California, once reputed to have the best public education system in the nation, finds itself ranked at or near the bottom at the end of the 20th century. Traditionally, the University of California has not been deeply involved in K-12 education, but the social and economic cost of an undereducated work-force in a global economy makes it imperative that all segments of California's system of higher education — including UC — get involved. The University can directly improve our public schools through outreach programs. At the same time, UC needs to improve its own curriculum, particularly in science and mathematics, and especially for prospective teachers. To prepare graduates for an increasingly technological world, curricula must be more interdisciplinary and inquiry-based, for science and for nonscience majors alike By breaking down traditional barriers that have prevented UC faculty from participating in curriculum reform efforts, UC can play a leadership role in providing Californians the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in the next century.

The principal purpose of this work, jointly funded by the US Geological Survey, Biological Resources Division, and the California Department of Fish and Game, was to establish quantifiable baseline information on habitat associations and environmental variables that may be useful in predicting the presence or absence of a variety of birds and small mammals in coastal sage scrub of southern California.

The primary database consisted of four sets of data associated with up to 240 replicate points at a up to 22 coastal sage scrub sites in Riverside, Orange, and San Diego counties (not all points and sites were sampled in all years for all attributes).  For each point, we collected information on:  (1)  the species composition and structure of vegetation in the near vicinity of the point, (2) the landscape context of each point (for example, the proportion of urban land use within a 500-1000m radius), (3) the species of birds recorded at each point during spring and fall censuses in 1995, 1996, and 1997 (spring only), and (4)  the species and number of individuals of small mammal species recorded at each point during spring and fall live-trapping censuses in 1995 and 1996.  Most of the analyses focused on the habitat and landscape associations of individual species, and of communities. 

The endemic canopy tree Cephalosphaera usambarensis is a valuable timber species in montane rainforest of Tanzania. Here we evaluate an experiment in which mature trees of species other than C. usambarensis were removed from an area in the East Usambara Mountains. We compared stage/size structure of the trees in this  area   to structure in three nearby control areas from which potential competitors had not been removed. The removal area contained a slightly higher density of large C. usambarensis trees than did control areas, but these trees had not grown bigger than those in control areas in the quarter century since removal. Furthermore, the removal area contained far fewer newly-dispersed seeds, seedlings, or small sapling trees. Thus there is no evidence that removal of potential interspecific competitors enhances the population density or biomass (tree size x density of individuals) of the C. usambarensis population. Instead, removing other trees not only sacrifices local forest biodiversity, but also may harm future timber yield of C. usambarensis by suppressing recruitment of new individuals into the population.