Starting the Quarter with a Spring

By Jen Adachi and Tiffany Wu

The biodiversity team kicked off the quarter with high spirits! We are continuing our field work at Sage Hill by weeding, watering, measuring, and monitoring our transplanted Encelia californica. We will also be participating in BioBlitz, an event promoting the importance of biodiversity through citizen science. At the event, we will be working with other students, faculty, alumni, and community members to document species around campus (including at Sage Hill) using the mobile app iNaturalist. Documenting all the native plants on Sage Hill was one of our project goals for this quarter, and BioBlitz is a great way to start that off.

In addition, we talked with Cully this week about the next steps for implementing our educational sign for Sage Hill. We’re excited to finally start making real moves on this portion of our project since education and awareness are so important to sustainability in urban areas. This sign will allow Sage Hill to become a more defined space on campus, and we hope that more people will become aware of it. Since it is Earth day next week, we hope the sign will be up soon!

Finally, we spent this week preparing our Earth Day Fair presentation to promote our project and inform the UCLA community about Sage Hill. Come check out our booth to learn about biodiversity and earn some cool prizes!