Campus: UC Santa Cruz

Instructor: Don Croll

Reserves Used:
Año Nuevo Island Reserve
Landels-Hill Big Creek Reserve
Younger Lagoon Reserve

Featured Reserve:
The 25-acre Año Nuevo Island Reserve is part of the California State Parks's 4,000-acre Año Nuevo State Reserve. This sensitive site is a breeding ground for northern elephant seals, harbor seals, California sea lions, and endangered Steller sea lions, as well as a nesting site for colonies of sea birds, including rhinoceros auklets, Cussin's auklets, Brandt's cormorants, and black oystercatchers.

The whole course is based on the UC reserves, because I never know what questions the students will want to explore. I don't have a standard set of labs. It's more exploration-based, and the reserves give us the flexibility to pursue whatever grabs the students' interest.

-Don Croll, UC Santa Cruz

Don Croll makes clear that Biological Sciences 141 is more than a natural history class. "The course is offered by the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department, so we're focused on doing rigorous science and learning field research techniques. Research provides a motivation for learning things fast. The students learn natural history and a lot of other skills as well."

NRS reserves play a key role in the class's exploratory design. "I don't have a set of labs where the students will do X, Y, and Z," he explains. "When the class begins, I don't know what the students will want to do. Logistically, it's much easier within the reserve system. If they want to do a transect or some trapping, rather than having to negotiate with a private landowner or getting a state park permit to do that, we work with the reserve managers. This allows the students much more freedom in developing their own field research projects from the ground up."

The course includes both afternoon lectures and morning sessions dedicated to fieldwork. The lectures focus on giving the students the tools they need for their research. Seven classes, for example, focus solely on statistics. "Almost all of the students have taken statistics before," he notes, "but they don't remember it. Now they have a motivation to learn. By the end of the quarter, I'll hear them comparing the value of different statistical methods, and it feels good because you know they didn't know any of this stuff coming into the class."

The fieldwork begins with a morning at Younger Lagoon Reserve, right next to UCSC's Long Marine Laboratory, where the students do some simple habitat mapping. From there, they move up the coast to the Año Nuevo Island Reserve for more elaborate correlative and mapping studies. Later in the quarter, they take a four-day trip to the Landels-Hill Big Creek Reserve in Big Sur, where they conduct behavioral studies and manipulative research projects. Each research project requires the student teams to develop a question, conduct the fieldwork, analyze the data, write up their results, and make an oral presentation.

Croll's research-first approach obviously works. Even though the class consumes a lot of time, it's very popular with students. "We're oversubscribed every year," Croll notes. "We're limited to 24, but I could probably fill it up twice. And that's just with seniors. I'd actually love to include more juniors, because this class sets them up perfectly for working on their senior thesis, which they need in order to graduate."