Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration

This document describes the content, purpose, methods and uses of the UCSB Cheadle Center Bird survey data.

This document describes the content, purpose, methods and uses of the nutrient concentration data set for the UC Santa Barbara North Campus Open Space (NCOS) Restoration Project. Nutrient concentrations have been taken as one way to assess the value of the newly established wetland and understand the impact that storms have on the system.

This document describes the content, purpose, methods and uses of the photo documentation data set for the UC Santa Barbara North Campus Open Space (NCOS) Restoration Project. Links to the photos and map are provided.

The UC Santa Barbara campus is fortunate to be surrounded by diverse natural areas that support a wide variety of wildlife. These areas—wetlands, grasslands, coastal sage scrub, and oak woodland—provide habitats necessary for the continued existence of many resident and migrant raptor species. Quite a few of these raptors can be seen on UCSB campus and outlying areas during specific times of the year. Visibility can depend on the time of day and the season. Most birds of prey prefer to hunt at dawn or dusk when their prey are more active, but they can also be seen foraging during the middle of the day. The reference area for this book includes the main UCSB campus, stretching west to Ellwood Mesa and east to the Goleta Slough.

This activity lesson aims to connect 4-6^th grade students to the riparian environment. The lesson was designed for Kids in Nature visits to the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, but may be adapted to any natural outdoor setting or to the classroom. Students are engaged by exploring their senses and writing their observations and reflections adjacent to the creek at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. The Kids in Nature (KIN) Environmental Education Program promotes the aspirations and achievements of students in underserved schools in Santa Barbara and Goleta, California by providing quality environmental science education and experiences through place-based field trips, mentored by UCSB students in the Nature and Science Education Practicum, utilizing hands-on activities to bring K-12 students outdoors and to UCSB. The Kids in Nature program is supported by the UCSB Coastal Fund, UCSB Office of Education Partnerships Faculty Outreach Grants (FOG) Program and the Mosher Foundation.

This activity lesson aims to introduce 4-6^th grade students to general mechanisms of pollination and was developed for Kids in Nature visits to the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration (CCBER) at UCSB, but may be adapted to any classroom, garden or outdoor setting. Students are engaged hands-on with flower and animal specimens to learn about pollinators and pollination. The Kids in Nature (KIN) Environmental Education Program promotes the aspirations and achievements of students in underserved schools in Santa Barbara and Goleta, California by providing quality environmental science education and experiences through place-based field trips, mentored by UCSB students in the Nature and Science Education Practicum, utilizing hands-on activities to bring K-12 students outdoors and to UCSB. The Kids in Nature program is supported by the UCSB Coastal Fund, UCSB Office of Education Partnerships Faculty Outreach Grants (FOG) Program and the Mosher Foundation.

The Cheadle Center at UCSB manages the North Campus Open Space (NCOS), which is a project that has restored 136 acres of upland and wetland habitats that existed before the area was converted into the Ocean Meadows Golf Course in the 1960s. The NCOS restoration project began in 2017 with a fine-scale grading of the site in order to recreate the salt marsh and use the excavated soil to rebuild the upland habitats to the southwest, which are now called the NCOS Mesa. In addition to re-establishing native biodiversity, a key goal of the restoration is to utilize the site as an educational, scientific, and recreational resource. This archived version of the July 2021 newsletter includes updates on acquisition of an all-terrain wheelchair for accessibility, success of the Ventura Marsh Milk-Vetch (Astragalus pycnostachyus var. lanosissimus), volunteer nature guides, and parking lot and outdoor classroom construction. The feature story focuses on invertebrates’ roles in the NCOS food web. Community photos include Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos), American Kestrel (Falco sparverius), Canada Goose (Branta canadensis), Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis), and Black-crowned Night Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax). 

The Cheadle Center at UCSB manages the North Campus Open Space (NCOS), which is a project that has restored 136 acres of upland and wetland habitats that existed before the area was converted into the Ocean Meadows Golf Course in the 1960s. The NCOS restoration project began in 2017 with a fine-scale grading of the site in order to recreate the salt marsh and use the excavated soil to rebuild the upland habitats to the southwest, which are now called the NCOS Mesa. In addition to re-establishing native biodiversity, a key goal of the restoration is to utilize the site as an educational, scientific, and recreational resource. This archived version of the February 2019 newsletter includes updates on tidal fluctuations in the restored slough. The feature story focuses on the community’s appreciation for the open space and the opportunities they have had for engaging with it. Community photos include a burrowing owl (Athene cunicularia). 

The Cheadle Center at UCSB manages the North Campus Open Space (NCOS), which is a project that has restored 136 acres of upland and wetland habitats that existed before the area was converted into the Ocean Meadows Golf Course in the 1960s. The NCOS restoration project began in 2017 with a fine-scale grading of the site in order to recreate the salt marsh and use the excavated soil to rebuild the upland habitats to the southwest, which are now called the NCOS Mesa. In addition to re-establishing native biodiversity, a key goal of the restoration is to utilize the site as an educational, scientific, and recreational resource. This archived version of the April 2020 newsletter includes updates on a recent slough breach, time-series photo documentation, trail construction, and COVID-19. The feature story teaches readers to differentiate between several common native and invasive plants. Community photos include Pied-billed Grebe (Podilymbus podiceps), Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii), and Hoverfly. 

Aquatic macroinvertebrates are often used as bioindicators of water and ecosystem quality due to their sensitivity to pollution. For these reasons, the Santa Barbara Audubon Society developed a Citizen Science program in collaboration with UCSB to collect long-term data on aquatic macroinvertebrate assemblages and water quality in order to understand the changing health of the slough. THis poster was presented at the UCSB 2023 EEMB Research Symposium.

We are in the second year of a project to revitalize entomology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and have new updates of its impact on the campus to report. The UC Santa Barbara Natural History Collection (UCSB) at the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration formed the UCSB Invertebrate Zoology collection from about 10K historical specimens that were found in a basement on the UCSB campus. The collection has continued to grow rapidly through Coastal California arthropod survey efforts, donated student collections, and faculty research projects. New results from the project include the formation of an outreach program through the UCSB Extension Department and discovery of several extirpated rare or endangered insects that once occurred on the UCSB campus. We will report on how the discovery of extirpated species on campus has received some press and the development of a collection on campus has raised the profile of entomology and insect conservation in the area.

This poster was presented at the 2018 Entomological Collections Network meeting held in Vancouver, Canada on November 10-11. 

Las abejas son fundamentales para nuestra seguridad alimentaria y la polinización de las plantas silvestres y cultivadas. Sin embargo, algunas poblaciones y especies están en riesgo de desaparecer. Nuestro conocimiento de los factores que causan estas disminuciones es limitado, en parte porque carecemos de datos suficientes sobre la distribución de las especies que nos sirvan para predecir cambios en su rango geográfico bajo escenarios de cambio climático. Además, carecemos de datos adecuados sobre las características morfológicas y comportamentales que podrían influir en la vulnerabilidad de las abejas a los cambios ambientales inducidos por el hombre, como la pérdida de hábitat y el cambio climático. Afortunadamente, se puede extraer una gran cantidad de información a partir de los especímenes depositados en colecciones entomológicas. Acá presentamos este proyecto, el cual incluye 13 instituciones y es financiado por la Fundación Nacional de Ciencias de los EE. UU. (NSF, por sus siglas en Ingles). En el transcurso de tres años, crearemos más de un millón de imágenes (2D y 3D) de alta resolución de especímenes de abejas que representan alrededor de 1⁄4 de la diversidad mundial. También desarrollaremos herramientas para medir los rasgos de las abejas a partir de las imágenes. La información generada estará disponible a través de un portal de datos abierto Symbiota-Light llamado Bee Library. Además, los datos de interacción biótica y asociación de especies se compartirán a través de Global Biotic Interactions. Presented by Victor Hugo Gonzalez at the XII Congreso Mesoamericano de Abejas Nativas, Centro de Investigaciones Apícolas Tropicales (CINAT), Universidad Nacional, Costa Rica, Nov. 20-21, 2021

Digital Extended Specimen Discussion Session presented at BioDigiCon. Biodiversity Digitization Conference (BioDigiCon) was held virtually on 27-29 September 2022 and hosted by iDigBio. https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/index.php/BioDigiCon_2022

Digital Extended Specimen Discussion Session organizers and presenters are Libby Ellwood, iDigBio; Katja Seltmann, Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration, UC Santa Barbara; Julie Allen, University of Nevada, Reno; Katie Pearson and Ed Gilbert, Symbiota Support Hub; Abby Benson, USGS

A video recording of the presentation is available in Supplementary Materials. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0g99h7kf#supplemental

The Eighth Annual Santa Barbara Botanic Garden Conservation Symposium for 2020 was themed “Children in Nature: Prescription for a Healthy Planet” and featured UCSB Environmental Studies professor Bridget Lewin, UCSB student Paulina Samosa, and Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration staff member Andy Lanes as panelists that present their experiences with environmental education and the Kids in Nature program along with a short video by Matt Fratus.

We introduce the Bee-Interaction-Database (BID), a project to create an open dataset about bee biotic interactions and other traits. Traits such as floral specialization, behavior, seasonality, parasites, nesting biology, body size and more may be included in the scientific literature, on natural history specimens, or observable in photographs (i.e., iNaturalist). Yet this information is often time-intensive to collect, hidden in the literature, and difficult to combine into one dataset because no uniform method for sharing traits and biotic information is used.

To date, we have extracted close to 3,000 unique bee observations from the scientific literature and integrated them into the Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI - https://www.globalbioticinteractions.org/), online infrastructure for sharing species interaction data. An early observation in our project is that trait data and interaction data are frequently part of the same recorded observation. In addition, authors frequently do not publish or include the raw data that goes into analyses, such as the study locality or specific interactions observed for the study. In conclusion, we hope to encourage new methods for publishing interaction and trait data that improves the reusability of research and provides authors a means of openly sharing trait data in the name of biodiversity research. https://github.com/Extended-Bee-Network/bee-interaction-database. This presentation was part of the 2020 Entomological Society of America meeting and was presented online.

Insects are possibly the most taxonomically and ecologically diverse class of multicellular organisms on Earth. Consequently, they provide nearly unlimited opportunities to develop and test ecological and evolutionary hypotheses. Currently, however, large-scale studies of insect ecology, behavior, and trait evolution are impeded by the difficulty in obtaining and analyzing data derived from natural history observations of insects. These data are typically highly heterogeneous and widely scattered among many sources, which makes developing robust information systems to aggregate and disseminate them a significant challenge. As a step towards this goal, we report initial results of a new effort to develop a standardized vocabulary and ontology for insect natural history data. In particular, we describe a new database of representative insect natural history data derived from multiple sources (but focused on data from specimens in biological collections), an analysis of the abstract conceptual areas required for a comprehensive ontology of insect natural history data, and a database of use cases and competency questions to guide the development of data systems for insect natural history data. We also discuss data modeling and technology-related challenges that must be overcome to implement robust integration of insect natural history data.

One of the main threats to forests in the Anthropocene are novel or altered interactions among trees, insects and fungi. To critically assess the contemporary research on bark beetles, their associated fungi, and their relationships with trees, the international Bark Beetle Mycobiome research coordination network has been formed. The network comprises 22 researchers from 17 institutions. This forward-looking review summarizes the group’s assessment of the current status of the bark beetle mycobiome research field and priorities for its advancement. Priorities include data mobility and standards, the adoption of new technologies for the study of these symbioses, reconciliation of conflicting paradigms, and practices for robust inference of symbiosis and tree epidemiology. The Net work proposes contemporary communication strategies to interact with the global community of researchers studying symbioses and natural resource managers. We conclude with a call to the broader scientific community to participate in the network and contribute their perspectives.

Phenotypic divergence is an important consequence of restricted gene flow in insular populations. This divergence can be challenging to detect when it occurs through subtle shifts in morphological traits, particularly in traits with complex geometries, like insect wing venation. Here, we employed geometric morphometrics to assess the extent of variation in wing venation patterns across reproductively isolated populations of the social sweat bee, Halictus tripartitus. We examined wing morphology of specimens sampled from a reproductively isolated population of H. tripartitus on Santa Cruz Island (Channel Islands, Southern California). Our analysis revealed significant differentiation in wing venation in this island population relative to conspecific mainland populations. We additionally found that this population-level variation was less pronounced than the species-level variation in wing venation among three sympatric congeners native to the region, Halictus tripartitus, Halictus ligatus, and Halictus farinosus. Together, these results provide evidence for subtle phenotypic divergence in an island bee population. More broadly, these results emphasize the utility and potential of wing morphometrics for large-scale assessment of insect population structure.

In this study, the seedbank of the Nipomo-Guadalupe dune complex was analyzed to better understand the endangered Nipomo lupine's (Lupinus nipomensis, Fabaceae) reproduction and competitors. 

This report assesses the water quality of UCSB's Campus Lagoon using multiple parameters and its ability to support aquatic life. In July 2011, the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration (CCBER) completed an assessment report on the water quality of the Campus Lagoon based on data collected from various surveys conducted over a five-year period (2006 – 2011). Here we present an update to the 2011 report with new data obtained from a recent (Dec. 2015 – Feb. 2016) survey of the quality of storm water run-off in the lagoon watershed and inclusion of data from a data sonde installed between 2009 and 2011.