Investiture of Dr. Judy Sakaki, Part 1 – Morning Workshops

Today was a special day on campus, a truly historic day, when Sonoma State University held the investiture ceremony for our 7th president, Dr. Judy Sakaki. In the morning, a wide variety of mini-workshops were held, along with a poster session, to showcase the work and research of SSU students and faculty. in the afternoon, the investiture ceremony took place in the Green Music Center. It was pretty magnificent, all the way around.

Earlier in the semester, I’d decided that this was important enough that I wanted to encourage my students to attend, so instead of lecturing today, I asked my morning class (Global Environmental Issues) to attend the poster session and at least one of the mini workshops. For Conservation Biology in the afternoon, I let them know that I would be attending the investiture, and I strongly suggested that they do the same. There were two overall reasons I wanted to do this . . . first, it’s a special day on campus, and I think it’s nice for all of us to have a break from the regular schedule from time to time. But more than that, this was a day for the entire campus community to come together, and I wanted my students to know that they’re part of this community, and maybe make some new connections with people on campus.

Turns out, this was a good decision.
My day started off in Seawolf Plaza, where I happened upon a poetry reading in progress, “SSU Student Poets Reading: Resistance and Hope in our Current Political Moment. Among the presenters was one of my former students, who shared some powerful, profound things that he’d written about the current state of our world.

From there, I headed up to the poster session, where I got talking with the authors of some research about the effect of media and technology on students. Not only was it an interesting project, but in talking with the Psychology professor who’d done the research, I found out that they knew who I was, because several of my students had come by and inquired about the research (which was part of the assignment I’d given them). Apparently, my students were asking VERY good questions, and really engaged with the process. AHHHH YES!!!!!!!! This was exactly what I’d hoped would happen. 🙂

My next stop was a session by Dr. Jeff Baldwin, “What Does Sustainability Mean? Active Learning With and From Sonoma State Students.” Anything with “active learning” in the title grabs my attention, and after Jeff started talking, I realized this talk had even more relevance to me, as he was talking about some assignments and results from a course that I’ll likely be teaching in the not-too-distant future. He described some assignments where he sent students out to do things like calculate the carbon footprint generated by their transportation needs, and spend a day riding the bus. That alone was interesting, but the really cool part is the data he’d collected from them about these activities – looking at how much it changed their own viewpoints, and how much they now seemed committed to making long-term changes to their own behavior, and possibly supporting systemic changes, as well. You can read more about his research in his paper, “Sustainability Education Through Active-Learning in Large Lecture Settings: Evaluation of Four Out-Of-Class Exercises.” Afterwards, I chatted for a few minutes with a couple of other professors, and we had a good conversation about how to improve learning outcomes for students, while keeping our own workloads under control.

After a lunch meeting, I headed in the direction of the Green Music Center. Along the way, I decided to wander along Copeland Creek, and through the Butterfly Garden. It was an absolutely stunning day, and the sound of the water trickling through the creek never fails to cheer me. Here are a few photos I took along my walk:

Mossy Logs
Mossy logs alongside Copeland Creek

 

I’ll cover the actual ceremony in a separate post, as this one’s getting a bit long. Plus, I’m waiting for the event’s photographer to post some photos online.

 

 

Sampling For Benthic Macroinvertebrates

I had a great morning out on the creek yesterday, taking some Entomology students out to sample benthic macroinvertebrates in Copeland Creek. This project is a true win/win: I’m getting data for a long-term monitoring study of the creek, and the students are fulfilling a service learning requirement for their biology course.

Before I go into the details, let me take a quick step back for some definitions, for anyone who might not be familiar with some of these terms: Macroinvertebrates are animals without backbones that can be seen with the naked eye (“macro” = large), and benthic refers to the ecological zone at the bottom of a body of water, in this case the creek bed. Entomology is the scientific study of insects, and they were our primary focus, although we’re looking at other invertebrates as well, including arachnids (spiders, and their kin), worms, and maybe even some crustaceans, like crayfish, if we happen upon any of them.

What we’re doing is pretty straightforward: I’m having them follow the same protocols our Restoration Ecology students developed last semester, so we can add to that data set. Copeland Creek is seasonal, and doesn’t have running water for part of the year (including the period of time when last semester’s sampling was done), so I’m particularly interested in having data taken at different times of the year.

Copeland Creek
Copeland Creek

Yesterday, we reviewed the protocols in lab, and brainstormed some ideas about how to format our data collection forms. Then I sent them out into the creek to (literally) get their feet wet. They sampled for an hour, and we’re planning to collect at least one more set of data next week, and possibly a third set, as well. Right off the bat, though, we noticed a BIG different in both abundance and diversity of aquatic inverts, compared with what they found last semester. We sampled in the same general area, but in the fall, there’s just a small pool that holds water year round. This time of year, the creek is running quite nicely.

I really enjoyed being out on the creek, and my students seemed to enjoy it as well. It’s not a hard sell . . . getting to wade into the creek and catch stuff and get school credit for doing it? It’s a pretty sweet gig. 😀 Once we’d finished sampling, we preserved all our samples in alcohol, but we didn’t even try to ID most of them. We’ll key them all out at once, after we’ve finished all our collecting trips.

More soon . . . we’ll be meeting again next week!

 

Copeland Creek Work Day

After months of planning, on Saturday, March 25, a group of volunteers gathered on the Sonoma State University campus to start the “muddy boots” part of our project to restore the riparian habitat along Copeland Creek. Over the past couple of weeks, our SSU project team identified native plants that we want to keep, and today our work team pulled up invasive species around these natives, to give them the best possible chance to thrive, and to make certain they’re not accidentally pulled up during a future phase of restoration work.  (All photos © the author, except where noted).

Our collaborators, Nick and Callie from the California Conservation Corps’ Watershed Stewards Program arrived first thing in the morning, to set up for the workday. SSU project team members Jessi and Jana walked through our project area and flagged the native plants where the clearing was to take place.

Just after 10:00 a.m. we got started. To a group of both SSU students and community volunteers, I gave a brief overview of the history of the creek, as well as our goal for the project as a whole. It turns out that, historically, there wasn’t actually a creek running through this part of the landscape . . . the creek ran down off nearby Sonoma Mountain, and spread out across a floodplain. This area would have been mostly wetlands, not dry land with a creek. So, our goal isn’t to try and restore this area to some previous “natural” state. Instead, we’re working to restore native vegetation, and encourage a habitat that supports a wide variety of native species, some of which we saw while doing our work (see this post for some photos of lizards and salamanders and things).

Then, everyone got to work! And boy, oh boy, did they work! We did take a break for lunch (sandwiches provided by Callie), but other than that, our team worked from 10 a.m. until about 2 p.m.

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Sometimes you’ve just got to crawl right in.

Some of my intrepid Conservation Biology students tackled a huge patch of Oregon grape that was being choked out by Himalayan blackberry. This invasive non-native species of blackberry is one of our main targets for this project. We want to replace as much of it as possible with native species, but we need to do this in a way that won’t disrupt the existing ecosystem too much while the new species become established. Removing the blackberry from this particular patch was a great place to start, and definitely above and beyond what we’d hoped to accomplish today. Hector, Paolo, Andrew, William, and Vince did an amazing job of “grubbing” out the blackberry.

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The “Dream Team”

Oregon Grape, after blackberry removal:

We accomplished more today than I thought possible. Sending out a huge thank you to our team, and to all the wonderful volunteers who came out and helped us get out Copeland Creek restoration project started! We hope to see you again on Earth Day, when we’ll work on the the next phase of our project.

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Photo by Callie Grant

Wildlife on Copeland Creek

On Saturday, March 25th, SSU collaborated with the California Conservation Corps’ Watership Stewardship Program to start work on our riparian restoration project (more details about the work we did on Saturday coming soon). One of the side benefits of working alongside the creek is encountering some of the wildlife that shares the campus with us. Here are a few of the highlights of our day . . .

Southern alligator lizard (Elgaria multicarinata): 

This gorgeous lizard was spotted in the middle of the bike path – one of the largest alligator lizards I’ve ever seen! What a gorgeous specimen!

Pacific chorus frog (Pseudacris regilla): We found more than one of these little cuties during our work day.

Slender salamander (Batrachoseps attenuatus): At least 9 of these little amphibians were discovered while working in an area of about an acre. The one at bottom right is the smallest I’ve ever seen.

We also saw lots of great native plants and fungi.

While I didn’t get many photos of them, I did see or hear a wide variety of birds, including western scrub jay, red-shouldered hawk, brown towhee, Anna’s hummingbird, turkey vulture, wild turkey, and Canada geese.

Best of all, the creek is gorgeous right now, with a good amount of water after our recent rains.

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Copeland Creek

This is the stretch of Copeland Creek running through the Sonoma State University campus, right behind the Environmental Technology Center. In nearly 10 years on campus, I’ve never seen Copeland Creek with this much water, or running so fast. It was worth giving my Conservation Biology students a quick break so we could walk down and see the creek, and take a quick video.