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UCSB Natural History Collection News

Collections Research Meetings Winter 2019

The natural history collections side of CCBER will be having weekly informal research seminars, with several guest speakers planned. If you are interested in natural history or collections research, come join every Wednesday from 5-6pm in CCBER's classroom! Read on for schedule of presenters and more.

California Flowers Project

Capturing California’s Flowers: - a new resource for detecting the link between flowering time and climate.

In California, thousands of native pollinator, bird, and mammal species depend on native flowering plants for the pollen, nectar, fruits, and seeds they provide. In turn, the flowering time of California native plants determines the abundance and availability of these food sources during our brief seasonal flowering periods. How will this availability change in response to climate change? A new National Science Foundation (NSF) grant provided to UC Santa Barbara and collaborators throughout California will help answer this question.

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CCBER News

Herbarium Collection on NCOS

Over the past six months, staff and interns have collected over 140 plant specimens from NCOS in an effort to catalog the wide range of plant diversity on the project; everything from invasive non-natives such as bristly oxtongue (Helminthotheca echioides) to our rare or endangered natives such as Ventura marsh milk vetch (Astragalus pycnostachyus var. lanosissimus). Read more here!

Environmental DNA: Assessing this new technology for documenting biodiversity

EDNA is a method of extracting and identifying fragments of DNA from sources that might otherwise be very time consuming to sample. The Cheadle Center is now getting results from an eDNA assessment funded by Steve Senesac and the Associated Students Coastal Fund designed to assess how valuable this tool might be for understanding biodiversity at North Campus Open Space. Read more here!

Breeding Birds at NCOS

One of the main goals of the North Campus Open Space project is to provide habitat for a wide variety of bird species. During the spring and summer months, the value of the habitat on NCOS can be assessed by observing birds that are using the restoration site as their breeding grounds. Which species do you think nest at NCOS? Find out more here!