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A few words from theDirector of the NRS

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M ike Hamilton, director of the James San Jacinto MountainsReserve in Riverside County, refers to himself as a “wirehead.”Others have called him the first “digital naturalist.” However he is

classified, this son of an electrical engineer is equally comfortable studying a rareplant species or troubleshooting a balky computer. And now, thanks to a 10-year, $40-million grant from the National Science Foundation, he and a host ofcolleagues will have the opportunity to explore new areas where technology andfield research overlap.

Their NSF-funded project is called CENS — the Center for Embedded Net-worked Sensing — and will involve scientists and engineers from UCLA, UC

James Reserve places naturevirtually at our fingertips

6 Mother lode of DNAdata mined at McLaughlin

10 Ever-more-sophisticatedtechnology reveals thesecret lives of Año Nuevoelephant seals and sharks

14 Super “ear” installed atBoyd Deep Canyon

U se of high technology is theleitmotif that unites the sto-ries in this Transect. The stud-

ies described here utilize diverse sen-sors: some so small they have beencalled “motes,” others so large they can“eavesdrop on the earth,” and some de-signed to track elephant seals for thou-sands of miles, communicating withsatellites. State-of-the-art genomictechniques have also come into wideuse in the NRS, as illustrated here byexperiments that examine the role of ge-netic variability and gene flow on the abil-ity of plants to adapt to new conditions.

The opening article in this issue de-scribes a landmark event for the NRS:the James San Jacinto Mountains Re-serve has become a partner in a newlycreated NSF-funded Center for Em-bedded Networked Sensing (CENS)

Continued on page 16

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear,does it still make a sound? Yes — if that forest is outfittedwith sensors, some of them tiny as this “Smart dust” fromCITRIS: <http://www.citris.berkeley.edu/SmartEnergy/brainy.html>. Courtesy of Kris Pister, CITRIS

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Riverside, University of Southern California (USC), Cali-fornia Institute of Technology (Caltech), and California StateUniversity, Los Angeles. It will focus on designing networksof embedded sensors for use in a range of different environ-ments. Embedded sensors are ubiquitous and have trans-formed our lives. They’re the inexpensive, miniaturizedmicroprocessors that control everything from the antilockbraking system in your car (along with dozens of other sys-tems), to the beeper in your waffle iron that lets you knowwhen breakfast is ready.

The CENS Project will seek to extend the use of embeddedsensors into four very different scientific endeavors. OneCENS team will design sensors to monitor plankton in theocean. Another will use them to create smart buildings thatdetect and respond to the first tremors of an earthquake. Athird CENS group will look at integrating sensors into build-ings or wells to detect and prevent groundwater contami-nation. And at the James Reserve, the sensors will be usedto provide an unprecedented look at the forest ecosystem.As Hamilton noted in announcing the grant: “These de-vices are so small and cheap we can put hundreds of themthroughout a study area. Some will be small mobile robots,while others will have fixed locations, and all will commu-nicate directly to the Internet via wireless Ethernet. Theapplications for these devices are extremely wide, and thepotential benefits are enormous.”

Those who know Hamilton shouldn’t be too surprised atthis latest venture. Throughout his 20-year career with theNRS he has always been at the forefront in exploring hownew technologies might be used to advance research. Backin the eighties, he was using an Apple II and a laserdisc tocreate one of the first virtual tours (his subject, of course,was the James Reserve). Over the last decade, his innova-tive work with GIS technology has helped local firefightersreduce the destruction caused by periodic wildfires by fo-cusing their mitigation efforts and improving their contain-ment strategies. The reserve itself is powered by a solarenergy system he designed, installed, and maintains.

“The science paradigm is completely affected by technol-ogy,” Hamilton says. “Nobody will deny that. There aren’tany Luddite scientists anymore. When I started using GISin the early eighties, people said, GI what? But by the earlynineties, half of our field biology students were taking aGIS course to learn how to use it. Today it’s used by any-body who deals with anything that relates to the landscape.

James ReserveContinued from page 1

The new Center for Embedded Networked Sens-ing (CENS) — in which Mike Hamilton and the

James Reserve will be playing an important role — isone of six projects recently selected from 143 applica-tions by the National Science Foundation (NSF) tojoin its new group of Science and Technology Centers(STCs). These six new STCs (along with their princi-pal investigators and lead institutions) are:

• Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (DeborahEstrin, UCLA)• Center for Integrated Space Weather Modeling(Jeffrey Hughes, Boston University)• Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology(Dennis Matthews, UC Davis)• Center for Advanced Materials for Water Purifica-tion (James Economy, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)• National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics (GaryParker, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)• Materials and Devices for Information TechnologyResearch (Larry Dalton, University of Washington,Seattle)

The STC program was started in 1987 in an attemptto encourage large, collaborative research and to movebeyond the NSF’s traditional emphasis on small grantsto individual investigators. At first, many scientistsfeared the STC program would focus on applied re-search and drain support for basic research. However,as Nathaniel Pitts, head of the NSF’s Office of Inte-grative Activities (which runs the STC program),points out: “It’s a chance for PIs to do something thattheir department or discipline can’t do on its own.”All the new centers will have multiple institutionalpartners — UC Berkeley, for example, is involved withfour of the six new STCs. Additionally, STCs are ex-pected to find innovative ways of training young sci-entists, improving diversity in the scientific workforce,and fostering public understanding of science.

The NSF’s first class of 11 STCs completed its 11-year run in 2000, while a second group of 12 STCswill be finishing up this year. This year’s six new cen-ters, including CENS, will join five centers created in2000. Another competition is scheduled to begin nextyear. — SGR

A bit about the NSF’s STCs

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Continued on page 4

The same will be true with these new technologies. They’regoing to change the way we work.”

To see an early prototype of what Hamilton envisions, logon to the James Reserve’s website: <http://www.jamesreserve.edu/>. In addition to the usual text and pho-tos, the site incorporates a “Wildlife Observatory” that con-sists of feeds from a number of other unique sources. Stra-tegically placed video cameras provide close-ups of nestboxes, meal worm feeders, hummingbird feeders, and a “batapartment.” A remote weather station provides real-timefeeds on the current temperature, precipitation, and windpatterns at the reserve. There’s even a robotic camera thatweb surfers can control — panning, tilting, and zoomingin on objects they want to observe more closely.

Originally installed as part of an NSF education grant, thesecameras were designed to help elementary students studyfield biology from their class-rooms. Over time, however,they’ve served a much larger pro-cess: introducing a whole newaudience to the reserve system.During the last year, the Jameswebsite recorded more than amillion visits, compared with the1,500 students, teachers, and sci-entists who were actually able tovisit the reserve during the sameperiod. And though these virtualvisitors don’t get to smell thefresh mountain air or hikethrough the woods, in manyways their experiences can be justas rewarding. For example, a researcher interested in thenesting behavior of western bluebirds can learn more abouttheir behavior by reviewing a season of archived “nest-cam”images than from a month of on-site observation.

Hamilton believes a network of embedded sensors will makevirtual visits to the reserve even more important. “I see thisas really enhancing the time-scale side of doing science,” heexplains. “In typical field biology, you try to capture sig-nificant observations in those periods of time when youhave live humans out there, and you have no data in be-tween, except maybe a few expensive satellite images. Wetend to ignore some questions because they can’t be done ina cost-effective manner. This technology opens up the pos-sibilities for potential new discoveries. If you had the rightsensors, you could listen to all the birds singing in the JamesReserve every hour for the entire breeding season. That dataset is extremely different from anything we’ve ever collected

because it’s continuous and it doesn’t involve a human, sothere isn’t the disturbance factor.”

To illustrate the potential impact of doing remote field-work, Hamilton takes reserve visitors outside and showsthem a wooden box nailed to a tree. Though the box isempty right now, he’s already working on the equipmentthat will be installed there. “We call it the MossCam,” hesays, opening the door to the box and indicating where acamera and processor will be mounted. “It’s designed forthe remote sensing of external physiological change in thispatch of Tortula princeps.”

Hamilton points out a smudge of dried moss on a graniterock a few feet from the camera box. “[UC Berkeley profes-sor] Brent Mishler and his students are studying the physi-ology of this arid moss species. This station will give themthe ability to continuously monitor the moss from their

lab. They can watch it throughall seasons to see how it respondsto changes in the environment— primarily precipitation andtemperature. Our camera systemwill be a multispectral camerathat will capture visible light andinfrared, and it will be a web camso the data will be collected ev-ery thirtieth of a second and up-loaded to a server where it canbe sent via FTP or viewed as aweb page via the Internet.”[Editor’s note: MossCam is now areality at — <http://www.jamesreserve.edu/mosscam>.]

He goes on to explain that the remote-sensing characteris-tics will be directly comparable to weather station data thatwill be available right next to it. The students will be able tocorrelate visible infrared light changes in the plant as themoss dries up and rehydrates after being dry. How rapidlythat change occurs and how often will be visible to thecamera.

The MossCam will serve its purpose well, allowing a teamof scientists hundreds of miles away to track the subject. Butit’s still just a first step in realizing Hamilton’s vision. “Ifthis was software,” he says with a laugh, “I’d call it Version0.0. The next step is to cut the line, at least the data line tomake the unit wireless … and it’s not a smart sensor yetbecause it’s just going to stream data constantly to a server.A human will still have to make decisions about what data

Michael “Wirehead” Hamilton working in hislab at the James Reserve.

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U n i v e r s i t y o f C a l i f o r n i a4

James ReserveContinued from page 3

we collect, when we store it and when we don’t. There isn’tany intelligent processing going on at the sensor itself. Thatwill be the next step.”

Hamilton’s goal is to have 100 nodes at James within a fewyears. Some will have specialized uses; others will be gen-eral-purpose nodes collecting a wide range of parameters.“One of our collaborators is John Rotenberry [director ofthe UC Riverside-administered NRS reserves],” he notes.“He’s an ornithologist interested in the acoustical data thatcould be processed for bird identification, location, and in-teraction. We might have special nodes programmed to iden-tify unique individual songs. By triangulating this readingwith other nodes hearing the same sound, we can pinpointthe location of that singing bird, all in real time. Over timewe can track the locations of those singing territories as a‘cloud’ of presence and absence activities. We can use thisdata to create a cloud that indicates where the singing malebird spends most of its time. The cloud could be darkertowards areas of higher frequency and lighter where fre-quency is lower. Then we can have these adjacent clouds ofother birds so we can see whether individuals are spendinga lot of time at the boundaries interacting and defending theedges, or whether they’re spending more time in the centerdefending the higher quality habitat where the female is.”

Embedded sensors will also change the scale at which re-searchers can conduct their studies. GIS resolution is finefor doing landscape-level analysis, but the new systems willlet scientists visualize phenomena on a much smaller scale.“The frontier is the ever-shrinking scale of observation, bothin time and space. We’re taking our scale of observation downfrom communities of vegetation to what’s happening in asingle tree or what’s happening within a square meter sur-rounding that vegetation. You need very different tools to dothat. And on a time scale, we’re going from seasonality — fourtimes a year — to once every minute or once every second.”

Hamilton acknowledges that the visualization of such data“is a real challenge because you’re dealing with orders ofmagnitude more data than you were in the past.” But heisn’t too concerned about being overwhelmed by so much data:“We’re developing a small microcomputer that will have theability to look at the data that comes from the sensors, pro-cess it, and then decide whether to store it, send it, or notify ahuman. That’s called ‘intelligent processing.’ Once we figureout how to classify and determine what it is we’re looking for,a lot of these processes can be automated to where the soft-ware will tell us when something important is happening.”

Hamilton foresees a day when thousands of tiny, inexpen-sive sensors scattered throughout the forest are constantlymonitoring the movement of animals and changes in theenvironment. Given current technology trends, he thinksit’s realistic that soon some of these devices will be the sizeof beetles. “Each sensor should actually be designed so it ispart of the niche we are trying to monitor,” he explains.“And sometimes the niche will change over time, so thenode really ought to be able to track that as well. I could seethe devices going up a tree and coming back down, or go-ing underground, or going under water and coming outagain like an amphibian. Ideally, our designs should almostmimic the life forms they’re designed to monitor.”

Just as the website’s Wildlife Observatory has opened upthe James Reserve to a global audience much larger than itcan hold physically, Hamilton foresees a day in the nearfuture when embedded technology will do the same thingfor the entire Natural Reserve System: “We serve a funda-mental need in terms of preserving and protecting theseareas and making them open to scientists, but these are notundisturbed ecosystems. People are a constant element here,and the success of a reserve is largely judged upon how muchit is used. We need to have the ability for science to go onhere, but there is a finite carrying capacity at any site before[use of the reserve] begins to change the ecosystem and im-pact the experiments of other scientists. We’re hitting ourheads against that already at many of our sites. How canyou allow new people to study in areas that are already atcapacity? I think the virtual reserve is one way to do that.Developing a passive remote-sensing network that allowsresearchers to have virtual access is going to be crucial.”

Personally, Hamilton sees this latest focus as one he willmaintain for the rest of his career. “This will be my lastdecade, my swan song. I’m planning to see the system usedat all of our field stations and to facilitate its implementa-tion at other field stations around the world. After the firstthree years of the CENS Project, I see the rest of thereserves becoming part of the experiment, and I certainlywill see the NRS fully wired in less than ten years. We’re atthe point where I think we all better fasten our seat belts,‘cause this is going to happen fast.” — JB

For more information, contact:Michael HamiltonReserve DirectorUC James ReserveBox 1775Idyllwild, CA 92549-1775Phone: 909-659-3811Email: <director@jamesreserve.edu>

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Recent devastating wildfires in Los Alamos, NewMexico, and Sydney, Australia, highlight how the

increasing encroachment of cities into wildlands is dra-matically raising the stakes involved in out-of-controlburns. Mike Hamilton and his colleagues at the JamesSan Jacinto Mountains Reserve have been involved infire-related studies for 15 years, working closely withfirefighters from the nearby town of Idyllwild. “We’reinterested in fire hazards,” Hamilton explains, “fire risks,the propensity of vegetation to burn, and, ecologically,why it needs to burn.”

Fire-suppression campaigns have been very effective inthe western United States over the last 50 years (remem-ber Smokey the Bear?). Perhaps too effective. The buildupof brush and deadwood in our forests — referred to as“fuel load” — has prompted scientists and forest man-agers to look at what happens when fire is removed froma natural ecosystem. How does breaking the natural cycleof regular small fires influence the risk and spread ofcatastrophic blazes?

As part of “The Mountain Communities FiresafeProject,” Hamilton is using remote-sensing analysis tobuild typical vegetation models for the area and GIS toproduce data sets that model fire-spread behavior on acomputer. He and his co-workers have used this tech-nique to simulate historic fires, and Hamilton alsoworked with the software during actual fires to see if hecould predict a fire’s spread. Unfortunately, so many fac-tors are involved that a 24-hour, fire-behavior simula-tion takes about three days to run. “You can’t make de-cisions during a fire based on what the computer tellsyou,” he explains, “because you don’t have the time.Those capabilities are still a few years down the road.”

Hamilton’s work has been most effective as a preventa-tive measure. He has completed a standard risk assess-ment survey for the local mountain area by overlayinghis GIS models on property ownership maps. Fire agen-cies use the data to target properties they should inspectfor safety compliance. Homeowners will eventually haveaccess to the system to assess their own properties anddetermine their own fire-prevention priorities.

“In the near future, our website will allow users to deter-mine the relative risk factors for each property and howthose risks fluctuate on a daily basis,” Hamilton explains.“People who live on a steep, south-facing slope with 50-year-old chaparral are always at risk, of course. If you’reon a stream with a conifer forest around you but you’reonly a mile away from that chaparral, then your riskfactor is lower — but it increases as the season progresses,so you have to be careful.”

The new CENS grant from the NSF will have two ef-fects on Hamilton’s wildfire work. First, it will bring pow-erful new technology to the reserve. “We’ll be able toaccomplish far more computer simulation of fire behav-ior,” he notes enthusiastically, “because I’ll have a wholebank of very fast UNIX computers that can run the soft-ware. And it’s all designed to run on parallel systems, soyou can have the same model running on five comput-ers simultaneously, and it will run five times faster.”

Second, the grant will allow Hamilton to model appro-priate construction for a fire-prone area. “Our newly pro-posed research lab will have a metal roof and cinderblockwalls filled with concrete,” he observes. “The bottomfloor will be built down into the ground — basicallymaking it a fireproof vault — and that’s where we’ll putour servers and other precious materials. That floorshould survive even if the building above it burns. Ifyou choose to live in a wildland setting, you really shouldbe able to live with fire.” — JB

To view the Mountain Communities Firesafe Project, visit:<http://www.firesafeidyllwild.org>.

Some say Mike Hamilton is playing with fire— and they’re right (and they’re glad he does)

Big Creek fire of 1985. Photo by Larry Ford

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Major changes are underway atthe McLaughlin NaturalReserve, located in Napa,

Lake, and Yolo Counties, two hours’drive northwest of UC Davis. As theon-site Homestake gold mine processesthe last of its stockpiled ore, UC Davisscientists are picking up the pace of sci-entific discovery under complementarygrants from the Andrew W. Mellon andDavid and Lucile Packard Foundationsfor a collaborative research programcalled “Ecological and EvolutionaryResponses of Plants to Habitat Mosa-ics at the University of California’sMcLaughlin Reserve.”

The same tumultuous geology thatonce attracted gold miners to the rug-ged coast range north of San Franciscois now attracting a growing group oflandscape ecologists, population biolo-gists, and molecular geneticists. And,

just as it took advances in mining tech-nology to release the microscopicspecks of gold found in the coast rangedeposits, researchers are relying on newtechnologies to reveal the geneticsecrets underlying plant adaptation andevolution.

For scientists, this reserve is filled withintriguing puzzles and research oppor-tunities. The steep flanks of the hill-sides burst with colorful wildflowersand grasses, as exotic and native spe-cies vie for territory. The crests of thehills host stands of blue oak, pine, andserpentine chaparral scrub. Old min-eral hot springs ooze down many of thehills, hinting at the volcanic activitythat stirred the area two million yearsago. In addition to Homestake’s open-pit gold mine, 130-year-old mercurymines tunnel beneath several of thehills. The Stony Creek fault, part of

McLaughlin Reserve gets mined for DNA data

the larger San Andreas fault, slicesthrough the reserve, separating ancientocean crust from valley sedimentaryformations.

The scientists are using McLaughlin asa model ecosystem, much as geneticistsuse simple animals for their studies.Maureen Stanton, a professor in theSection of Evolution and Ecology atUC Davis and one of the project’s prin-cipal investigators, explains their strat-egy: “Molecular genetics has made in-credible strides in the last twenty yearsby focusing on a few model systemsthat they get to know well enough toask the really tough questions. [Thefruitfly] Drosophila is the model systemfor animal genetics. Mouse is the modelsystem for mammals. Arabidopsis* is themodel system for simple plants. It’s notthat these species are representative ofall other species, but you have to start

The Donald and Sylvia McLaughlin Reserve is uniqueamong NRS reserves: both for having a working gold

mine on site and for joining the reserve system in stagesover a period of 20 years.

Back in the early 1980s, the Homestake Mining Com-pany decided that, once it finished mining, the propertywould become an environmental research station insteadof vacant land. In 1985, Ray Krauss, then Homestake’senvironmental manager, approached UC about theproject. In 1992, the UC Regents approved the first stage:a reserve of approximately 300 acres owned byHomestake, but available for research and teachingthrough a use agreement. Since then, the McLaughlinReserve has grown to 7,050 acres.

The McLaughlin gold mine has been recognized by theSierra Club, the Soil Conservation Society of America,and other organizations for its rigorous environmentalmonitoring and innovative reclamation. While securingmining permits, Homestake spent millions of dollarscollecting baseline data on the area’s geology and soils,hydrology, air and water quality, terrestrial and aquatic

ecology, and archaeology — and the company continuesits environmental monitoring. From the start, Homestakewelcomed educational use of its long-term data sets.

The McLaughlin Reserve was named for the late DonaldMcLaughlin — Homestake geologist, former dean of UCBerkeley’s School of Mining, and a UC regent — andhis widow, Sylvia McLaughlin, a founder of the Save theBay Foundation. She continues to be an active environ-mentalist in the San Francisco area. It was often said thattheir marriage combined the interests of resource use andpreservation.

Nowadays the McLaughlin Reserve (along with two otherNRS reserves, Quail Ridge and Stebbins Cold Canyon)is also part of the 500,000-acre Blue Ridge BerryessaNatural Area (BRBNA), which incorporates portions ofSolano, Napa, Yolo, Lake, and Colusa Counties. TheBRBNA conservation partnership, with members fromover 130 agencies, works for positive open space plan-ning and to reduce piecemeal development (whether resi-dential, industrial, or recreational), directing new devel-opment toward other areas already fragmented. — SGR

McLaughlin Reserve was special from the start

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somewhere. … If you don’t have this kindof data on the environment, you can’thope to tackle the important questions.”

(*Editor’s note: Arabidopsis is a mem-ber of the mustard (Brassicaceae) family(which includes such cultivated species ascabbage, broccoli, and radish). It is con-sidered a “model” organism because it iseasy to grow in the lab, has a short lifecycle, makes lots of seeds, has a smallgenome compared to other higher plants,and can be “transformed” — that is, genescan be introduced into a plant.)

The team includes professors,postdoctoral researchers, and graduatestudents — with areas of expertise thatrange from molecular genetics to land-scape ecology. Each team memberbrings along a specific research spe-cialty, but all are eager to expand theirperspectives. “I’m excited to work on amore holistic level,” says SusanHarrison, another principal investiga-tor on the project, professor in the UCDavis Department of EnvironmentalScience and Policy, and campus direc-tor for the NRS sites administeredthrough UC Davis.

Kevin Rice is a perfect example of thegroup’s interdisciplinary approach. A

UC Davis professor in the Departmentof Agronomy and Range Science, hisprimary research focus has been on pat-terns of species distribution, especiallyinvasive plants. “In some ways, I waspulled kicking and screaming intolooking at genetic issues in terms ofplant distribution,” he says with alaugh. “But it’s become pretty obviousthat genetics can make a difference interms of the capacity of a plant to livewhere it does.”

McLaughlin’s extensive serpentine out-crops are a key attraction for many ofthe researchers. For plants, serpentineis a tough neighborhood: high inminerals like nickel, zinc, chromium,and magnesium, and low in nutrients,such as calcium and nitrogen. Serpen-tine deposits have become botanical ghet-tos inhabited primarily by native Cali-fornia plants that have adapted to them.Harrison explains why plant evolution-ists tend to gravitate towards serpentine:“[There] you can find the real raritiesand interesting systems to study specia-tion. In California, we have this young,rapidly evolving flora, and serpentine hasbeen a hotbed for that kind of recentburst of speciation … there’s probablya few dozen genera of plants that havegone wild with serpentine endemism.”

In this characteristic McLaughlin Reserve landscape, gray (orfoothill) pines (Pinus sabiniana) on the hillside suggest theunderlying presence of serpentine. Photo by Ray Krauss

On serpentine, native California plantsare relatively free from competitionwith the invasive species that nowdominate most nonserpentine environ-ments. “Many times exotics can’t tol-erate the serpentine,” Harrison says,“but that’s not absolute. Serpentinegrasslands are actually fairly invaded,they’re just not as invaded asnonserpentine grasslands.”

Plants have an amazing ability to adaptto new conditions, sometimes withina few generations. New technologiesare giving scientists a deeper under-standing of how this adaptation hap-pens at the limits of their range. “Us-ing molecular techniques to under-stand the balance between selectionand gene flow is crucial,” Rice explains.“I’m trying to understand how rapidlyexotic species change evolutionarily. Ifthey have enough genetic variation andthe selection is strong enough, they canchange pretty quickly. But the onething that often reduces the capacityfor change is gene flow. Plants comeup to a gradient and begin to adapt,but if there’s gene flow coming in fromsomeplace else where the selection pres-sure isn’t as strong, that really slowsdown the capacity of the plant tochange. Measuring gene flow has al-ways been difficult, but with the newmolecular markers we have, it’s rela-tively a snap. You can go in and dopaternity analysis and see who begatwhom.”

The effects of the technology aren’t justlimited to looking at invasive species.“We’ve done work with blue oaks,”Rice says, “and just from doing tradi-tional fieldwork, you can see that oaksare becoming more and more frag-mented in the landscape. They’ve be-come pollen-limited. You think, mygod, there’s got to be enough pollen togo around, but it’s not necessarily true.One really interesting question is theoak’s breeding structure: Where is the

Continued on page 8

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pollen coming from? Is itlocal? If one tree is the bigdaddy to lots of the other trees,if it’s fathering lots of acorns,why is that? Is there somethingabout the time of pollination?That type of paternity analy-sis, which was unheard of fiveto ten years ago, has becomeroutine.”

Map it and they will come

Other technologies that havegreatly facilitated the work atMcLaughlin are GIS (Geo-graphic Information Systems)mapping and GPS (Global Po-sitioning Systems). In fact, oneof the group’s first steps in de-veloping their project was tooverlay a portion of the reservewith a huge grid. Postdoc researcherBrian Inouye, who led the effort todesign and map the grid, was also theteam’s original “cat herder” — a job thatentailed organizing meetings and semi-nars among faculty, grad students, andpostdocs. (Kendi Davies is the team’snew cat herder.)

Inouye’s first challenge was to get ev-eryone to agree on where the gridwould be. The team selected a hilly sitethat incorporated three ridges of ser-pentine, separated by varying degreesof nonserpentine soils, grasslands, andchaparral environments, a major sec-tion of the fault, and two fossil min-eral springs. Over this mixed environ-ment, they laid a 550- by 600-meter(27.5-hectare) grid. Most of the grid ismarked at 50-meter intervals, but someareas of particular interest are dividedinto 10-meter or even 1-meter squares.There are about 500 sampling sites overthe grid, and at each one, Inouye col-lected soil for analysis, so he and his

fellow researchers would have a fairlydetailed map of the area’s soil chemistry.

Once the soil had been characterized,Inouye began the laborious task of cata-loging the plants at the same sites.“Collecting the vegetation data re-quired two rounds of sampling,”Inouye recalls. “In the early spring, wefound all the small annual flowers —most of the natives are annuals thatflower quite early. Then we went backagain in June for a second round ofsampling to identify all the grasses.”

The Mellon and Packard grants havebeen a boon to the researchers, bothgraduates and undergraduates. A dozenprojects are already underway atMcLaughlin and more are in the plan-ning stage. GPS technology is criticalfor coordinating and accessing the hugeamount of data being generated. “Weuse GPS receivers to document the lo-cations of all our sampling points,”Inouye explains. “All the graduate stu-

McLaughlinReserveContinued from page 7

dents funded for this projecthave a stipulation that they takeaccurate GPS readings of alltheir study sites so we have anaccurate record of who hasbeen working where, and so allthe data we collect over timewill be spatially referenced inthe literature.”

“Back in the lab, we can thensort all this information bywhatever factor we want. Sayyou want all exotic species thatare perennials growing on a cer-tain soil type. The computer willproduce that for you, so whenyou go back into the field, youknow exactly where to look.”

Harrison, long accustomed todoing her work with pencilsand topo maps, has been veryimpressed with the team’s newtechnology: “You go out, walkaround a patch of your plant,

and hit the button on your GPS torecord data points. Then you go backand dump that file into your computer(which already has a map of the studysite with all the other attributes we’vemeasured), throw your map on top ofthose other features, and from thereyou can very easily calculate how manypatches you have, what their total areais, and how many of those patches areon which kind of slope or which kindof vegetation community. The technol-ogy makes the process a lot slicker andthe data a lot more accurate. And itreally facilitates people sharing and ex-changing data on the grid, so it’s helpedfoster connections between the differ-ent projects.”

For Rice, the accuracy of GIS technol-ogy has led him to rethink the idea ofa gradient as a transition from oneenvironment to another: “We’re look-ing at larger spatial scales in the envi-ronment, and rather than taking a sim-plistic view of a serpentine gradient, I

Grad student Marina Alverez (L) and postdocJessica Wilcox Wright (R) conducting a plantsurvey at McLaughlin. Photo by Jerry Booth

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Principal investigator MaureenStanton’s research at the

McLaughlin Reserve provides agood example of the kinds ofprojects being carried out on “thegrid.” Her team’s goal is to addressa basic, long-overlooked question ofecology: what factors determine aniche?

Stanton explains: “Ecology has beendefined as the study of the abun-dance and distribution of species,but since the seventies we reallyhaven’t been asking why a speciesgrows here and not there. And werealized that this grid provides afabulous opportunity for trying tounderstand the concept of ecologi-cal niche, where a species lives andwhy.”

Stanton’s work focuses on a smallannual native, Gilia tricolor, that hasvery clear distribution patterns andboundaries. “There are two reasonsyou get patches,” she says. “Eitherthe seeds don’t get dispersed too far,or the seeds that are dispersing onlysucceed in certain areas. So the firstquestion is: what are the immedi-ate factors that keep the speciesfrom broadening its distributionthrough the whole environment?The second question is muchtrickier: why doesn’t the populationadapt for the conditions beyond its

current boundaries and spread? In evo-lutionary terms, what keeps the nicheconstant?”

Her study involves a series of lilliputianresearch plots filled with toothpicksand collars marking each of the hun-dreds of tiny germinating plants.Stanton describes her method and herresults thus far: “We’ve set up transectsgoing from the core area in the patchwhere there’s lots and lots of Gilia, tothe edge where it’s petering out, andthen perhaps 10 meters beyond theedge, which we call the periphery. Ineach area, we’ve transplanted Giliaseeds collected last year from the cen-ter of the patch. They shouldn’t beadapted to the edge in any way. Nowwe’re monitoring the seedlings to an-swer several questions. First, can theysucceed perfectly fine beyond the patchedge? If so, then that suggests it’s justdispersal limitations, just a historicalaccident that the species grows whereit does.”

“That’s not what we’re finding. We’refinding that the seeds are not doing thatwell outside of the native distribution,even if we help some of them by clear-ing away other seedlings and dead plantmaterial. … In the center of the plot,you have just about equal numbers ofseedlings emerging in the weeded andunweeded plots. As we move to theedges and beyond, we find that weed-

ing has more of an impact. If we don’tweed and clear away competitors,Gilia has very little success. So it’snot just seed dispersal limitation; inthis zone, some combination of com-petition and litter is impeding emer-gence and probably changing sur-vival as well. That kind of experimenthas been done elsewhere quite a lot,but not for serpentine populations.”

Stanton’s next step will be to lookat the genetic part of the story. Sheplans to take a few seedlings thatsurvive in the peripheral sites andanalyze them to see if their geneshave adapted to the new conditions.And if so, why doesn’t the popula-tion produce successful seeds thatwill establish there again next year,thus extending the boundary oftheir niche? Her current hypothesisis that gene flow from the center ofthe patch dilutes the potentiallyadapted genes, but that remains tobe seen. Stanton pokes at theground, extracting a Gilia seedling.“Niche is something ecologistsspend a lot of time worrying andtalking about,” she muses, “but wehaven’t done much to develop a pic-ture of the niche that’s really pre-dictive. And with the grid in place,we have the template to do that hereat McLaughlin. That’s where we’regoing next.” — JB

What’s in a niche? Gridwork is helping to define it

want to think about how important thepatchiness of that gradient is.”

Susan Harrison, in her role as directorof those NRS reserves administered byUC Davis, is delighted with the ongo-ing research, the impact it is having onthe reserve, and the support it has re-ceived. “Research on evolution and di-versity is a natural for McLaughlin,”

she says with a smile, “but the Mellonand Packard grants have really jump-started the process. Having money toget the word out to researchers, to of-fer mini-grants to grad students … it’smade things happen in a year or twothat might have taken five years. I thinkit will really put the reserve on the mapfor people who get excited about plantevolution and ecology.” — JB

For more information, contact:Susan HarrisonEnvironmental StudiesUniversity of CaliforniaDavis, CA 95616Phone: 530-752-7110Email: <spharrison@ucdavis.edu>

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Año Nuevo Island scientists tag sharks and seals todetermine how the great whites know dinner is ready

It happens each year like clockwork. The great whitesharks arrive in the waters south of San Francisco nearthe NRS’s Año Nuevo Island Reserve just in time to

feast on young elephant seals as they return from foragingin the open ocean. Researchers have long wondered aboutthe sharks’ uncanny timing, but only recently — throughthe use of modern technology — have they been able toexpand their understanding of the movements of both thesecreatures. The story they’re uncovering is more amazing thanthey had imagined.

Like modern commuters whose new cars come equippedwith GPS mapping systems, marine researchers are benefit-ing from the increasing sophistication and miniaturizationof computers, as well as from the growing fleet of communi-cations satellites in low earth orbit. More and more animals— such as sharks, elephant seals, bluefin tuna, even large sea-birds — are heading into the open ocean equipped with minia-ture tags that record everything from their geographic posi-tions and traveling speeds to their heart rates and diving depths.

Among the researchers whose work has benefited from thenew technology are UC Santa Cruz professors Burney LeBoeuf and Dan Costa, two leading experts on the northernelephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris). They and their col-leagues have been studying the seals at Año Nuevo sincethe late 1960s, when the population was just beginning tore-establish itself. Today, at the height of mating season,thousands of elephant seals crowd the 8-acre island and spillacross the narrow channel to the coastside state park. (Editor’snote: The NRS’s Año Nuevo Island Reserve is a 25-acre por-tion of the 4,000-acre Año Nuevo State Reserve, site of theworld’s largest mainland breeding colony for the northernelephant seal, owned and operated by California State Parks.)

In many ways, elephant seals are ideal subjects for study.Though they spend much of their lives in the open ocean,they regularly return to Año Nuevo to molt, breed, andgive birth. Their onshore behaviors are well documentedand provide a perfect opportunity to attach and retrievetags. Sharks are more difficult to study, but their habit ofreturning each year to the waters off Año Nuevo and theFarallon Islands makes it at least feasible to tag them, evenif retrieving the tags is not quite so easy.

Offshore studies of the elephant seals began in the early1980s when researchers outfitted elephant seals with thefirst time-depth recorders, developed by Gerry Kooyman

of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. (Though time-depth recorders had been used on other animals, this wasthe first time they were deployed on elephant seals.) Backthen, the devices used film to record the elephant seals’ div-ing behavior over a limited time period. “They could onlyrecord data for 14 days,” recalls Costa, “but they providedthe first glimpse of the animals’ diving behavior. Until then,we didn’t realize the animals were routinely diving to 1,800feet and spending 90 percent of their time underwater.”

Unfortunately, the early recorders could only provide dataon the animals’ behavior. What scientists still didn’t knowwas where the elephant seals were performing their amaz-ing feats. That capability — to determine where the sealsdid what they did — came in the early 1990s when RogerHill, of Wildlife Computers, and Bob DeLong, of the Na-tional Marine Fisheries Service, developed electronic tagsthat could measure light level and temperature. The light-leveldata allowed scientists to track sunrises and sunsets to deter-mine an animal’s approximate longitude and latitude. The tem-perature data allowed them to refine their position estimates.

Tracking of white sharks at Año Nuevo improved markedlyin 1997 when Le Boeuf and UC Davis colleague PeterKlimley, of Bodega Bay Marine Laboratory, installed threesonobuoys offshore, 550 yards apart. When a tagged sharkapproached the area, a computer on the island tracked itsexact position in real time by triangulating the readings fromthe three buoys. This system provided new insights on thebehavior of the great whites in the coastal waters, revealingthat they hunt 24 hours a day and often use the camouflageof the rocky bottom to surprise their prey.

Today researchers have expanded their studies far into theocean, using tags that can record an animal’s behavior andtravel patterns for months at a time and then archive thatdata for later retrieval. An elephant seal typically carries twoof these tracking devices. A head-mounted platform trans-ducer provides Argos satellite telemetry data to track theanimal’s daily movements, while a time-temperature-depthrecorder (TTDR), attached to its back, records diving pat-terns. TTDRs are typically archival devices that scientistsrecover and download when a seal returns to the reserve.

These tags have revealed that male and female elephant sealsbehave very differently in the open ocean. Males spend fourmonths off the Aleutian Islands, feeding near the oceanbottom on benthic prey, and they tend to return to the

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Continued on page 12

same areas on subsequent migrations. Females, on the otherhand, feed on pelagic prey, much nearer the Oregon andWashington coast, and they seem to vary their traveldepending on the availability of food.

It took yet another major technology breakthrough to pro-vide new insights into the great white sharks’ movements.Instead of archival tags, LeBoeuf and UCSC graduatestudent Scott Davis de-ployed new satellite tags thatautomatically drop off theshark at a predeterminedtime and transmit data fromthe ocean surface to a pass-ing satellite. These tags weredeveloped by Barbara Block(Hopkins Marine Station),Roger Hill, and Paul Howie(Microwave Telemetry).Not only are the tags muchsmaller than the earlier ones,but they also hold muchmore data — 4 megabytescompared to 500 kilobytes— and record the shark’sdaily position and behaviorover a four-month period.

In late 1999, researchers at Año Nuevo and the Farallonesplanted tags on four great whites. The results dramaticallychanged assumptions about their behavior. Researchers hadlong assumed that great whites stayed close to shore, pa-trolling up and down the coast in search of food. The tagsrevealed a very different story. All four sharks swam far outinto the central Pacific — one male covered over 2,200 milesto Hawaii, traveling fast (an average of about 44 miles aday) and diving deep (as deep as 700 meters). And evenwhen it reached Hawaii, it remained very deep in the wa-ter, at about 500 meters. The big question now is why. Thescientists suspect breeding, but confirmation will requirefurther research and more sophisticated technology. Andthere’s still the mystery of how they can time their return toAño Nuevo so precisely.

Unique physiology

While advances in tagging technology have revealed a newworld of oceanwide migrations, Costa and Le Boeuf havebeen using a very different technology to further their un-derstanding of how the animals are designed to cope withthis demanding lifestyle. Elephant seals, for example, dive

much deeper than other seals and spend up to 90 percentof their time at sea underwater. When feeding, the malesroutinely undertake long dives of up to 1,500 meters thatsubject their bodies to tremendous water pressure and causethem to surpass the limits of their aerobic capabilities.

The challenge scientists faced was how to investigate howthe elephant seal’s internalbody functions change un-derwater. “One obvious ad-vantage of the Año NuevoReserve,” Costa explainsmatter-of-factly, “is that justover the hill you haveStanford and its research hos-pital. Our location is uniquebecause you have animals ina natural environmentwithin close proximity toone of the state-of-the-artMRI research units in thecountry, if not the world. Sowe teamed up with Profes-sor Peter Hochacka andgraduate student SheilaThornton, of the Universityof British Columbia, to take

yearling elephant seals to Stanford to see what their bloodflow is like under diving and nondiving conditions.”

The scientists already had a good understanding of the seal’snormal diving pattern, so their task was to simulate thispattern in the MRI facility. “To simulate a forced dive,”Costa notes, “we put a mask on the animal’s face and floodedit with water for 5 to 10 minutes. Then we evacuated thewater very quickly to simulate diving. It’s kind of like aterrestrial dive. In the ocean they dive for 20 or 30 minutes,so giving them a 3- to 4-minute dive here is nothing. Youtrain them to get used to the idea that when the water levelgoes up, they should dive. And they just sit there and do it.”

Costa was confident the animals would do well in the stud-ies. “We trained them first, to get them used to the process... and they’re so calm, if we had one sitting in this room itwould probably sleep ten minutes, holding its breath thewhole time.” He does admit to one problem, however. “Wehad to clear out their stomachs because they eat a lot ofsand on the beach, and the sand at Año Nuevo has a lot ofiron in it. It didn’t hurt the animals, but it produced somevery bizarre [MRI] images.”

This female elephant seal, fully outfitted with ahead-mounted platform transducer and time-temperature-depth recorder (TTDR) attached to herback, is a participant in studies at Año Nuevo that aimto find out where she and her friends go, how theyget there, and what they do. Photo by Dan Costa

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What the researchers discoveredprovided tremendous insightinto how elephant seals haveadapted to their diving lifestyle.In particular, the study focusedon the animals’ large spleens,which are full of oxygenated redblood cells. “As soon as the ani-mal dives, the spleen squeezesdown very quickly and the he-patic sinus enlarges,” Le Boeufexplains. “The timing is suchthat this activity appears tomodulate oxygenated bloodcells to enter the vascular systemthroughout the course of diving.”

In open water, the seals only sur-face for short periods of time.This suggests the spleen remainscontracted and the hepatic sinusmodulates the oxygenatedblood cells the whole time. Sowhy is the spleen so big nor-mally? “Sixty-five percent of adiving seal’s blood is red bloodcells,” Le Boeuf notes, “andwhen you have that many redblood cells, the blood is very vis-cous, not the optimum way of transporting oxygen rapidly.”

At sea, the seals are not high-activity animals. They hold alot of oxygen, store it, and dive at a moderate-to-low rate.The fact that their blood is viscous isn’t important becausethey’re not doing things very fast. But all that changes whenthey come ashore. On land, where they need to fight orwalk around, it’s more advantageous to have a lower viscosityof blood, so they take the red cells and put them in their spleens.

Coming soon — SealCam?

Never content with the status quo, Costa and Le Boeuf arepondering how emerging technologies will shape futureresearch. Already sharks are being tagged with more power-ful devices that will be able to record their entire migra-tions. One idea is to put small “seal cams” on elephant sealsthat would provide time-lapse stills or footage of theiractivities. Today researchers must interpret printouts of div-ing and speed patterns to determine an animal’s behavior.

Cameras could provide a muchclearer picture of what’s actuallyhappening. “For the males, we’dhave to put a time delay on thecamera,” Le Boeuf explains, “be-cause it takes them a month to45 days to reach their feedinggrounds. We may want to cue todepth as well, as they are benthicfeeders. For females, you’d haveto program the instruments alittle differently because theirfeeding patterns are so different.”

For his part, Costa thinks theseals might be extremely valuableas data-gatherers for monitoringthe health of the ocean environ-ment itself. He’s now workingwith Barbara Block, GeorgeBoehlert (National Marine Fish-eries Service), and RandyKochevar (Monterey BayAquarium) on the early phases ofa program known as “Tagging ofPacific Pelagics” or TOPP. Theprogram’s goal is to try to under-stand how large marine animalsutilize the vast habitat of thenorth Pacific Ocean.

In upcoming years, 4,000 animals — elephant seals, Pacificbluefin tuna, albatrosses, leatherback sea turtles, sharks,whales, and others — will be tagged in a coordinated effortthat will follow all the species simultaneously. By overlay-ing these data with oceanographic profiles, researchers hopeto gain a better understanding of what factors drive theirmigratory patterns. This information will become crucialas researchers try to protect these animals and the oceansfrom overfishing and increased human impact. — JB

For more information, contact:Daniel P. CostaBiologyA404 Earth and Marine Science Bldg.University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz, CA 95064Phone: 831-459-2786; 831-459-3610Email: <costa@biology.ucsc.edu>

MRI images taken at Stanford Hospital todetermine how elephant seal internal bodyfunctions change underwater, keeping thesecreatures well oxygenated during deep dives.Photos courtesy of dan Costa

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The return of El Niño suggests hard times aheadfor the elephant seals at Año Nuevo Island Reserve

Scientists at the Año Nuevo Island Reserve have aperspective earned by only a few other long-term

researchers. After roughly 35 years (since the late sixties) ofworking with a single, rapidly growing animal population,they have come to notice small variations in the animalsthat alert them to changes in the environment. The Na-tional Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)is currently tracking one set of environmental changes:evolving El Niño conditions in the tropical Pacific.

When an El Niño does develop, the team will already betracking its impact on the elephant seals. After all, they’vebeen weighing 100 to 200 pups at Año Nuevo everyyear since 1978. “We’re in a good situation to detect achange caused by an aberration in the environment, likean El Niño,” notes Burney Le Boeuf, UC Santa Cruzprofessor emeritus and long-time elephant seal researcher.“We’re weighing pups right now, so we’ll be poised tolook for the effects on elephant seals, both direct andindirect. Bad weather at peak season is direct. Indirectwould be if they have difficulty foraging as soon as theygo to sea in the spring — then we would expect a muchlower survival rate. Or if the mothers are affected whenthey’re foraging, we would expect an impact on wean-ing weight. It depends on when the effect occurs andwhat kind of effect it is.”

Le Boeuf goes on to explain that El Niño affects elephantseals differently than most animals:

You might think that elephant seals wouldn’t be affected byEl Niño because it’s thought to be a surface phenomenon.

They, on the other hand, range throughout the north Pa-cific and dive to depths of between 400 and 600 meters.But the data are very compelling. Elephant seals do re-spond very dramatically for an animal that one wouldthink would be well buffered. [El Niño] hits seabirds orsea lions immediately because they’re feeding when it comes.The female sea lion goes out, feeds, and returns to her pup,so her ability to feed is intimately connected with foodavailability. The elephant seal comes ashore in late De-cember or early January, gives birth to a pup, and thenstays with that pup, fasting for 26 to 28 days before sheweans it. Her investment in that pup is determined bywhat happened over the previous nine months while shewas feeding. So there could be an El Niño going on in theocean, but what’s happening on the beach doesn’t reflect thatyet. When the pup is weaned, it fasts for two to three months,so when it goes to sea, if the El Niño continues, it couldface a shortage of food. That’s when we’ll see the impact.”

During the last El Niño (1997-98), researchers saw amajor impact on the seals. Le Boeuf says, “Dan Costaand I are working on a paper with [UCSC colleague]Dan Crocker on the effect of a previous El Niño on theforaging behavior of females. We weighed the femalesbefore we tagged them and when they returned. Dur-ing an average year, the weight gain is 1 kilogram perday of feeding, but that year they gained only .33 kilo-grams per day. Some of the females didn’t gain mass atall. And the seals weren’t at sea as long as normal — thefeeding was so poor. If another El Niño is coming ourway, it might be good to have ten more animals outthere this year.” — JB

El Niño aside, the scientists have seen adisturbing trend over the last couple of decadesthat needs to be monitored: the weaning weightof elephant seal pups has been going down everyyear since 1980. Another UCSC scientist, JimEstes, has noticed the same trend in sea otters.“You can jump to conclusions,” Le Boeuf muses,“but it seems to suggest that there’s somethingbigger going on out there. Elephant seals are aclosed system. The mom feeds, she comes back, shegives birth, and everything she gives her pup isfrom body storage. How much she can give, whatthe pup weighs at weaning, is a function, in part,of how successful the mom was when she wasfeeding.” Photo by Steve Davenport

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Ameteor explodes as it enters earth’s atmosphere.But does it make a sound?

Instruments installed last summer at the NRS’s Boyd DeepCanyon Desert Research Center at its Pinyon Flat site, southof the City of Palm Desert in Riverside County, will helpscientists decipher this and other sounds we may never haveheard.

This new installation is part of an array of instrumentscentered at UC’s Piñon Flat Observatory in the mountainsabove Boyd Deep Canyon. The array is one of 60 similarlistening posts that will be built around the world as a glo-bal “infrasound” listening network. Financed in part by theU.S. Defense Department’s Threat Reduction Agency, thenetwork was designed to help uncover nuclear weapons test-ing. But the scientific application of “infrasound” goesbeyond detecting nuclear activity by rogue nations.

One of the first signals picked up by the Piñon Flat arraywas the sound of a ten-foot meteor exploding in the atmo-

sphere more than 1,100miles away.

Such large explosions createshock waves that displacemassive amounts of air,generating sound wavesthrough the atmosphere.The high-frequency wavesdissipate rapidly, but thelow-frequency infrasoundwaves, inaudible to human

ears, can travel great distances. The sound wave dips andrises through the atmosphere, striking each listening postin a way that makes it possible to trace the path back to itssource.

In addition to exploding meteors and nuclear blasts, thelistening posts will be able to detect infrasound generatedby volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Thesemeasurements, used in conjunction with, say, seismic dataor weather satellite information, will give a more detaileddescription of activities that may be brewing above andbelow the surface of the earth.

Of the 60 planned listening posts, 13 have been installed.The Piñon Flat array is managed by UC San Diego’s ScrippsInstitution of Oceanography, which has a second arrayunder construction near Newport, Washington, and hopesto build two others.

Installation of the instruments at Boyd Deep Canyon fol-lowed stricter-than-usual requirements to protect plants andsoil. As it turned out, this approach to installation improvedthe array, making it cheaper and quicker to build, as well asmore efficient to operate. According to Al Muth, directorof Boyd Deep Canyon, leaving vegetation in place aroundthe instruments reduced wind speeds, which in turn reducedbackground noise that would otherwise have interfered withinfrasound reception. — MLH

Boyd Deep Canyon Desert Research Center aidsscientists in their effort to eavesdrop on the earth

(Left top) Design diagram for a single listening-post array (one of 60 planned) in the global“infrasound”network.(Left bottom) Array at L3, located on UC land atBoyd Deep Canyon’s Pinyon Flat site.(Right above) Infrasound detector (sensor) in avault. Photos courtesy of Michael A. H. Hedlin,Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics,Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD

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A strong sense of community iscrucial in remote areas of Cali-fornia. With hospitals and fire

stations hours away — or sometimesnot available at all — rural residentsmust rely on each other in emergen-cies. Staff members at the Landels-HillBig Creek Reserve on the Big Sur coastplay a crucial role in that isolated com-munity. Their dedication was high-lighted recently when reserve stewardFeynner Arias-Godenez was honored asthe 2001 Firefighter of the Year by theBig Sur Fire Brigade.

In presenting the award, Fire ChiefFrank Pinney was lavish in his praise:“Feynner demonstrates an exceptionalwillingness to help his peers, and is de-pendable and cheerful, supporting histeammates in drills and incidents witha positive attitude and a can-do spirit.He has been seen many times to take aload of equipmentstraight up a hill whilethe rest of us are stillcatching our breath.”

Engine Captain Mont-gomery London echoesPinney’s praise: “It’snot that Feynner didone heroic action,” shenotes. “It’s that he’salways there … will-ing, confident, andsmiling. During onefire, he and I were as-signed to protect ahouse on the ridge. Aswe sat in the truckwaiting, I admitted tohim how scared I was.He just smiled at meand said, ‘Don’t worry.You’ll do everythingright.’ And we did.”

Intrepid steward at Big Creeknamed Firefighter of the Year

Feynner Arias-Godenez and his trusty “mule.”Photo by Susan Gee Rumsey

Feynner joined the volunteer fire de-partment in July 1998 and has beenone of its most committed members.John Smiley, director of the Big CreekReserve, observes that Feynner re-sponds to emergency calls at all hoursand is often the first to arrive at an ac-cident scene, sometimes clamberingdown cliffs to rescue stranded motoristsand provide first aid.

Chief Pinney has been very impressedwith Feynner’s day-to-day contribu-tions and his unfailing attendance attraining and drills. He commented,“Feynner represents the spirit ofvolunteerism and serves as an ex-ample for his peers and the entirecommunity.”

Congratulations, Feynner! — JB

During his lifetime, formerstate senator Fred Farr was

known for bringing people to-gether to share perspectives andconcerns. After his death in 1997,it was clear the best way to honorthe memory of one of thefounders of the Landels-Hill BigCreek Reserve would be to con-vene a symposium of researchersand friends to discuss all that hasbeen learned there since thereserve was established in 1977.

The results of this unique day-long event are now available in anattractive new book, Fred Farr Re-search Symposium / Views of aCoastal Wilderness: 20 Years ofResearch at Big Creek Reserve. The82-page book features presenta-tions by experts on the reserve’sarchaeology (Terry L. Jones), ma-rine environment (CarolinePomeroy, Mary Yoklavich), veg-etation patterns (Paul Rich), en-tomology (John Smiley, Jerry A.Powell), and geology (Clarence A.Hall, Jr.), as well as color photo-graphs and a presentation on oneartist’s research by UC Santa Cruzart professor Norman Locks.

The cost of the book is $25 (plus$4.00 shipping/copy). Californiaresidents should add 7 percentsales tax ($1.75/copy) to their or-der. Checks should be made pay-able to “UC Regents” and sent to:

DirectorUCSC Natural Reservesc/o Environmental Studies1156 High StreetSanta Cruz, CA 95064

Big CreekSymposiumPapers Available

0460Natural Reserve SystemUniversity of California1111 Franklin Street, 6th FloorOakland, CA 94607-5200

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PAIDUniversity of

California

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and a test bed for a habitat-sensing arrayof devices for biocomplexity mapping.

Current research on wireless sensor net-works promises many benefits. For ex-ample, UC Berkeley’s Center for Infor-mation Technology Research in the In-terest of Society (CITRIS) is exploringthe development of a wireless networkof tiny, inexpensive sensors to monitorand help control energy use in a build-ing to save electricity. This applicationhas the potential of saving billions ofdollars a year in energy costs. Similarsensor networks embedded in roads,bridges, and buildings could provideinformation in real-time on the condi-tion of these structures after an earth-quake. A fascinating look at the extraor-dinary future possibilities of embeddedsensor networks is provided at <http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/speeches/tennenhouse20010827.htm>.

CENS will develop and field-test suchnew technologies “to explore the useof embedded networked sensing tomonitor the interactions of terrestrialorganisms in their habitats, at multiplecoordinated temporal and spatial scales.”At the technology’s heart will be com-

puters running in real time, connectedto the physical world through wirelesscommunication with new types of min-iature sensors that detect things aroundthem and with actuators that enable thecomputers to manipulate the world. Itwill be possible at the James Reserve toimplement, over the project’s initialten-year life, advances being made inproduction of self-assembling networksof nodes, in machine learning, and in cre-ating new types of information storagetechnology. The new “sensory networks”will revolutionize our understanding ofthe functioning of the natural worldand offer unprecedented opportunitiesfor research and learning at a distance.

Synergy between the NRS and advancedtechnologies takes many forms. NRSsites provide opportunities to ask fun-damental questions about the function-ing of the biosphere. They enable thesequestions to be asked by providingsecure settings for long-term studies in-volving complex instrumentation.Finally, and most important, the NRSreserves are home to the research ofmany gifted scientists with unique ar-eas of expertise, who eagerly adopt pow-erful new approaches in innovative ways.

— Alexander N. GlazerDirector, Natural Reserve System

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