UCLA College Corps at Sage Hill
Starting in fall of 2023, Sage Hill has been fortunate to serve as a host site for eight fellows from the UCLA College Corps Program. The College Corps team have played an integral part in Sage Hill's restoration over the past two years, helping to remove invasive plants, plant natives, and restore benches and trails.
Since the fall of 2023, Sage Hill has had the privilege of hosting student-fellows from the UCLA College Corps Program. College Corps fellows have been a major force in restoring Sage Hill and increasing it’s capacity as a center for environmental education. College Corps fellows helped replant natives and removed mountains of invasive weeds from the site.
College Corps Highlights:
Restoring benches – December 2024. Fellows spearheaded work to restore four much needed benches. After successfully applying for a TGIF Grant to pay for paint and supplies and then worked to repair and repaint the benches.
Study plots – Winter 2023 & 2024. In winter of 23/24 fellows helped prepare 33 1×1 m plots for a study of native plant germination across the site. In winter of 24/25 fellows helped build five 2 x 2 m plots with fencing to exclude small mammals. Fellows also cleaned and prepared native plant seeds for each plot. The plots were seeded with 30 species of native plants to determine which species would be most successful in areas currently dominated by mustard.
Filling the pit!– Fall 2024. Working with students in Dr. Tom Gillespie’s Forest Ecosystems Class (GEOG 107) the College Corps team helped fill in a 30 x 10 x 4 ft pit that remained after a large storage tank was removed from the site in 2021. We received 20 cubic yards of soil from a nearby construction site and then moved the soil by hand to fill the pit. The work took dozens of students over three days time to finish! The filled hole now provides additional space for native plants in the center of Sage Hill.
Removing Lantana – Fall 2024. Lantana is an invasive species that grows as dense thickets that outcompete native plants for resources, removing the Lantana from Sage Hill was vital to help native plants grow. We removed almost all of the lantana throughout various days to restore the oak woodland understory at Sage Hill.
Removing Short-pod Mustard – 2023 to 2025: Another invasive species, the short-pod mustard, was systematically removed to prevent it from outcompeting the native plants. This weeding project was essential for maintaining the ecological balance and supporting native
Collecting Seeds – Fall 2024. College Corp fellows helped collect a variety of native seeds from Sage Hill and from the UCLA Stunt Ranch Reserve. Cultivating these seeds helps us reintroduce native plants that no longer exist in Sage Hill but it also helps us gather seeds to spread around Sage Hill and put into our nursery. We spent various days cleaning the seeds at a Botany Building Lab, as we needed to extract the seeds from their seed coat.
