Preserving California Environments: The Big Sur Wildlands Project
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Team members will take part in exciting, on-site ecological investigations of the forested canyons, wilderness backcountry, and rugged coastal environments that form California’s famed Big Sur wildlands. Our summer field explorations will take us across a rich spectrum of dramatic habitat zones found in Big Sur’s protected Landels Hill-Big Creek Reserve—four thousand acres of largely undisturbed wilderness that is home to a diverse flora and fauna ranging from kelp forest and sea otter habitats to high country grasslands hosting birds of prey.
In this living laboratory, hands-on instruction in field research techniques (including flora and fauna inventorying, behavior monitoring, and habitat sampling) will enable each of us to participate fully in key ecological studies investigating wildlife behavior, pristine streams, and the status of sea mammal populations—field studies aimed at bridging information gaps and furthering Big Sur’s long term ecological sustainability.
THE PROJECT
With its pristine marine ecosystem, clear streams, wild canyons, and relative absence of human impacts, the Big Creek Reserve remains an area of rare, unspoiled grandeur in an otherwise rapidly developing California coastline. In Big Creek’s tapestry of environments, researchers are beginning to search for answers to key ecological questions. How do animal and plant communities in still pristine wildlands develop and change over time? How do 
protected Big Sur populations compare to those found outside Reserve boundaries? How can long term field research help us better manage Big Sur’s irreplaceable natural resources?
Through participation in hands-on Big Creek research projects, we will learn important sampling protocol, and be part of exciting new efforts to address these pressing environmental questions. Team field study projects will be selected from research priorities that may include firsthand assessments of sea otter and seal population distributions, ecological mapping and surveys of key stream and intertidal habitats, and/or on-site studies of Big Creek’s biologically diverse animal and plant communities. These are important projects that will give us unique opportunities to gain both an enriched awareness of Big Sur ecology and direct involvement in field studies of significance to Big Sur’s future.
Full information available on request.
PROJECT LEADER
NICOLE CRANE, Wildlands Studies Field Ecologist, is a Biology instructor, with emphasis in ecology and marine biology, at Cabrillo College. She founded the W.S. Big Sur Program in 1997.