration areas. When we went out to get started, however, I decided that there was more wild radish to be dealt with (and it’s much easier to work with than the blackberry – no thorns!!), so we had a radish-removal day instead.
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Evernote Organization
A while back, I wrote about my ongoing process to organize ALL THE THINGS in Evernote (Tag Wrangling in Evernote, Archiving RSS Feeds with Evernote, Storage Space in Evernote, and Evernote). After doing the big tag reorganization last summer, I feel like I’ve come to a pretty comfortable place, so it seems like a good time to update about the structure of my current system.
The nutshell version: moving to a small number of notebooks, and relying on tags and Evernote’s “Search” function is working out really well!
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Blog Post
Field Biology trip to Fairfield Osborn
March 15, 2018
The day of our Field Biology trip to the Osborn Preserve was rainy and a bit cold (but at least it didn’t snow on us, as it had when we were at Sonoma Mountain Ranch).
The day of our Field Biology trip to the Osborn Preserve was rainy and a bit cold (but at least it didn’t snow on us, as it had when we were at Sonoma Mountain Ranch). We were undaunted by the weather, though, as I had a cohort of extremely motivated (and knowledgeable) students, including some folks who had gone through the university’s Naturalist Training Program. We were ostensibly here to survey the coverboards on the property (which we did), but we spent a lot of time making more general observations. We were only there for a few hours, and it drizzled on us most of the time, but we saw loads of great stuff, across a wide variety of taxonomic groups.
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Newt Research at Sonoma Mountain Ranch
For our first off-campus field trip of the semester, today I took my Field Biology class up Sonoma Mountain, to the Sonoma Mountain Ranch . . . a working cattle ranch about 30 minutes’ drive from campus. A wide variety of research is being conducted at the site, about the interaction between cattle and ecosystems, and also on the wildlife that uses the preserve. Today, our visit was hosted by Daniel Hudson, an SSU graduate student who is doing research on the various species of Pacific newts.
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Field Biology – Learning to Identify Birds
Took my Field Biology students out for the first time on Thursday, for a field experience on campus. I’m planning to spend the first part of the semester introducing them to different taxonomic groups, and helping them develop naturalist skills – especially observation, identification, and keeping details notes in the field – and this seemed like a good way to start.
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