Campus: UC Irvine

Instructor: Peter Bowler

Reserve Used:
San Joaquin Freshwater
   Marsh Reserve

For More Information:
Transect 21:1 (Spring 2003), pg. 7:
"San Joaquin Freshwater Marsh Reserve offers UCI students unlimited projects and possibilities"
http://nrs.ucop.edu/Transect-San-Joaquin.htm

Featured Reserve:
Located just a few minutes' walk from the Irvine campus, the San Joaquin Freshwater Marsh Reserve provides UCI's largely urban student population with the perfect introduction to natural processes. At the marsh, students can explore a variety of wetland and upland habitats, from freshwater marshlands to coastal scrublands, and observe more than 200 bird species, including two resident endangered species.

Our students have led mostly urban lives. They don't have a sense of geologic place or a natural history identity. Being able to come to the marsh to write reinforces their relationship with nature. Many of them find feelings that they've never had before.

-Peter Bowler, UC Irvine

The 202-acre San Joaquin Freshwater Marsh Reserve, adjacent to the UC Irvine campus, is a small remnant of what was once a vast wetland that drained into nearby Newport Bay. Condominiums and research parks crowd its edges. The movement of water through the marsh, once determined by stream flow and tidal movements, is now more dependent on pumps and pipes. The coastal sage uplands at the marsh perimeter have been restored, often using native plants rescued from on-campus construction sites.

Yet the marsh is flourishing, both ecologically and educationally. Award-winning teacher Peter Bowler (students have selected him three times as the "Outstanding Professor in Biological Sciences") has made it the centerpiece for a number of classes, ranging from large lecture classes like Environmental Ethics, to much smaller, but no less important advanced labs and seminar programs.

"Students love to get out here and get their hands dirty," Bowler says. "For most of my classes, visiting the marsh is a built-in component, because it's such a wonderful opportunity to show them nature and the way we can restore nature. Reality is worth a thousand pictures."

BIO 179L, Limnology and Freshwater Biology, offers a great example of how Bowler uses the marsh. Each quarter, 30 to 60 students opt for this upper division lab class to get valuable field experience. "The marsh allows them to go out and sample," explains Bowler. "They can compare the restored areas of the marsh with the older sections and see how wetlands grow and develop. On this one site, they can study all stages of marsh development, from an old remnant of what was once a much larger historical wetland to the new areas we've created essentially from scratch."

Bowler and his colleague Bill Bretz carefully design and maintain the marsh to serve as a living laboratory. In the older cattail wetlands, they control the seasonal flow of water to create natural soil sequences students can document, while in the restored areas, they created 11 experimental bulrush-dominated ponds with varied depths so students can study habitat selection and zonation. Each area offers a totally different habitat used by different waterfowl and other organisms.