Channel Islands' Unique Partnership

Newly appointed National Park Service Director Jarvis has stated that two of his primary goals are to increase the connection between parks and people, especially people who live in urban environments, and to promote the value of parks for education. In Southern California, a partnership between NPS and a local university works toward fulfilling both of the director’s goals. Biologists at Channel Islands National Park and environmental science students at California State University, Channel Islands (CSUCI) are collaborating on a project to teach students field methods in a National Park setting while also providing NPS with skilled volunteers from the ethnically diverse local community.

This collaboration between NPS and CSUCI is unique in several respects. The university serves a diverse local population, including both community college and university students with roots in the rich farmworker and Hispanic culture of the Ventura County and Oxnard plain regions. This program, in part, provides funding for boat transportation, allowing future environmental scientists and resource managers to experience the unique ecosystems of the islands and surrounding ocean. The program is organized and overseen by the author who is a former NPS biologist and current professor at CSUCI, an element that helps mediate some of the more difficult logistical challenges of island work.

Channel Islands National Park has a goal of removing exotic iceplant from East Anacapa Island, one of the smaller Channel Islands, by 2016. An African succulent, iceplant was widely planted in California to minimize erosion, but quickly became invasive and now outcompetes island native plants such as buckwheat, giant coreopsis, and Artemisia. In early summer 2009, CSUCI professors participated in a grant program to encourage community college students in the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, and Math) to advance to four-year universities. As part of this program, students from Oxnard College traveled to the Channel Islands to begin work on baseline data collection. During two island visits the STEM students conducted a rapid assessment of the relative abundance of iceplant and native shrubs, and those data were incorporated into the planning document being prepared by NPS.

In the fall of 2009 a new field methods class in the Environmental Science and Resource Management (ESRM) Department at CSUCI, assisted by an NPS Challenge-Cost Share grant, began the second phase of the student portion of the project. Upper-division ESRM students returned to EAI for 4 days to: 1) collect soil samples for salinity, pH, and seed bank analysis; 2) use GIS to map iceplant and shrub distribution; 3) collect age and size information for a population of native shrubs; and 4) volunteer some physical labor by establishing cover boards and location stakes for vertebrate monitoring. This phase of the project will be completed by December, 2009, and NPS plans to continue removing iceplant in a systematic method based on these data until iceplant is eradicated. Several senior ESRM students may also incorporate portions of the data collection and restoration project as part of their senior research requirements.

The goal of the project is to increase the data available to NPS for restoration planning, and to provide NPS a consistent source of trained volunteers and possibly future employees. If successful, participants hope to expand the program to the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, which is directly adjacent to the university campus.