Mildred E. Mathias (1906-1995)
Long time chair of the UC NRS university-wide advisory committee

1998-1999 STUNT RESERVE ANNUAL REPORT

Highlights
User’s Affiliations
University Courses
Current Research
Publications
Research Reports

Stunt Ranch Santa Monica Mountains Reserve
University of California
Los Angeles

Annual Report
1998-1999

Milkweed
Asclepias fascicularis

Chumash Indians had numerous uses for Milkweed. The stems provided cordage and basket weaving material, and the sap was made into chewing gum.

Highlights

Change, as the saying goes, is the only constant in the life of the UCLA Stunt Ranch Santa Monica Mountains Reserve. This last year was a patchwork of activity that is on-going with many events and projects expected to come to fruition as the next century begins. Somehow this all seems very fitting and exciting.

Besides our on-going research and educational activities….

While we are still working on finalizing designs for the soon-to-be constructed facilities in our residential and educational zones, we did buy (with the assistance of the Nonac’s lab at UCLA) a spacious new storage shed. For a reserve with as yet no buildings, this is a great help to our researchers and us.

In this interim facilities design period at Stunt Ranch, Lisa Pompelli, the reserve’s nature center design consultant, has taken the lead in researching and drafting several models of exhibits and displays for our proposed indoor/outdoor nature center. Even in the model stage, the displays are eye-catching. A majority of the finished products will be interactive (both technologically and hands-on) and all will relate important environmental information in ways that are intended to stimulate and educate community visitors as well as K-12, and university faculty/students.

The Santa Maria Trails and Parks Association has pledged $50,000 to fund a major portion of exhibits in the reserve nature center. The award, to be distributed over five years, will help provide the exhibit materials and supplies for the Stunt Ranch Nature Center.

Thanks to the magic of the internet and the web surfing by Ed Hall which led him to the Stunt Ranch site, the reserve will be able to display in its nature center many of Ethel Stunt’s (the matriarch of the family for which Stunt Ranch was named) treasured photos, correspondence, and Stunt Ranch surveys among other items. Ed, now living in Montana, was a Stunt Ranch neighbor as a young lad and his family was happy to donate these items to the reserve. Perhaps the most special of all the items are two of Ethel’s walking sticks…dog hair attached and all. The UCLA Special Collections Primary Sources Institute has helped in the archival process of protecting these items using sealed mylar folders, acid free paper, envelopes, file folders, and storage box. As an adjunct to the preservation of the articles mentioned above, the reserve, under the guidance of the Oral History Department on campus is in the process of developing an oral history program. Our intention is to collect stories from those who knew the Stunt family and are familiar with the early years of the Cold Creek watershed, to preserve these wonderful memories, and to share them with visitors to the Stunt Ranch Reserve.

The Cold Creek Docents, an affiliate of the Mountains Restoration Trust, continue to play an integral role at Stunt Ranch. They coordinate the award-winning K-12 environmental education program at the reserve and are actively working with us to develop our undergraduate field internship program. The Docents are assisting us, along with Tim Bradley from UCI with the help of a grant from Chevron, in producing teaching guides for the Stunt Ranch Reserve website. The Docents have also been most generous in leading tours of the Stunt High Trail at various reserve-sponsored classes and events held at Stunt Ranch.

The undergraduate 199I field internship program is being coordinated with the Department of Organismic Biology, Ecology, and Evolution. We intend to expand this program to other departments such as Geology and Anthropology sometime in the near future. In the fall ’99 quarter Phil Rundel, the Stunt Ranch Reserve’s faculty director will teach a new class, California Ecosystems, which will use Stunt Ranch for the focus of a variety of field activities. The class will be an introduction to the structure, biodiversity, and dynamics of California ecosystems with a focus on the Southern California coastal region and the Santa Monica Mountains in particular. There will be weekly fieldtrips or labs. For the new internship programs (that in many cases will follow this class) students may work on projects like alien species inventories, set up processed plant collections, literature reviews, bird population surveys, successional monitoring, establishing permanent photopoints, riparian habitat monitoring, climate data analysis, etc. We eventually hope to make this data accessible on our website. An added feature will be a special training with the Cold Creek Docents to learn to lead tours – with the Docents or for special reserve activities.

Last fall Dr. Alexander Glazer, UC NRS director, visited UCLA. His primary purpose in coming south was to participate as a panelist in a UCLA Institute of the Environment conference titled, "California Biodiversity Crisis: Loss of Nature in an Urbanizing World". Dr. Glazer spoke on "What is happening now?" Phil Rundel spoke about "What do we have now?" And Carol Felixson, the Stunt Ranch Reserve director of education and community outreach, addressed the topic, "Preserving biodiversity: individual and collective action". All were joined by other fine panelists.

The Reserve took an active role, along with the Institute of the Environment and the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden, in the planning and coordination of the "Earthday at UCLA, 1999" which took place in the Garden on campus. A meaningful event under any circumstances, this year's Earthday at UCLA occurred several days following the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado. The overflow gathering of three to 83 year olds were held in rapt attention by, among others, Gabrielino/Tongva elder Jimmy Castillo, who poignantly and forcefully reminded us that, "we need the children." Earthday was planned to be entertaining and educational; it turned out to be healing in the sense of a communal gathering and healing in the sense of being held in the embrace of nature.

The reserve’s presence was felt visually in other UCLA locales. Posters of the UC NRS and the Stunt Ranch Reserve were displayed in the 2^nd annual Department of Organismic Biology, Ecology and Evolution’s Research Symposium held in the Faculty Center. The reserve was one of four exhibits in a show titled "UCLA Off-Site…Beyond the Beaten Path" held in the Powell Library Rotunda during the fall quarter. And the reserve has a semi-permanent display in the lobby of the Life Science Building. The central part of that display will be changed every two months in order to highlight different aspects of Stunt Ranch.

Articles about the Stunt Ranch Reserve appeared in the following publications: the Transect (Natural Reserve System), UCLA Today, The Basics: a newsletter of the Life and Physical Sciences, UCLA College of Letters and Science. And the AlumNews (UCLA) will publish an article on the reserve in their November ’99 volume.

In late spring, the reserve hosted two memorable events. The Department of Biology, Ecology, and Evolution (OBEE) held its annual gathering for faculty, staff, and graduate students and their families at Stunt Ranch in late April. In addition to Cold Creek Docent led hikes of the Stunt High Trail, the catered event included the toe-tapping music of Trailer Park McShank, the Anglo American Ensemble (students from the UCLA Ethnomusicology Department). Less than 10 days later, the reserve hosted its first UCLA STUDENT DAY. Graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, staff from OBEE, geography, and anthropology toured the reserve and listened to presentations by reserve researchers/instructors. The purpose of the day was to serve as an introduction to the reserve, its current and future instructional use and research projects.

An activity that was in the planning stages during ‘98-’99 will actualize in the ‘99-2000 school year. In mid-September, UCLA will sponsor and host the Ninth National Conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. The Stunt Ranch Reserve will be one of two sites on the Society’s "Wild Mountains, Urban Woes" tour. Carol Felixson will introduce the journalists to the Natural Reserve System and Stunt Ranch. Following will be presentations by Dr. Peter Nonacs, Assistant Professor in the Department of Organismic Biology, Ecology, and Evolution, and Dr. Janet Thornber, Director of Center X in the Graduate School of Education & Information Services. The Cold Creek Docents will then lead the visitors on a hike of the Stunt High Trail. Later in the day, the reserve will be a participant in a Scientists’ Poster Session to be held on campus.

Beginning in October ’99, the Stunt Ranch Reserve, in coordination with the Wilderness Outdoor Leadership Foundation (WOLF), will participate in the UCLA Eco-Heroes program. Eco-Heroes is an affiliate of the Advanced Policy Institute of the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research, whose purpose is to bring Los Angeles area high school students to wilderness areas for hands-on conservation work supplemented by on-site environmental education. The reserve will host a different group of 35 high school students every three months. At Stunt Ranch, the students will help with exotic species removal, culvert clean-up, trail maintenance and other needed work, and will receive instruction from select reserve researchers and the Cold Creek Docents.

Use of the reserve remains high. UCLA - 871 user days; other California colleges – 45 user days; others, including K-12 – 2,750 user days. From the experience of other reserves with facilities, use at Stunt Ranch is anticipated to increase dramatically once buildings are re-constructed in the educational and residential zones at the reserve. The Stunt Ranch Reserve is dedicated to a broad community environmental education program, and the new buildings will help to facilitate this use.

PERSONNEL NOTES:

The reserve is proud to announce that Richard Ambrose has just begun his three-year term as the UCLA representative to the UC Natural Reserve System system-wide advisory committee. Rich is an associate professor in the UCLA School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences and the director of the Environmental Science and Engineering program. Phil Rundel held the previous three-year term. Both Rich and Phil are active members of the UCLA Institute of the Environment.

Besides devoting hours and days of his time as the Stunt Ranch Reserve faculty director, Phil Rundel is busy teaching classes at UCLA and conducting his research both locally and worldwide. This year Phil taught Conservation Biology (OBEE 116), Tropical Ecology (OBEE 154), and a graduate seminar course in plant ecology. He studied Mediterranean type ecosystems, particularly inter-regional comparisons between California, Chile, and the Cape Region of South Africa. He worked as a consultant with the Metropolitan Transit Authority on environmental impacts of the subway corridor under the Hollywood Hills, and again as a consultant for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in developing conservation priorities for Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Phil’s studies in the Mojave Desert focused on the eco-physiology and plant species diversity of desert plants. Much of this work took place at the Granite Mountains Reserve. He traveled to northern Chile to study plant adaptation in the high elevation puna community in the Andes of northern Chile. In South Africa, Phil has been working collaboratively on the ecology of the winter rainfall succulent Karoo, and co-edited an in-press special issue of Plant Ecology on this subject. Springer-Verlag just published a book that Phil co-edited, Landscape Degradation and Biodiversity in Mediterranean-Type Ecosystems.

In addition to Carol Felixson’s work as the Stunt Ranch Reserve director of education and community outreach, she serves as the docent and communications coordinator for the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden (MEMBG) at UCLA. In that capacity she writes Carol’s Corner, a column devoted to docent and garden activities, for the MEMBG’s quarterly newsletter. This past year was a creatively eclectic one for Carol. She completed her ‘98 chapbook, To Question and To Name, and is currently writing poetry for her ’99 chapbook. In December, she concluded an intensive one-year training to become an instructor of traditional Jewish meditation. And along with playing the djembe (a west African drum) and other percussion instruments, Carol began ukulele lessons. She particularly enjoys practicing strumming techniques and cord progressions for calypso and Celtic styles of music.

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1998-1999 User's Affiliation

Other:
University of California Office of the President

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1998-1999 University-level Instruction

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1998-1999 Research at Stunt
(lists Principal Investigator Name, Affiliation, Research Title,
Project Duration, and Funding Source)

Philip W. Rundel and Rasoul Sharifi
UCLA
Long term gas exchange and water relations study of a chaparral plant community
1998-2000

Richard F. Ambrose, Antony R. Orme, and others *
UCLA
Lower Malibu Creek and Malibu Lagoon resource enhancement and management project
August 1997 – June 2000

Jeff Thomas (Advisor – Peter Nonacs)
UCLA
Signal variation and categorization by wrentits (chamaea fasciata)
January, 1998 – June 2000

Aviva Liebert (Advisor – Peter Nonacs), recipient of NRS Mildred E. Mathias Graduate Student Grant
UCLA
Division of labor and reproductive skew among paper wasp foundresses
1998 – 2001

Maria Diuk (Advisor – Peter Nonacs)
UCLA
Social behavior and learning in the California scrub jay
June 1998- December 1998

Craig M. Fiehler (Advisor – Peter Nonacs)
UCLA
The effects of resource density on territorial behavior in wintering wrentits (chamaea fasciata)
October 1998- March 1999

Stewart B. Peck
Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Diversity of winter-active leiodid beetles in southern California
January 1- Jauary 15 1999

Charles A. Knight (Advisor – David Ackerly)
Stanford University
Comparative ecophysiology of heat shock protein expression in plants
July 1998-July 2000
Stanford University Grant

John Gamon
Cal State Los Angeles
Multi-spectral remote sensing of plant productivity
Follow up to 1996 study

* Lower Malibu Creek and Malibu Lagoon resource enhancement and management project:

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1998-1999 Publications

Anzalone, C.B., L.B. Kats, and M. Gordon, 1998, Effects of solar uv-b on embryonic development in three species of lower latitude and lower elevation amphibians, Conservation Biology, Vol. 12, pp. 646-653

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1998-1999 Research Reports

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