The UC Berkeley Biology Scholars Program supports underrepresented minority students pursuing the life sciences. The program kicks off with a weekend field trip to the UC Natural Reserve System’s Hastings Natural History Reservation in Carmel Valley. Over a long spring weekend, before a summer doing research in campus labs, students get to know one another […]
Hastings Natural History Reservation
NRS draws crowds at Celebrate UCI, Cal Day
Woodpecker granaries, digital weather nodes, and wetland tours were just a few of the attractions offered at NRS 50th anniversary festivities at UC campuses last Saturday. Celebrate UCI At Celebrate UCI, the sesquicentennial party-cum-open house on Irvine campus, dozens of visitors took walking tours San Joaquin Marsh. At the adjacent Arboretum, reserve director Peter Bowler set […]
From the HMS Beagle to Barcroft Station
The Value of Natural Reserves and Field Stations In 1831, a young British naturalist by the name of Charles Darwin sailed to the New World on the research vessel HMS Beagle. Along the way, the ship put in at both mainland South America and the Galápagos Islands, landforms separated by over 1,000 kilometers of open […]
Culprits of native pigeon die-off found
by Kat Kerlin, UC Davis News Service Major die-offs of band-tailed pigeons native to North America have been linked to a new pathogen in studies led by the University of California, Davis, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Scientists were able to implicate this new parasite, along with the ancient parasite Trichomonas gallinae, […]
NRS Summer Artist-in-Residency Program
Long known for supporting science research and teaching, the Natural Reserve System has teamed up with UC’s leading arts research organization to encourage reserve use by artists. Together with the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), the NRS is offering summer artist-in-residency opportunities at one of eleven reserves. The Arts2NRS program […]
Fanny Hastings Arnold, benefactor of Hastings Reserve, 1914-2013
Fanny Hastings Arnold, a longtime supporter of the NRS’s Hastings Natural History Reservation and daughter of the landowners who donated the reserve to the University of California, died November 18, 2013, at her home in Menlo Park. She was 99. Fanny was the only child of Russell Platt Hastings and Frances Simes Hastings. She was […]
Hastings Reservation Celebrates 75 Years
Hastings Natural History Reservation is celebrating 75 years of science research into California ecosystems. Located among the rolling oak hills of eastern Carmel Valley, Hastings became the first biological field station of the University of California in 1937. Hundreds of students and scientists have worked there since, advancing the study of subjects such as bird […]
Study of the Seasons: Phenology at the NRS
Nature celebrates the seasons with unmistakable changes. In California, rhododendrons add bursts of pink to coastal forests, bare buckeye branches grow leaf buds, and great egrets gather to nest in tall trees. In autumn, quaking aspens turn from green to gold, toyon produce bundles of berrylike fruits, and snow geese collect by the hundreds of […]