Emerson Oaks UC Reserve BioBlitz

Reserve Manager Joe Messin led UC Riverside graduate students on a guided walk at Emerson Oaks UC Reserve. Managed by UC Riverside, this reserve has a variety of habitats including mountain, desert, coastal, and interior valley. Oak woodlands, coastal sage scrub habitats, and chaparral support wildlife including kangaroo rats, rattlesnakes, hawks, and butterflies.

Graduate students brought their expertise of fungi, grasslands, and kangaroo rats to help us decide which sites were best to sample. The foggy and drizzly day made it ideal to observe fruiting fungal bodies and made vegetation such as the toyon pop with color. As we made our way back to the parking lot, we disturbed a family of California quail that continued on their way after chirping their disapproval of us.

Photo credits: Joe Messin (UCR), Miroslava Munguia (UCLA)

 

Malibu Lagoon BioBlitz w/Santa Monica Bay Audubon Society

The Santa Monica Bay Audubon Society led a morning bird walk at Malibu Lagoon led by local bird experts helping citizen scientists identify as many species as possible. The SMBAS gave us history about the ongoing changes to Malibu Lagoon and how the region has changed in their experiences. Volunteers got a chance to use binoculars and were able to see over a dozen local waterfowl species within the first hour!

After a new wave of inspiration, 10 volunteers helped collect over 30 samples within two hours. Sites included the lagoon banks, along the shores of nesting birds, and revegetation plots along the path. Volunteers were able to see how field managers monitor the rise of the lagoon after rainfall using a creatively marked bridge design.

Another huge thanks to the SMBAS for helping us understand the ecosystem and deciding on best sites to sample! Check out their website for their upcoming scheduled events.

 

San Joaquin Marsh UC Reserve BioBlitz

Our team drove down to UC Irvine to explore San Joaquin Marsh just off of central campus. As one of the last remaining wetlands in the county, this marsh is a hotspot for migratory waterfowl and seasonal vegetation. Current research by undergraduate and graduate students includes studying coyote movement in urban areas, herbivore predation effects on vegetation, and parasitoid population ecology. Just about all of the ponds and marshes were dried up, making it trickier to collect soil samples. On the way, we collected vegetation samples for UCI’s Botanical Conservatory for future researchers to have a catalog of plants on the reserve.


Peter Bowler, Reserve Co-Director, led us from site to site giving us vital information about how the marshes and vernal pools have been filling at different rates each year. We then took a short drive to collect samples at UCI’s Ecological Reserve where we examined revegetation plots of native plants including California buckwheat and coastal sage brush.

Photo credits: Peter Bowler (UCI), Miroslava Munguia (UCLA)

 
 

Santa Monica Bioblitz last week was a smash!

Thanks for the photos and the great hang out! We collected from >30 sites at different elevations all around Malibu Creek State Park. Perfect day! Next week we’ll be going to the lagoons! Sign up for this Saturday’s (March 23) bioblitz here: https://data.ucedna.com/events/20

 

eDNA webinars

CALeDNA research results were presented today to the USGS! Check out their numerous eDNA webinars here: https://my.usgs.gov/confluence/display/cdi/eDNA+Webinars

 

Desert eDNA results are online

Nearly a year ago, eDNA surveys took place from Oak Glen to deep in the Coachella Valley, meandering through Pioneertown, Anza Borrego, the Salton Sea, and Palm Desert. Results are in! We are looking for volunteers to help us analyze the data. https://data.ucedna.com/research_projects/6

As a botanist from Palm Desert (a desert rat, as we call ourselves), I can’t help but highlight that we get some really cool plants in the eDNA results, including one of my favorites that perfumes the desert, creosote bush (Larrea). Oh, and we got both black bears and water bears (Tardigrades) in the eDNA, too.

Image from the web, no author name given. Eat your hearts out, tardigrade lovers. California is full of them (58 sites and counting).

Image from the web, no author name given. Eat your hearts out, tardigrade lovers. California is full of them (58 sites and counting).

 

CALeDNA has its largest bioblitz ever! Surprise, it's at the UC Merced Vernal Pools

Fairy shrimp were all over the place, as were people of all ages, with their phones out, gloves on, and cryotubes handy. We got lucky with the weather, too! 41 people collected samples from 6 pools including the big playa. Teenagers took off their shoes to experience the squish of vernal pool mud. Two people celebrated their birthdays at the bioblitz; one birthday crew drove all the way up from Santa Barbara to join for the day. Afterwards, we met up with professor Michael Dawson and feasted on Indian food buffet.

I’m thrilled to pass along the amazing photographs and stories of the people who attended so you can read about the experience from their vantage points. Here’s Mr. Hollister’s blog post with photos and even a video of an endemic fairy shrimp!

http://www.mrhollisterphoto.com/home/uc-merced-vernal-pool-reserve-edna-collection

The full photo collection can be viewed here:

http://www.mrhollister.com/getout/vernal%20pool%20eDNA/

Here’s a screenshot of what you would see if you clicked that link.

Thanks to everyone who came out! We’ll do another bioblitz there in late April or May. Email us at uc.caledna@gmail.com if you want to join!

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Sampling the Santa Monica Mountains affected by the Woolsey Fire

It was wrenching to see the destruction and loss of life from the fire. Communities of organisms will reassemble somehow, and an important question to ask is will they be different than before (landscape conversion)? NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories and CALeDNA want to understand this process by combining eDNA with remote sensing data. CALeDNA has 121 sites in the Santa Monica Mountains that are in the eDNA freezer — many of these areas burned and can be used to compare biodiversity before and after the fire. Volunteers, including JPL employees, set out to collect from burned sites. Some areas were dangerous with dead branches and debris, so we wore our helmets when hard hats weren’t available. We also thank Marti Witter from the Santa Monica Mountains Resource Conservation District for helping us access these sites. Photos below courtesy of Rachel Meyer and Natasha Stavros.

 
 

CALeDNA x NHMLA Tidepool bioblitz for Snapshot Cal Coast was like opening buried treasure!

Volunteers, researchers, and curators got to hop along algae-covered rocks, and peer into the rarely exposed world of the San Pedro Point Fermin intertidal zone at dawn. It was the second-to-lowest tide of the entire year. Every few minutes you could hear a burst of "oh what! wow!" as people found and gently scooped up animals, from slimy sponges to brittle starfish to the behemoth black sea hare. Regina Wetzer and Dean Pentcheff, long time collaborators now, also collected specimens to bring back to the lab and voucher for permanent archiving as well as DNA barcoding. With these species barcoded too, we can now track them more accurately with our CALeDNA environmental DNA metabarcoding. :)

 
 

California Naturalist Partner/Instructor Training Workshop

Rachel and Maura attended the California Naturalist Partner/Instructor Training Workshop for a future collaboration and we also trained/sampled with members from the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, Community Nature Connection, and others at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden in Arcadia, CA. We look forward to strengthening our connections at the local, state, national, and international level. Thank you for such an amazing opportunity!

 

Sampling the L.A. River

We successfully collected at the L.A. River this Memorial Day Weekend and made some new friends along the way. We made the news! Addriana Weingold from CBSLA asked us of our use of the L.A. River, go to (https://cbsloc.al/2sfxQpC) to find out our answers.  

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Welcome our two new postdocs!!!

Dr. Ana Garcia Vedrenne completed her Ph.D  at UC Santa Barbara in Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology and  Dr. Maura Palacios Mejia obtained her Ph.D at Texas A&M University in Ecology & Evolution.

Together they will contribute their expertise to develop courses for the new Environmental DNA for Science Investigation and Education Program and pursue innovative eDNA research. 

Today, they were initiated by collecting sediment samples from the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden at UCLA.

Welcome to the team!

 

Younger Lagoon Natural Reserve Bioblitz

Located adjacent to the UC Santa Cruz marine campus, Younger Lagoon Natural Reserve offers protection and access to a unique undisturbed coastal wetland and restored terrace. On April 28th, UCSC undergrads, UCSC alumni, UC Davis S.E.E.D.S, and local citizen scientists worked together to collect soil across the reserve, record flora and fauna with iNaturalist, and collect washed-in trash. 

Those collecting soil split into two groups. One group tackled the terrace, focusing their sampling on the three microhabitats (grassland, wetland, shrub) the terrace supports. Being raised on the terrace, this group was able to see a group of humpback whales breaching not too far off shore in the bay! The other group got a bit muddier, sampling from the sand bar in through the mixed and freshwater zones of the lagoons edge. This group was able to explore the beauty of an undisturbed and protected beach covered in drift wood, animal bones, and shells. 

Our trash collectors filled bags of water bottles, flip flops, candy wrappers, and other detritus that continues to wash in from the ocean. And our naturalists wandered both the terrace and lagoon taking pictures of native and invasive grasses, frogs, lizards, birds, and much more! 

The amazing turnout we had for this event allowed us to collect from 23 sites, record over 300 iNatualist observations, and remove several bags of trash from the Lagoon. 

iNat link for this event: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/younger-lagoon-reserve-bioblitz-2018

Our sampling site: https://ucnrs.org/reserves/younger-lagoon-reserve/

eDNA collection sites: http://data.ucedna.com/field_data_projects/118

 

UC Davis S.E.E.D.S will collect eDNA on Mt. Diablo

Thanks, S.E.E.D.S, for staying committed to the CALeDNA program and offering to collect on your upcoming excursion to Mt. Diablo! Hope 2018 is a great year for you with lots of new recruits. If anyone is interested in eDNA research internships this coming summer, let us know! 

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Our eDNA analysis pipeline is fast!

UCLA postdoc Dr. Emily Curd, who spearheaded the development of a new software pipeline and top quality DNA reference databases, has streamlined the pipeline to run fast. In just about two days, we've gone from 200 samples in raw fastq files to lists of species, abundance, and confidence level of the species assignment. We've processed close to 1000 samples on the pipeline, which will called Anacapa, and will soon be published and publicly available. Congratulations, Emily, Jesse, Gaurav, Bao-Chen, Zack, Rachel, and Bob!