Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration

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.

It is hypothesised that ecological restoration in grasslands can induce an alternative stable state shift in vegetation. The change in vegetation influences insect community assemblages and allows for greater functional redundancy in pollination and refuge for native insect species. 2. Insect community assemblages at eight coastal California grassland sites were evaluated. Half of these sites had undergone restoration through active revegetation of native grassland flora and half were non-restored. Insects were collected from Lupinus bicolor (Fabaceae) within 2 × 2-m2 plots in spring 2017. Lupinus bicolor is a common native species that is used in California restoration projects, and home and state landscaping projects. 3. Ordination demonstrated that insect community assemblages were different between restored and non-restored sites. These differences were seen in insect functional groups as well as taxa-specific differences and were found to be driven by environmental characteristics such as non-native forb cover. 4. Functional redundancy of herbivores decreased at restored sites, while pollinators became more redundant compared with non-restored sites. The assemblages of the common species found at restoration sites contained more native insects than those found at non-restored sites, including species such as Bombus vosnesenskii. 5. Local grassland restoration has the potential to induce an alternative stable state change and affect insect community assemblages. Additionally, it was found that grassland restoration can be a potential conservation tool to provide refugia for bumblebees (Bombus), but additional studies are required to fully understand its broader applicability.

In coastal California dune ecosystems protect coastal cities from damaging storms and provide habitat for native wildlife. Despite the economic and ecological importance of coastal dunes, habitat loss has continued and is predicted to accelerate with a changing climate. To combat the effects of climate change and ensure that coastal dunes will persist into the future, they need to be prioritized for conservation and restoration. However, for restoration to be successful, endemic plants, which are plant with specialized habitat requirements, need to be prioritized because they make up a significant portion of the biodiversity in California coastal dunes. Because endemic plants are rare and there is limited stock of plants available for transplant, we need to be more aggressive in using pilot studies. These can be used to evaluate the biotic and abiotic conditions that maximize growth and reproduction and to help guide effective reintroduction. To evaluate how exploratory pilot studies can enhance the restoration of rare and endemic plant species, we conducted a study restoring Lupinus nipomensis, a United States federally endangered species, on coastal dunes in San Luis Obispo County, California. We found that L. nipomensis had the highest seed production in plots that had a steep, north facing slope and were protected from herbivores. Our results suggest that restoration efforts should be focused on areas with these characteristics to maximize restoration success. Our pilot reintroduction of L. nipomensis highlights the importance of using pilot experiments to enhance reintroduction success and to quicken the recovery of coastal dune ecosystems.

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.