Yosemite hosts new NRS field station - guided by a far-sighted vision

The first NRS reserve to be administered by the University of California's tenth and newest campus - UC Merced - holds major significance for this Central Valley institution of higher education. Officially known as the Sierra Nevada Research Institute's (SNRI) Yosemite Field Station, the site, with its location within one of this country's most spectacular national parks, has enhanced public perception of the young campus, helping to attract high-quality faculty and students.

Eric Berlow, the Yosemite Field Station's first manager, explains: "Student tours [of UC Merced] always mention the Yosemite Field Station because they realize it's a big selling point. Faculty members do the same thing with grad students. Even Chancellor Kang is very aware, and proud, of what we have going on here. The partnership with Yosemite National Park is intrinsic to the campus's evolving image."

A site's symbolic value and its role as a functioning field station are two very different things, however. Berlow and SNRI Director/UC Merced Professor of Engineering Roger Bales have been working hard since the field station was established in 2006 to make sure the reality matches the vision. Bales, a noted hydrologist, already has a major research presence in the southern Sierra Nevada that focuses on processes across the rain-snow transition in the area's mixed-conifer forests. From his perspective, the Yosemite Field Station is important because it is near one of the five ground-based instrument clusters he and his colleagues have installed to study mountain water flow (see <https://snri.ucmerced.edu/CZO>).

Berlow has focused on expanding the programs and facilities at the field station itself, which is located within the historic village of Wawona (<http://www.yosemitepark.com/Accommodations_WawonaHotel_History.aspx>), just inside the park's south entrance. As a long-time field researcher with experience working at stations such as the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories (<http://depts.washington.edu/fhl/>), UC's White Mountain Research Station (<http://www.wmrs.edu/>), and the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado (<http://rmbl.org/rockymountainbiolab/>), Berlow came to his current position with a specific vision of what made these sites special.

 "My PhD was in marine biology, and I did a lot of work at Friday Harbor," Berlow recalls. "I remember that, within ten minutes of arriving at the lab, I would be having really great discussions with people about their research, getting new ideas, bumping into professors and having conversations you wouldn't normally have on a campus because everyone was too busy. In my mind, field stations are places where you go for an extended period and change your pace of life. You get a lot done, but you also have time to interact more with colleagues and students, and that's critical."

Upon reaching Wawona in 2006, however, Berlow realized that the available facilities wouldn't be sufficient to support a vibrant research community. The station was fine as a  base for field research that involved collecting samples or making measurements, but it lacked sufficient housing. The original facilities provided by the park included a manager's residence; an historic house and stable that had been refurbished to serve as an office, meeting room, and work space; and a third house for a single visiting group.

Berlow realized that lack of adequate housing would prevent him from hosting the critical mass of scientists required to foster informal conversations, long-term research projects, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Working together with park personnel and park partners, they were able to add and restore five more homes near the station. Today he can offer housing for groups of up to 40 in comfortable guesthouses that are much more than the rustic dorms found at many reserves. UC Merced's Facilities Maintenance staff has remodeled the dated houses to provide a comfortable environment for a wide range of users: from student groups on a weekend field trip, to researchers accompanied by their families who are there for an extended research stay, to faculty groups working on proposals or holding a multiday retreat.

The power of interns

With the facilities coming together, Berlow next turned his attention to attracting users, both researchers and educators. Though many people in the park were excited about the opportunity to collaborate with University of California faculty, others were taking a wait-and-see attitude. Wanting to produce some tangible results quickly, he decided to focus on education.

When he visited the Merced campus, Berlow had been impressed by the diversity of its student body. He also knew the National Park Service was facing a real challenge throughout the country in recruiting ethnically diverse rangers and staff who would reflect the shifting demographics of park visitors. The two situations were a perfect match. "Together with the park education branch chief, the chief ranger, and the Yosemite Conservancy," he says, "we set up an internship program that gave UC Merced students the opportunity to work throughout the park, including visitor interpretation and education. Because the campus is so diverse, those student interns who speak Spanish, Hmong, and other languages proved especially valuable as bilingual interpreters for presentations at the Mariposa Grove. When park officials realized they had a resource in these interns, they began hiring them into summer jobs as seasonal rangers."

"The parks are really concerned about the lack of diversity in their ranks," Berlow continues. "It's not for lack of trying. They struggled with how to tap into these communities. So these students - many of whom grew up less than two hours away from Yosemite, but had never visited - are now excited about the park. They go home and tell their families how beautiful it is, and they bring their families for a visit. This has really helped to solidify our relationship with the park staff. Where once we had to push interns on them, now they're fighting for them."

Beyond science

Seeking to attract a wide range of users to the field station, Berlow also established a Scientific Visualization Fellowship  (<https://snri.ucmerced.edu/snri/wawona/programs.html>). Art has been a major influence in his life, and he loves to promote interaction between artists and scientists. "The neat thing about the Scientific Visualization program," he notes with a smile, "is that we created it out of nothing. We really had nothing to offer but the name Yosemite - a powerful lure - and a free place to live. At first, there was no stipend or anything. Someone at an NRS managers meeting had told me about the "fake it 'til you make it" approach, so I designed an application for a "highly competitive" internship. Now we've carved a bit out of our budget so we can offer the artists a stipend. That definitely makes it more attractive, and today it truly is a 'highly competitive' fellowship."

A major focus of the Scientific Visualization program is to get scientists - and ultimately the public - to think about their work in new ways. "One element that really interests me is bringing in an outside perspective by having an artist-in-residence who helps scientists communicate their results more creatively to the general public. So we specifically seek to recruit artists who are interested in working with scientists."

The concept for the fellowship was originally inspired by the Scientific Illustration Program at California State University, Monterey Bay (formerly at UC Santa Cruz). However, as the program has grown, it has expanded to include a wide range of artistic disciplines. "There's such a tradition of landscape art at Yosemite, it's hard to do something new," Berlow notes. "So we've branched out, hosting an avant-garde dance presentation and a number of musical performances. It's exciting to see how it's evolving."

Last summer's artist-in-residence was Patrick Cress, a San Francisco Bay Area musician, composer, and sound artist who accompanied Berlow on a number of research trips to alpine meadows. Berlow observes: "The Nature Sound Society in Emeryville provided some amazing high-quality recording equipment, and the results were really interesting. As a scientist, I'm trying to understand things rationally, looking for patterns, counting things, and so forth, and it was great to see what kinds of things piqued his interest. In the end, he took the sounds he had captured in the meadow, sampled them, looped them, layered them with saxophone and bass clarinet, and created pieces that were much more about the experience of being in this wilderness. It was a really nice complement to scientists who try to understand the wilderness so they can figure out the best ways to protect it. Patrick's completed piece, Yosemite Soundscapes, was more: "Here's what it feels like to be out here, here's the mood it evokes."

Berlow is hoping Cress will return this summer to collaborate on a public presentation: "Our idea is that I will give a more scientific talk on meadows, climate change, and Yosemite toad decline, and he'll do a musical piece on sounds from the meadows. We'll use the two presentations to elicit discussion from the audience about how those approaches evoke different ideas, and the tension between the rational and the emotional approach to being in nature."

Another element in Berlow's vision is building a strong outreach program for primary and secondary schoolchildren. As part of his K-12 effort, he is helping to expand the ARC (Adventure Risk Challenge) program at the Yosemite Field Station. First established at the NRS's Sagehen Creek Field Station on the eastern slope of the northern Sierra Nevada near Truckee, ARC is an outdoor leadership and literacy program that targets high-potential secondary students whose families do not speak English as their first language (see "Summer at Sagehen Reserve Transforms Teens Through Program of Adventure Risk Challenge," in Transect 23:2 (2005), pp. 7-13; <http://nrs.ucop.edu/Transect/TR23.2%20PDF-full%20issue.pdf>).

"It has taken a lot of work to piece together funding from existing programs to get ARC going at Yosemite," Berlow notes, "but it's such a life-transforming experience for the students - 92 percent of ARC participants pass the English language arts portion of the high school exit exam (compared to 40 percent of English language learners statewide), and 77 percent are attending college - and the link with Yosemite is a natural. UC Merced, given its demographics and its interest in reaching students from the Central Valley, is totally excited about having a bigger presence in the area's high schools. ARC Director Jennifer Gurecki has done an amazing job of building relationships with new schools, establishing trust, and detailing curriculum standards. We're now building on the Sagehen program by having UC Merced students mentor participants while they're in the park. Combined with field trips to campus, these efforts make the ARC students realize that college is a real option."

Building the research program

All of this effort to promote educational use of the Yosemite Field Station doesn't mean that Berlow is less interested in building the research focus that is at the heart of all strong field stations. Rather, he well understands that fostering research is a longer term process.

While the opportunity to work at an iconic national park might seem an attractive proposition to a layperson, many researchers see potential problems. From past experience, some are leery of the permit and approval processes required by the park service. Also, historically, major cultural issues have arisen between agency researchers, who face a multitude of pressing management issues, and academic researchers, who pursue less applied work. Many UC faculty already have full research schedules at existing sites, so the idea of expanding their research programs to a new site is not that attractive, despite the beautiful scenery and opportunities for investigation.

Berlow is addressing these issues in a number of different ways. First, he is continually contacting potential researchers and has visited college and university campuses throughout the state to talk to groups about the Yosemite Field Station. And once he finds interested researchers, he helps them understand and navigate the park's permitting process. As new graduate students who are able to take advantage of the historical data and ongoing measurement programs near Yosemite come to UC, more UC faculty will become involved.

Second, Berlow has maintained his own role as an active researcher working in mountain meadows. He explains: "I have a joint appointment as a research scientist with the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey), so I have collaborators through those projects. As I'm actively doing research in the park, I'm also building a relationship on the science side, so agency scientists realize that UC Merced is a resource, that we have things to offer them, and that we're looking to engage with them to find solutions to management problems. If we're not doing something that's really hitting their needs, it's not because we don't want to - it's because we don't know about it. And we're willing to work with them."

A great first step to attracting faculty researchers is to target their students. "We've been targeting undergraduates, as well as graduate students and postdocs, rather than professors, because they're open to looking for new projects," says Berlow. "The National Science Foundation's program, Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU), has been a huge draw to get faculty interested in working at Yosemite, because these are small grants that get the faculty on board. Once they get some preliminary data, the professors realize, ‘Hey, this could actually go somewhere.' And they've already gone through the process of writing a permit, so they realize it's not such a big deal. And now that I've built a relationship with USGS in the park, other sources of funding are available that are not usually available to professors. So now we can say, if you partner with a USGS scientist or a park scientist, there are these other pots of money that you could get to support your graduate students. Then they're all excited to collaborate."

The Yosemite Field Station is currently experiencing an influx of graduate students interested in working on environmental issues in the park. This summer four new graduate students and a postdoc are at the station to advise REU students on their projects with the goal of using this work as a seed for their own future research and PhD projects.

A new kind of field station

Since it opened in 2006 as an SNRI UC Merced facility, the Yosemite Field Station has gained momentum with each succeeding year. From those first days when even ordering office supplies was a chore because the young campus had not yet established any business procedures, Berlow now finds himself ever closer to realizing the vision that he and Roger Bales have for the station.

Berlow explains: "We have the advantage of starting a new reserve with a contemporary approach that's larger scale to help researchers collect a mix of both field data and virtual data to support today's multiscale initiatives. People like Roger and the students in his research group have less need for a really nice facility to hang out at. What they want most is access to a lot of places, storage space for their equipment, and Internet access for themselves and for distributed sensors that remotely stream data to a central node. Their interest in a field station is much more virtual than a traditional field ecologist. So SNRI is trying to straddle the two worlds by having some traditional field station hubs with resident scientists and some more virtual field stations offering a network of points with a combination of instrumentation and access."

In pursuit of this goal, Berlow and Bales just received more than $400,000 from NSF to renovate the historic stable next to the Yosemite Field Station office and turn it into networked office space. "Part of the idea is that we really need to push contemporary research," Berlow explains. "We don't need more areas to sort samples and put them in drying ovens. We need cyber-infrastructure so that people working in the field can download data and work with remotely sensed imagery to visualize it, so they can plan their next trip. They want to be able to pull data off the sensor network and make decisions based on that information. So this is part of being a different kind of field station that embraces the eco-informatics side of things. But then we also have a place that is quiet during the off-season, and we want to build it so it can be like an NCEAS at UC Santa Barbara, a center for synthesis and collaboration and data analysis. Just because a field station is in a beautiful place doesn't mean it should only be used for collecting field samples. It can also be an inspiration for more conceptual activities. Instead of having a workshop on campus, you could have it at Yosemite. We're trying to build the station so it will be a place you'd like to go in winter to do more collaborative retreats."

Berlow extends an open invitation to the entire UC community to help him build a vibrant intellectual center at the Yosemite Field Station, whether their interest is in life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, or the humanities. He says: "I really want to get across the idea to the University community that this place is here for them. They don't have to be collecting invertebrates in the streams. They could be working on a collaborative grant proposal. It's a legitimate use of the facility if their work is enhanced by walking through the mariposa grove as they work out their problems. That's a very legitimate use of the place."  - JB

For more information, contact:
Eric L. Berlow
Director, Yosemite Field Station
Sierra Nevada Research Institute
Yosemite National Park, CA 95389
209-375-9917
eberlow@ucmerced.edu