On March 18 of this year, The Regents of the University of California designated Sagehen Creek Field Station as the 35th site in the UC Natural Reserve System. Though few people may have marked the item on the Regents' Agenda, the inclusion of this field station in the UC reserve system represented the culmination of years of effort by a wide range of interested parties, from local community activists and U.S. Forest Service representatives to UC Berkeley administrators, the Sagehen staff, and NRS personnel.
There's no question that Sagehen is a spectacular addition to the Natural Reserve System. Located just over the crest of the Sierra Nevada in the Tahoe National Forest approximately 20 miles north of Lake Tahoe, the field station offers tremendous research and instructional opportunities. The land on which Sagehen is situated is managed by the U.S. Forest Service. The field station itself occupies some 452 acres (183 hectares) and enables access to roughly 7,900 additional acres (~3,200 hectares) of Truckee River watershed that features mountain meadows and fens, montane chaparral, and extensive stands of yellow pine, mixed conifer, and red fir forests. The area's diverse biota includes more than 500 species of vascular plants, 212 species of vertebrates, and 340 families of insects.
For decades, the site has been operated as a field station by UC Berkeley through a long-term cooperative agreement with the Forest Service, originally signed in 1951. This makes Sagehen the second oldest NRS reserve. Only Hastings Natural History Reservation, located in Carmel Valley and established in 1937, has a longer history; it too is administered through UC Berkeley.
Research at Sagehen has produced data from pioneering studies of the trout fishery and stream ecosystems, as well as long-term studies of the beaver, marten, and bird populations. The field station's online database comprises more than 50 years of weather data, as well as biological inventories for amphibians, birds, bony fishes, insects, mammals, plants, and reptiles. Teaching collections for birds, insects, plants, and mammals are also available.
Currently, Sagehen consists of 19 buildings, including a library/computer lab; two classrooms; communal kitchen, eating area, and deck; office space; and fish observation house. Up to 50 people can be housed year-round at Sagehen, making this site perfect for a wide range of field classes. Two legendary Berkeley faculty, Paul Needham and Starker Leopold, established a fisheries and wildlife field course at Sagehen in 1954, beginning a teaching tradition that continues to this day. One UC Davis course, Entomology 109, has returned to the field station every other year for more than three decades (see page 11, "Sagehen hosts two generations of 'Bug Boot Camp'").
Beth Burnside, Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Berkeley, led the effort to bring Sagehen into the NRS. "I've had a continuing interest in how field stations function and survive," she observes, citing her long relationship with the Bermuda Biological Station for Research (<http://www.bbsr.edu>). "I was trained as a zoologist, and I like the kind of research that goes on at these sites, but I'm also aware of the kinds of challenges that such remote units have to deal with."
Even with Burnside's support, however, preparing Sagehen for admission to the NRS was a long, difficult process. Soon after she became vice chancellor in January 2001, Burnside dispatched two of her staff to look at the field station. The report they returned was dismaying. Sagehen's facilities had fallen into serious disrepair. Burnside held a few meetings on campus to gauge support for the site, but she received little encouragement. One faculty member bluntly advised her to give it back to the Forest Service.
But Burnside is not one to be easily dissuaded. She decided to go up and have a look herself. "Jeff Brown [who had just become the field station's manager] showed me around. I realized how valuable [Sagehen] was, but also what a challenge it would be. That's when we started addressing the issue of where it should go and how we could attract more faculty involvement. What are the unique things the field station could offer that would make it more competitive for resources?"
Brown turned out to be one of the bright spots in Burnside's visit. He and his wife, Faerthen Felix, were working hard to turn the place around, cleaning the buildings thoroughly and building strong contacts with the local community. "But Jeff was struggling," explains Burnside, "with no faculty director or any real link to this campus. He was trying to bring people back, with some success, so he was starting to have needs."
Burnside decided to support Brown's efforts. "That's when I contacted Jim Kirchner [a professor of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley] and asked him to take on the role of faculty director. It was a challenge, but he agreed because he really cares about the station, and he was already director of Chickering [the Chickering American River Reserve, a nearby NRS site] and snow lab [the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory, administered by UC Berkeley], so it makes sense to have all of those units under the same director."
Another reason for selecting Kirchner was that he specializes in watershed hydrology and geochemistry, an area Burnside felt might make an ideal focus for Sagehen. "Every field station needs a unique focus, and I see powerful opportunities for growth in special aspects of hydrology and pristine watershed studies. That's an area where Sagehen could really stand out."
This feeling was reinforced at a stakeholders meeting that Burnside and Brown organized and held at Sagehen in the fall of 2002 to discuss the field station's future. "I was really turned on by that meeting," Burnside recalls. "Jeff had included people from the Forest Service, the Truckee River Watershed Council, the University of Nevada, all these different people, and there were lots of water studies going on and a very lively interaction with local community groups involved in monitoring the watershed and the health of the Truckee River. It seemed to me that there were a lot of really positive possibilities there."
Burnside also backed her commitments, guaranteeing an operating budget for at least five years (while attempting to make these funds permanent), and providing one-time funds to renovate some of Sagehen's most dilapidated structures. Even Nature contributed to the rebuilding cause that winter, when falling trees destroyed a bathhouse and a cabin. Insurance money, combined with Burnside's one-time funds, gave Brown enough money to build some badly needed new facilities.
Through its history, Sagehen has built up a huge reservoir of support among former researchers, students, and staff. "It's an imprinting mechanism," Burnside observes. "Once people get hooked on a field station as undergraduates or as graduate students, they'll dream up experiments or studies to try to get back there. What I'm trying to do is get enough resources into Sagehen, to build up an appropriate infrastructure so that it can attract the people who will then continually renew it."
Having assembled secure funding, new leadership, improved infrastructure, and renewed programs, Burnside was at last ready to write to the UC Regents, officially requesting inclusion of Sagehen Creek Field Station into the UC Natural Reserve System. And once the NRS review process for such an application was complete, it was clear this was one offer the reserve system couldn't refuse. - JB |
