Sagehen News

Timeline of Sagehen History

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 14:13:00 -0800

The timeline includes some important events, research, and discoveries in Sagehen's history to date, as well as all the station's staff up to 2018. You'll also find many links to videos and publications providing more detail about specific programs and research.

Sources:

UCNRS Transect, 22:2, Booth, 2004.
History of the Tahoe National Forest: 1840-1940, W. Turrentine, et al. 1982.
UC Berkeley, In Memorium: Paul R. Needham
UC Berkeley, In Memorium: A. Starker Leopold
Sagehen Historic Photo Collection, 1952–2018.
Sawdust Trails in the Truckee Basin: A History of Lumbering Operations, 1856-1936, Dick Wilson, 1992.
Sierra Nevada Wood & Lumber Company, Gordon Richards.
Personal recollection: Faerthen Felix, Don Erman, Phil Ward, Shorty Boucher, John Shivik.
Natural Reforestation in the Northern Sierra-Nevada Donner Ridge Burn, Bock & Bock, 1969.

You can also consult the spreadsheet that the timeline is generated from.

Updated Sagehen Collections Activity Report, 2023

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 15:52:00 -0700

In 2023, volunteers Erica Krimmel and Faerthen Felix substantially completed the 10+ year Sagehen Collections Program digitization project, and updated the 2014 Collections Activity Report explaining the program and its accomplishments.

Read about it here.

2020 summer updates

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 00:15:00 -0700

Even in the shade of Covid-19, several very significant and important things have happened at Sagehen this season. Here is a quick rundown:

Early this summer, the Northern Sierra Partnership completed a $14M acquisition in their ongoing "Checkerboard Initiative" to repair the ownership patchwork created by the railroad era. Part of the purchase includes stunning wild land surrounding nearby Frog Lake (image below); more relevant to us, it also includes the last major private in-holdings in the Sagehen Basin. We've been working with local and state land trusts to secure all the private land in the basin since shortly after we arrived in 2001. Now, there remains only one small parcel of about 40-acres, which is not a big management concern. In the past, private logging in the basin threatened and interfered with the science and larger basin management strategy, so it's fantastic that this conflict is now gone for good! Learn more about Sagehen's land use history here and here.

Two important long-term Sagehen monitoring data sets were finally analyzed this year. Gretchen Lebuhn and Mark Reynolds will soon publish the results of their examination of almost 30 years of Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) bird banding data at Sagehen. Meanwhile, Jay Rosenheim and Phil Ward recently published an analysis of more than 40 years of insect collection in the basin during the alternate year UC Davis ENT109 field course. Both studies surprisingly indicate fairly stable populations, suggesting that the basin is very resilient over a long enough time span, even if short term variability can be alarming. It is beyond special that these dedicated researchers were able to continue data collection over multiple decades. We can't thank them enough for their efforts.
Hydrology research in the Sagehen Basin continues to grow in importance. This summer, the collaborative work of UNR--led by Adrian Harpold--and the Swiss Federal Institute--led by James Kirchner--was awarded a coveted Critical Zone Collaborative Network grant from the National Science Foundation.
Governor Newsom and the US Forest Service have codified the forestry and healthy fire principles we've been fighting for in the Sagehen Forest Project for 15 years. It feels amazing that our culture has finally shifted on this major socio-ecological issue! The new agreement brings the land managers into coordination, focuses on science-based decision-making, increases the scale of treatment to a million acres a year, focuses on broad ecosystem health, and increases the use of prescribed fire.
The pandemic cancelled the actual exhibition and associated events about the Sagehen art program at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC this summer. But JD Talasek, Bill Fox and others worked hard to put together a virtual DASER talk with us in August (you can watch the recording and read the Q&A transcript). They've also produced a beautiful e-catalogue to capture the exhibit that didn't quite happen.
Sagehen's electricity supplier is exploring taking the station off the grid. This action would reduce the fire danger associated with the 8-miles of 1960's-era cable that stretches through the forest from the station to Hobart Mills. It would also provide a beautiful demonstration project for both the energy company and the university. Sagehen is perfectly sited for solar, and we've wanted to do this since the day we arrived. But until Liberty Energy got on board it was out of our reach to even consider it. Thanks, Liberty! UPDATE: installation completed in November, 2020!

German television aired a program on California wildfire on August 25. The piece features Sagehen, Jeff Brown, Sagehen Forest Project partner Scott Conway, and California Observatory partner Salo Science.
"Salo Sciences, Planet Labs, and Vibrant Planet are proud to announce the public launch of the California Forest Observatory platform at the September 14th meeting of the Forest Management Task Force." Sagehen worked for several years to get these folks up to speed on forest issues so that they could develop this excellent live data management tool. The observatory allows for a landscape-scale approach, rather than the disconnected, project-scale planning of the past.

Finally, with Covid-19 taking a wrecking ball to the summer reservations, Jeff and Faerthen did the math and realized they had just enough service credit to allow them to push their retirement date forward to July 1. This also helps take some of the financial pressure off the station, given the loss of summer income and another looming round of brutal campus budget cuts. We intend to remain involved with the art and collections programs as volunteers, however.

We're going to miss the place and all of you, but it's time to go. Thanks for everything--it's been a fun ride!

MAPS bird banding

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 16:56:00 -0700

The crew was able to socially distance and start the 2020 bird banding season. Great to have Mark Reynolds, Gretchen Lebuhn and Walter Clevenger back at Sagehen!

We managed to catch a Northern Flicker today, a very unusual catch, though they are common in the basin. You see them lapping up ants on the access road. These birds are so big and strong that they usually tear through the nets.

Covid-19 silver linings...

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 10:51:00 -0700

Sagehen's Zooniverse Project. Take a look at what everyone found!

Sagehen is closed to overnight use for the time-being. We do have a few researchers operating under "Exceptional Use" permits, since stopping their work could destroy years of effort.

The Sagehen crew continues to work remotely, with regular onsite visits as we usually do this time of year when weather routinely takes out Sagehen's power and internet.

One thing that we've been doing is getting our Zooniverse citizen science project moving. It's been in beta-testing for months, and we finally went live last week. And what a surprise we got three days later: 50K classifications of 8K images! I thought there must be some mistake, but here's a note from our EDI Data Fellow, Georgia Titcomb, who set up the project for us to analyze our Sagehen Forest Project camera trap monitoring photos:

...And wow! There were more than 25000 classifications in one day! That's amazing. Yep -- it looks like it is totally done. I can analyze that data and send it to you to see if there is any reason to extend the retirement limit.

Then:

Holy crap! People finished my Kenyan Zooniverse project too!

That required more that 300,000 classifications . I guess Zooniverse is a great alternative for those who are sitting at home and wanting to get out into nature!

Thanks to everyone who took time out of their day to help us do science! This is not something we could do alone. Please consider visiting Sagehen's iNaturalist projects, too. We always need IDs of plants and animals that people observe here. And post pics from your short walks, too!

4-2-2020 UPDATE: Georgia uploaded 1500 more of Dan's monitoring images and they are done already, too! Wish we had more to give them.

Sagehen Collections Digitization Continues

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Mon, 23 Dec 2019 11:43:00 -0800

Last week, Faerthen Felix and Erica Krimmel traveled to San Luis Obispo with the entire Sagehen Herbarium collection.

As it happens, Cal Poly has a remarkably dynamic botany department. Professor Jenn Yost, Director of the Hoover Herbarium, is anchoring a large phenology effort that Sagehen was lucky enough to participate in (thanks to Erica!):

The California Phenology Thematic Collections Network (CAP TCN) is a collaborative project funded by the National Science Foundation through the Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program. The project brings together 22 California universities, research stations, natural history collections, and botanical gardens to capture images and data of nearly 1 million herbarium specimens--collections of dried and pressed plants.

This project uniquely aims to capture phenological data: information about the timing of, e.g., flowering or fruiting. Workflows and data standards necessary to collect, store, and analyze these data are under development.

Previously, the project shifted Sagehen's digital herbarium records to the new Consortium of California Herbaria portal (CCH2). At the Hoover Herbarium at Cal Poly, we received help from Katie Pearson to image all of our specimens, process and upload them to the associated records in CCH2 via Cyverse. This way, we didn't have to do them one at a time nor figure out a way to archive this data ourselves, a task that has proven to be beyond our small budget capacity.

Thanks to Yost and company, our Sagehen collection of approx. 1800 vouchers is now part of a much larger research project, and available for future research, as well. We can ask much bigger questions now that it's possible to digitally analyze our specimens (and/or compare them to citizen scientist provided live observation data from iNaturalist); questions like, has the timing of flowering changed at Sagehen since the 1960's? How has the species palette in the basin changed over those 60 years? What species are missing from the physical collection, or need to be collected again? Erica and I also have some ideas about how to fine-tune the post-collection geo-referencing workflow for old specimens.


A peculiar voucher of Utricularia...is it Phil Ward?

The herbarium is not Sagehen's only collections digitization project. Our mammals and birds are also available online. These resources are available thanks to Sagehen Collections Manager Erica Krimmel and volunteers Teresa and Emily Gollub, Kathy Mullen, Angele Carroll, Hannah Johansson, Alex and Robert Gallandt, various Sagehen California Naturalists and Truckee Weed Warriors, and Rob Rhew's 2018 students. Sagehen insects were digitized by the Berkeley MVZ and are available in that museum's collections now [and in Symbiota as of 2020!]. In summer 2019, EDI data fellow Georgia Titcomb helped us add some of our legacy data set collection to the EDI repository for easier discovery and access. All of these digitization efforts are generating new research from Sagehen specimens and old data--see our research resource page and/or bibliography for references.

There's still plenty left to do! Get in touch if you'd like to volunteer. There's more information available on the Sagehen Volunteer Blog. One fun current project is helping us identify animals in our camera trap monitoring photos [completed in record time, thanks to COVID].

Update, 2-3-2020: Sagehen is now a registered presence on GBIF, so it's easier to locate our collections data now. At present, you can find our herbarium and mammal records; we are working to add our birds and insects in the coming weeks [September 2020: finished!]. We will also create a presence in iDigBio so that there are multiple ways for researchers to access this data.

Update, 5-1-2021: With COVID lockdown this winter, I was able to hide out, mount and accession all of Sagehen's remaining legacy herbarium specimens from the 1960's and 1980's. Freshly vaccinated, Erica Krimmel and I headed down to Cal Poly in April with the last two boxes of vouchers for imaging. The Sagehen herbarium is now completed filed and organized under the updated schema, with current taxonomy annotations: some determination labels are printed and still need to be attached, but all our CCH2.org records are accurate.

This has been a long row to hoe, but a very fun project. Now we can just focus on collecting for the last remaining gaps between the herbarium and the Master Plant List for Sagehen and the much greater collecting needs for the North Fork of the American River.

Sagehen Fire Updates

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Sat, 7 Dec 2019 15:25:00 -0800

Prescribed Fire

Happily, we got a lot of under-burning done in the basin this fall, including the tricky dense units on the south side of the creek that we thought might never come into condition. Crews also moved the piles that were sitting in wet meadows so that we can burn them this winter or next spring.


All of this Sagehen fuel is now gone!

Then the contractor finally arrived and began chipping the large slash piles and sending the fuel to the Loyalton co-gen site.

Thanks go out to our partners at the Tahoe National Forest and Sierra Nevada Conservancy!

More photos.

About 80 piles went from this, to... (see video below).

Wood chip time lapse by Ellie McCutcheon.

Red Card Training for Artists & Scientists

Linda demonstrates fuel moisture sticks.

Many artists and scientists would like to work more closely with prescribed fire. But in order to be on a live fire, it's important to understand wildfire behavior and what everyone is doing out there so that you don't create a danger to yourself or others.

Working with Linda Ferguson and Travis Shoemaker of the Tahoe National Forest, Sagehen held its first session of Red Carding for Artists and Scientists on November 13.

Unfortunately, the weather conditions didn't allow us to actually burn anything during the training session, but we hope to do more of that this winter. We also plan to offer the training again next spring. Get in touch with Jeff if you are interested, and stay tuned for dates.

Participants:

Trainers: Linda Ferguson and Travis Shoemaker, USFS
Artists: Steve Dunsky; Ellie McCutcheon; Shannon O'Hare; Ethan Turpin; Julie Weitz
Scientists: Stephen Drake; Rob Rhew
Others: Jamie Ervin; Jeff Brown; Faerthen Felix, Dan Sayler

Photos.

Culture of Fire

A fire sprite waits to be released.

Shannon O'Hare and Steve Dunsky came out and installed the first Culture of Fire artworks for burning. Shannon has come up with a brilliant conceit: that there are "fire sprites" trapped in the accumulated wood debris. To free the imprisoned sprites, we must bring small fire back to the forest.

We plan to hold a public event in the spring when we'll burn the student and artist-created artifacts as part of returning healthy fire and ritual to the Sagehen forest.

More photos.

WeatherBrains podcast #724

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Thu, 5 Dec 2019 23:23:00 -0800

This week, Jeff was a featured guest on the popular weather podcast, WeatherBrains. He discussed wildfire and the Sagehen Forest Project solutions.

More info on the WeatherBrains website.

Berkeley forestry

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 23:05:00 -0700

Sagehen's forest work is part of an illustrious tradition. Though Yale forestry gets most of the press, this recent note from Jason Moghaddas, Director of Operations and Natural Hazards - Spatial Informatics Group (SIG), illuminates the thread of seriously cutting edge work that has consistently come from a small, interconnected group of Cal faculty and alums, some of whom paid a harsh career price for being so far out ahead of the crowd:

"It started with Harold Biswell who really saw California's fire issues (and foresaw the problems we are having today) back in the 1950's. He wrote a great book: Prescribed Burning in California Wildlands Vegetation Management. From Harold, the 'torch' was passed to Bob Martin, who had just 6-8 graduate students, including Joe Scott, Mark Finney [of SPLATs fame], Dave Sapsis, Kevin Ryan, Scott Stephens and a few other well known names in fire ecology. Scott Stephens then became a [Berkeley] professor of Wildfire Science and is there today--I worked for him for several years and we have worked together on several projects via SIG."

Of course, the Sagehen Forest Project began with research by Scott Stephens and another Berkeley forestry professor, John Battles. And Berkeley continues to promote a robust fire research community today. A recent workshop explored ways to work together moving forward.

Jason Moghaddas and Ryan Tompkins (Forestry & Natural Resources Advisor - University of California Cooperative Extension for Plumas, Sierra, and Lassen Counties) visited Sagehen last week with a diverse group from Plumas County, wrangled by Lynn Campbell of Sierra Nevada Conservancy. The goal is for us all to work together to think bigger about forest management and fire.

Both Jason and Ryan are also Cal foresters!

-------------------------------------------------------
I would be remiss to not mention A. E. Wieslander in this discussion, perhaps the grandfather of all this thinking: "He was a pre-forestry student at the university from 1910 to 1914 and one of the energetic and committed Forestry Club members who promoted the establishment of UC's Division of Forestry in 1913. During his long career with the United States Forest Service at the California Forest and Range Experiment Station from 1926 to 1956, his office was on the university campus, and he worked cooperatively with the university's Agricultural Experiment Station and the Departments of Forestry, Soils, Botany, and others. Thus, his tie to the university was a close one. As the initiator and director for thirty years of the experiment station's extensive vegetation and soils mapping projects, his contribution to California's wildland management was pioneering and unquestionable."

Wieslander was also an early recognizer of the role of regular low-intensity fire to maintain forest health and keep vegetation in check.

Translating data into knowledge is the first step to culture change: data>knowledge>empathy>policy>action.

New Yorker article on the Sagehen Forest Project

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 17:50:00 -0700

The New Yorker has published an article by Nicola Twilley on the Sagehen Forest Project. The piece appears in the August 26, 2019 issue:

A Trailblazing Plan to Fight California Wildfires

Throughout the twentieth century, federal policy focussed on putting out fires as quickly as possible, but preventing megafires requires a different approach.

The article does a great job of clarifying our complex wildfire issues. It calls out a few of our great partners, like Scott Conway, Scott Stephens, Craig Thomas. But sadly, no magazine article could ever mention everyone who deserves credit for their contributions to this effort--that would take a novel!

This is also the work that won Sagehen its second UC Berkeley Chancellor's Outstanding Staff Team Award (COSA) in 2016. And it's actually Sagehen's second New Yorker article: the first was written in 2013 by Michael Pollan about Rick Karban's work on plant communication.

Had Sagehen not been engaged in the arts, we would never have made the connection to Twilley that led to this piece: we met her through the Nevada Museum of Art - Center for Art + Environment. And had we not been engaged on all other cultural fronts, too--business, policy, management, science--this project could never have begun, much less succeeded.

Natural Discourse at Sagehen

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Sat, 17 Aug 2019 18:56:00 -0700

“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong... to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.” -- Gus Speth

Sagehen believes that it is critical to integrate the arts into our science program and the socio-ecological issues we are working on. We need artists to engage with these issues in order to bring them into the larger culture. Scientific facts don't interest most people.

On August 10, 2019, curator Shirley Watts organized an iteration of her Natural Discourse series for Sagehen. The Truckee-Tahoe Community Foundation generously underwrote the evening. Sagehen fire video footage previously featured in Watt's Digital Nature event at the LA County Arboretum in spring, 2019.

The sold out Sagehen event included a catered dinner, fixed art installations, projected artwork, and an original "eco-feminist sci-fi rock-opera" performance by Sagehen artist-in-residence Sasha Petrenko, a team of dancers and a drummer. Attendees included the general public as well as artists, arts and university administrators, scientists, and representatives from the US Forest Service, CalFire, Sierra Nevada Conservancy, Truckee River Watershed Council, South Yuba Citizen's League, Wild & Scenic Film Festival, Truckee-Tahoe Community Foundation, Nevada County Arts Council, and the Nevada Museum of Art.

Installations included an original work by Erin Espelie that included Sagehen collection specimens and scientific apparatus, projection of her film, Silent Springs, and photographs from Carl Fuldner and Shane DuBay's wonderful Phoenix Index. Also, Jenny Kendler's Underground Library (2017-ongoing), and stpmj's Invisible Barn (2015), one side of which functioned as a projection screen for a new piece by Jonathan PJ Smith and Ethan Turpin (Burning House, 2019).

Additional projected artworks included selections from Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport's short film CRUDE (2018-ongoing), Jonathon Keats' Pornography for Plants (2007-ongoing), David Opdyke's Fair and Balanced (2019), Ethan Turpin and Jonathan PJ Smith's Walk into Wildfire (2015-ongoing), and Burn Pile, a new work by Kevin Cooley. A short 2019 documentary also screened. Build on the Beach (excerpt from Site Specific Cameras) is a film by Matthew Brown about artists Adam Donnelly and David Janesko who document the California natural environment by making pin hole cameras from materials found on site.

The previous day's set-up for the Natural Discourse event overlapped with the break-down of the annual Sierra Nevada College MFA program at Sagehen, so the students were able to benefit from interaction with the Natural Discourse artists.

More info about the artists, and ArtSciConverge at Sagehen.
Words and more photos by Mitchell B. Maher

Catered dinner for 114 people.

Sasha Petrenko and team perform Forest-time (2019), her new "eco-feminist sci-fi rock-opera" on fire ecology and time travel.

Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport's short film CRUDE (2018) played in the Fishhouse.

Jonathon Keats' Pornography for Plants (2007-ongoing) projects images of pollination on the forest.

David Opdyke's Fair and Balanced (2019). The piece contrasts real political arguments for and against climate change action, overlain on images of real climate carnage.

Artist/scientist Erin Espele created a site-specific installation juxtaposing Sagehen's teaching collections and microscopes with her film Silent Springs and Carl Fuldner and Shane Dubay's Phoenix Index photos of historical specimens from Chicago's Field Museum. Fuldner and Dubay illuminate the effects of late 19th and early 20th century industrialization on wildlife, allowing the specimens to find new life as a retroactive air-quality proxy (2015-ongoing).

Kevin Cooley's 3 channel HD video installation, Burn Pile (2019).

Ethan Turpin and Jonathan PJ Smith's Walk into Wildfire (2015-ongoing) places you on the ground as fire passes over.

Invisible Barn (2015-ongoing), from the Sagehen permanent collection

Burning House (2019). Ethan Turpin and Jonathan PJ Smith.

Shirley Watts displays Jenny Kendler's Underground Library (2017-ongoing). The artwork turns defunct and passed over books about climate change into biochar; the book objects are then buried onsite, sequestering the carbon.


Sagehen's first (presumably!) book burning. The book biochar was prepared the previous day. Photo: Faerthen Felix.

Sagehen artists-in-residence Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle (The Ecosexuals) present on their work and career to the Sierra Nevada College MFA students on the previous evening. Photo: Faerthen Felix

New Sagehen Citizen Science project!

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 23:51:00 -0700

Sagehen's EDI data fellow, Georgia Titcomb, is helping us get some of Sagehen's historic data into the EDI repository this summer for easier researcher access and future security. Watch our website for updates.

One additional project that Georgia has just finished is posting our camera trap monitoring photos to Zooniverse. The Sagehen Mammal Quest now allows the interested public to help us identify which images have animals in them. These photos help us evaluate the effects of the Sagehen Forest Project on wildlife.

Take a look and help out!

The Sagehen Mammal Quest on Zooniverse.

Defoliation event

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Mon, 22 Jul 2019 16:48:00 -0700

Every now and then, there is a season with so many butterflies or moths that they denude the scrub. This summer, the Leps are mowing the Snowbrush (Ceanothus velutinus) in the upper basin! Here are some pics from Dan Sayler, and a video showing the crazy thing that the chrysalis does when touched...

7-24-19 UPDATE: Will Richardson at Tahoe Institute for Natural Science (TINS) confirms that these are California Tortoiseshell butterflies (Nymphalis californica). And it's not really a bad thing that this is happening--in a healthier forest, regular low-intensity fire would keep the brush thinned. Without fire, the butterflies are doing it before catastrophic fire can sweep through...yay, insects!

8-8-19 UPDATE: The butterflies are now completely off the hook at Sagehen!

The hungry caterpillars.

Denuded snowbrush field.

Drowned caterpillars in a spring.

A chrysalis.

Old friend back for the season

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Sat, 22 Jun 2019 17:49:00 -0700

We refer to Deer #335 as Dan's Girlfriend, since she likes to hang around his house. She's back again for the summer, bringing her little herd along. So far no fawns yet (it's too early), but over the years she has grown her posse until it is now probably a dozen females and youngsters. Though young males also occasionally show up in the basin, they don't really hang out with 335's little herd.

Sara Holm of CADF&W recalls, "...[335] was collared in 2013 on July 30th as an adult (3 or older) so we know she is at least 9. She was nursing fawns when we collared her near your campground."

Though #335 appears to be hale and hearty, Mule Deer usually only live 9-11 years in the wild. Given the ease and low stress of deer life at Sagehen, we're hoping low cortisol (stress) levels will provide her with the much longer lifespan of captive deer.

Here is a map of her migration pattern before her collar fell off. Looks like she wisely hurries past the highway on her way between summer and winter grounds, though she inexplicably made one quick trip to lower Sagehen Creek. Wonder what was up with that?

And here are some past photos of Ms. 335:

August 18, 2016

July 8, 2015

Truckee Cultural District

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 20:55:00 -0700

The Truckee Cultural District is a geographical area where one can find a concentration of historic, artistic and cultural activities and attractions, all of which provide opportunities for creative enterprise. Truckee was awarded one of only 14 cultural district designations by the State of California in 2016.

Sagehen worked with the Nevada County Arts Council and the Truckee Arts Alliance to support this proposal.

Sagehen is featured on the new Cultural District map:

View map

2019 Field Station Consulting

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Thu, 6 Jun 2019 12:30:00 -0700

Sagehen's remarkable success with programs like our education outreach, the Sagehen Forest Project and ArtSciConverge means that Jeff and Faerthen are occasionally called on to consult with other field stations around the country that are just coming on line, or otherwise reevaluating their operations.

These consultations allow us to help these folks avoid pitfalls, and start out with broad collaboration as a value, benefiting Sagehen, other field stations, and society in general.

Rather than being isolated and irrelevant, 78% of the US population lives within 60-miles of a field station, and 98% live within 120-miles. Our issues are society's issues, and Sagehen works to help field stations understand and embrace this idea. We encourage targeting important socio-environmental issues of interest to their communities, like Sagehen does with wildfire and water supply.

This spring, we visited two operations:

Tulane's new Bywater Institute field station at A Studio In The Woods in New Orleans was a bit of a departure for us, since they are an artists-in-residency program that wants to add a scientific research component (we're usually called in when it's the other way around).

Planning meeting at A Studio In The Woods.

A beautiful Live Oak.

Succinct and to the point harassment policy!

Spider lilies at one of the field sites.

The Nature Conservancy has been protecting wetlands along Nevada's Amargosa River for decades. A recent ranch acquisition has them wanting to create a stronger research and education component across these critical Mojave properties. Jeff and Faerthen connected with Bill Fox of the Nevada Museum of Art - Center for Art + Environment to tour the 7J Ranch and offer our thoughts.

TNC tour of the 7J Ranch. Maintaining livestock on the land sustainably is a primary goal.

Bill Fox at the Nevada Test Site, adjacent to 7J Ranch. Military holdings like this end up being critical refugia for wildlife and native plants.

The desert oases along the Amargosa River support more than 100 species of concern.

New truck!

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Thu, 6 Jun 2019 11:08:00 -0700

Jeff and Dan check out the new beast.

Though it was missing a door panel, almost impossible to open from the back, leaked like a sieve in the rain, rattled like a snake, and was beginning to blow smoke past its rings, our venerable red Blazer never actually broke down.

But it finally got too old and expensive to maintain to campus standards. We'll miss the reliable, ratty old thing!

That left us without a working street-legal vehicle at Sagehen.

Thanks, Red!

Fortunately, our friends in the Campus Facilities department were able to offer us a used truck in good condition. This was their graffiti truck, that would drive a crew around all day doing nothing but removing graffiti from the campus grounds. Weirdly, it never occurred to me to wonder why there is never graffiti at Berkeley...

Our new truck has a lift and utility bed, so it will be perfect for fetching snowcat fuel from town and moving the OHV, generator, weather towers, batteries, and other equipment and supplies around the basin.

Runoff: 2017 vs. 2019

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 17:08:00 -0700

Dan was up on Tower 1 today and took a picture of the creek. Here it is compared with a photo of the same location taken on the same day in 2017.

The runoff has been quite delayed this year, and only really started less than 2 weeks ago. As you see, the creek is not even out of its banks yet, as it was in 2017. That year, the fishhouse filled with water, but this year it's bone-dry, so far (knock wood!).

Winter 2016-17 was warm, and most of our precip came as rain. We had sheet-flow over the ground all winter long, and the snowpack was mushy all the way to the ground from all the rain.

This year, winter was cold and the snowpack was frozen all winter long. That may mean that it lasts longer at higher elevations, delivering our water slowly rather than all at once. That's what historically happened, and what our ecology is adapted for.

April 17, 2019

April 17, 2017

Recent Sagehen scholarship

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 19:03:00 -0700

A couple of very different recent publications from Sagehen researchers are particularly interesting this week.

First, Adrian Harpold and Rose Petersky have published a:

"...continuous dataset subject to QA/QC and gap fill methodology for Sagehen Creek watershed, which allows for this dataset to be usable for long term hydrological and micrometeorological studies in this watershed."

Sagehen's meteorology record is used by the majority of researchers in the basin, and in studies and models worldwide. But this data has not been particularly easy to acquire and apply. This effort addresses those issues.

Second, Laura Eliasieh (formerly, Cassidy Rogers), completed her Stanford Ph.D. thesis. In this work, she argues that,

"Contrary to prominent New York art critic Hilton Kramer and others who have lamented the weakening and death of the historical avant-garde and its fomenting political unrest, this dissertation argues that the avant-garde attitude is very much alive and thriving. The drive to challenge what exists and to locate oneself outside of a dominant paradigm in order to change it most certainly continues after the so-called triumph of modernism in the 1960s."

Eliasieh uses the archive of artists Helen and Newton Harrison to substantiate her argument, including their cutting-edge work at Sagehen.

Sagehen honored by Chancellor

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Sat, 2 Mar 2019 04:56:00 -0800

Sagehen has been chosen to receive a prestigious UC Berkeley, Chancellor’s Award for Public Service 2018-2019. The Sagehen Forest Project was selected for the Campus-Community Partnership Award, which:

"recognizes students, staff, faculty, and community partnerships that embody UC Berkeley’s proud tradition of public service and commitment to improving our local and global community."

Learn more here.

ArtSciConverge regional effort updates

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 09:47:00 -0800

Our efforts to connect art and science in quest of basic discovery and community connection continue to clip along, picking up new supporters and opening new doors.

Jeff speaks during the "Wilder Than Wild" panel with
film maker Steve Most, and fire managers from the Tahoe
National Forest and Yosemite National Park
(appearing as private citizens).

Last week, Jeff and I attended the Wild & Scenic Film Festival in Nevada City / Grass Valley in order to speak on three different panels about forest health and wildfire issues. We were joined in that effort by our partners Eliza Tudor, Nevada County Arts Council, curators Michael and Heather Llewellyn, Forest Service personnel (appearing as private citizens), and the film makers responsible for the documentary, "Wilder Than Wild", which examines issues around the 2013 Rim Fire. Audiences are really hungry for this information: the panels were well-attended and well-received. More photos.

In addition, Jeff was featured in a film about forest communities and fire that screened at the festival: Ruth Chase's "Belonging".

This week, we traveled to Vallejo to lead a meeting with our regional ArtSciConverge partners. Unfortunately, the government shut down meant that we were unable to present to the Regional Deputy Forest Supervisor, as planned. But the meeting helped solidify our partnerships and communicate about projects that are in development or underway, including the 2020 Forest⇌Fire exhibit.

Through the Organization of Biological Field Stations, we are working to encourage and enable field stations around the country to integrate the arts into their programs, as well. This helps all of us work together to strengthen and improve our Broader Impacts efforts, and ultimately, the reach, impact, and social support for our science.

Northstar to the Rescue (again)!

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Sun, 11 Nov 2018 10:06:00 -0800

Northstar California Resort styled us this week (again!) with a donation of chairs for our dining room. This strong, commercial-grade furniture replaces the hodge-podge of mismatched and deteriorating chairs we've been using for inside dining: the new chairs look and work a lot better.

Thanks, Northstar!

Help your neighborhood field station!

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 20:16:00 -0700

Sagehen has experienced serious budget cuts in the last several years. We've always fund-raised through the community all the money for our ground-breaking outreach programs, like Adventure-Risk-Challenge (ARC) and the Sagehen Outdoor Education Program (SOEP). But now we have to find money to pay part of our salaries, and all of our maintenance and operating expenses, too.

If you believe it's valuable to have science research, education and outreach in your community for you and your kids, please consider making a donation and/or sharing this call with others! You can donate from the link at the top of the page on our website, or join us at the end of the month at the Truckee-Tahoe Community Foundation's Give Back Tahoe campaign (see image below). We'll post the link on our Facebook page when the event kicks off in late November.

Please talk to us if you'd like to leverage your contribution with a matching grant, or if you have other ideas.

Join the Give Back Tahoe campaign later this month!

STEM project

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 13:51:00 -0700

Sagehen is involved in more than just field science. Our researchers have also produced intellectual work and scholarly publications on education, art, computer science, modeling and other fields.

We are currently a collaborator on a new NSF proposal, entitled “Biological field stations in the informal STEM learning landscape,” with Rhonda Struminger of Texas A&M, and Jill Zarestky of Colorado State University as the Principal Investigators.

The team will be using Sagehen as a case study, examining some of our outreach programs including the Sagehen Outdoor Education Program (SOEP), Adventure-Risk-Challenge (ARC), Sagehen California Naturalist, ArtSciConverge at Sagehen, and others.

Sagehen was also a collaborator on Struminger's previous Texas A&M University grant (NSF-DRL 1713359 and NSF-DRL 1713351), active from Aug 1, 2017-July 31, 2019. See the project website and learn more here.

This project documents the outreach work of field stations and explores the connections between how the outreach activities engage learners, incorporate science topics, and address science learning. By creating an Outreach Ontology, a multidimensional framework around the outreach activities, this work provides a valuable resource and reference to informal science researchers who seek to understand what informal learning projects are undertaken at field stations, and how these activities fit into the broader context of informal science learning. This project will help field stations collaborate on improving informal STEM learning activities by bringing them together to discuss their efforts and by developing a publicly available, searchable database detailing their activities. A particular benefit to advancing informal STEM learning by investigating field stations is the broad range of people and communities that are involved with and affected by field station outreach activities.

Sierra Vision Award

noreply@blogger.com (Faerthen Felix) — Sun, 1 Jul 2018 23:45:00 -0700

Sagehen is the winner of the 2018 Sierra Business Council's Sierra Vision Award!

The award recognizes our work to understand and improve our forest ecosystem, foster sustainable management, and community connection. SBC's President, Steve Frisch presented the award at the recent partner's BBQ.

More photos.
Our other awards.