Landels-Hill Big Creek Reserve

25 Aug, 05 AM - 26 Aug, 09 AM

The main reason for my visit to the Big Creek is not research related. However, I do have a secondary reason for wanting to visit that is research related. The primary purpose for the visit is to create an undergraduate biogeography exercise that will be used sometime within the next year or two in a course that I am currently creating from scratch: My advisor (Chris Still from UCSB Geography) and I just received a grant to create an undergraduate summer course that will include a 2 week road trip. The road trip will be geared around visiting several UC reserves and doing unique exercises in biogeography at each site. One of my jobs this summer is to visit some of the reserves and begin creating the biogeography exercises. Because I've been trying to get up to the Big Creek reserve for some time now, I'd love to visit this coming Monday and Tuesday (Aug. 25-26) and create a really cool field project for the class. Secondary reason for the visit: After emailing several times with Mark Readdie about tree species and location, I am still very interested in collecting some tree cores from coastal redwoods. I have previously been indecisive about what species I want to core and what I will use the samples for. I now very clearly know that tree cores from coast redwood on the Big Creek reserve would be very valuable to my dissertation, which is scheduled to be complete in June 2009. The Big Creek reserve would be an ideal place to collect coast redwood cores because it is near the southern extent of the coastal redwood range. This should result in a ring-width record that has a high sensitivity to climate. Because of difficulty in cross-dating and interpreting redwood ring-width records from old trees, I would probably target younger individuals in the 50-150 year old range. I would be happy to provide literature and accounts from personal experience that indicate that collecting tree-cores will not do any long term damage to any of the trees on the reserve. I propose to sample roughly 15 trees. Using the tree-ring-width chronology produced from the redwoods, I will create a growth model that uses climate data to estimate annual tree-growth rates. Doing the same thing with trees from the northern extent of the range, I will eventually create a climate-driven growth model that determines the specific climate thresholds that work in defining the boundaries of the coast redwood range. This will be of interest to the Big Creek reserve because it will test the hypothesis that without coastal summer fog-water inputs and cloud shading, redwoods would not be able to tolerate the warm, dry summers of the central Californian coast.

Visit #16072 @Landels-Hill Big Creek Reserve

Approved

Under Project # 10465 | Research

Create Biogeography of California Fieldcourse

faculty - Columbia University

Reservation Members(s)

Park Williams Aug 25 - 26, 2008 (2 days)
Park Williams Aug 25 - 26, 2008 (2 days)

Reserve Resources(s) | Create Invoice

Redwood Camp 2 Aug 25 - 26, 2008