Great Horned Owl.

Wile attending the annual meeting of the UC Natural Reserve System in Cambria, I came across this captive, injured owl at Camp Ocean Pines.

It's interesting that the hooting is so gentle up close, yet carries so far through the woods.

Adventure - Risk - Challenge Program

A.R.C.: Voices on the Rise from F. Felix on Vimeo.

An introduction to the Adventure - Risk - Challenge Program (ARC), produced by Coldstream Creative & ARC graduates.

Learn more about ARC at their website.

Quicktime [31.1MB]

Bear cub release at Sagehen.

Jason Holley of the California Dept. of Fish & Game talks to the Sierra Sun about the wild bear cub release at Sagehen last January.

2008.

Sagehen's healthy meadows & fish.

UC Davis Newswatch talks to Sagehen researchers Shorty Boucher & Peter Moyle about what they are learning about the connection between meadow health, fish populations, diversity, & management policy changes due to insights gained from Sagehen research.

2006.

Lahontan Cutthroat Trout research.

Sagehen researcher Peter Moyle talks to UC Davis Newswatch about why putting endangered native Lahontan Cutthroat Trout back into Sagehen Creek is a good idea & also about the value of long-term datasets like Sagehen's.

2006.

50+ Years of Sagehen.

Updated version, 6-2014:


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50+ Years of Sagehen from F. Felix on Vimeo.
07:00

This is Jeff's "Introduction to Sagehen" slideshow that he shows to all Sagehen guests as part of their orientation. It encapsulates what's been going on at the field station for the past 55 years or so.

It is as good an answer to "So, what do you guys do out there, anyway?" as we can come up with.

You can also download it as a Quicktime movie:
Small [8MB]
Medium [20MB]
Large [60MB]

Forest Resiliency & SPLATs Research at Sagehen.

Forest Resiliency & SPLATs Research at Sagehen. from F. Felix on Vimeo.

35:00

This video is Sagehen Summer Speaker Series #21. Professor John Battles discusses how we can convert our precious western national forests from torchy, mismanaged tree farms, back into resilient, naturally-functioning ecosystems using Strategically Placed Area Treatments [SPLATs].

Or choose a Quicktime movie for download:
Small [25.1 MB]
Medium [76.8 MB]
Large [199.3 MB]

You can read Nicole Vaillant's recently completed Ph.D. thesis on SPLATs here.

This study includes a fire history for Sagehen Basin that indicates that the fire return interval in the basin was just a bit over 2-years prior to the logging era. It increased to over 20-years after logging began, which would explain these massive, hot & destructive forest fires we've been having in the West lately.

Sagehen Master Plan.

Here are some fly-throughs of the new Sagehen Master Plan.

This plan is the physical manifestation of the Sagehen Vision that was created in 2005 by the Sagehen Reserve Program Planning Advisory Group to define Sagehen's future. SRPPAG consists of a variety of interested community stakeholders & Sagehen users.

You can download the plan or get more information at "Sagehen News".

Highway-89 Road Ecology.

Highway-89 Road Ecology. from F. Felix on Vimeo.

30:00

This video is Sagehen Summer Speaker Series #19, Sandra Jacobson discussing the Highway-89 Stewardship Team Road Ecology project.

Or choose a Quicktime movie for download:
Small [22.1 MB]
Medium [64.5 MB]
Large [162.5 MB]

For full editorial disclosure, see the un-edited source tape here.

See this link for more information about the Highway-89 Stewardship Team & projects.

Here's a 2-part FishXing multi-media presentation from Sandy with more about road ecology. More road ecology P.E.P.'s available here.

Keck Hydrowatch Project.

Sagehen is a snow-driven hydrologic system, one of two watersheds at the focus of the Keck Hydrowatch Project, a multi-discipline research initiative to understand the water cycle. Here's a video about Hydrowatch that largely focuses on the second watershed, rain-driven Angelo Coast Range Reserve.

Interesting use of LiDAR...

Here at Sagehen, researchers use airborne & ground-based LiDAR to create very high resolution digital maps of the landscape in order to image & model things like surface geology, snow-water equivalent (SWE), crown-bulk density & fluvial geomorphology.

Since the instruments are measuring both the first & last returns (basically light bounces), you can do some amazing things like strip off the vegetation layers to see the shape of the bare ground, & create topo maps at 1-meter resolution. By comparison, conventional topo maps are derived from 30-meter resolution data. With multiple scans of ground-based LiDAR, it's even possible to create maps at millimeter scale!

This music video by Radiohead is an unorthodox use of ground-based LiDAR arrays developed for the DARPA Grand Challenge by Velodyne.

See this link for a short "Making of" documentary, & to play with the LiDAR code yourself.

Sagehen Outreach

An introduction to the Sagehen Creek Field Station Outreach program.

00:01:00

Predator reaction to animal coloration.

Sagehen researcher Jen Hunter studies predator response to animal coloration.

She creates taxidermy mounts of the same animals with different coloration, then puts them in the field with a camera trap to see how predators respond. Watch the video to see what happens.

08:51

Ant Ranchers.

This is a short clip of ants farming aphids on a willow branch at Sagehen.

The ants protect & herd the aphids so they can "milk" them for their nutritious honeydew.

As bizarre as this idea of complex agricultural behavior seems in such a tiny-brained animal, several other species of ants are also farmers. For instance, Leaf-cutter Ants march those sail-like bits of leaves back to the nest where they chew them up for use as mushroom-growing medium. They don't eat the leaves, just the fungus.

Perhaps the scariest insect farmers are the Vampire Ants that occur a little north of Sagehen. Like all adult ants, the Vampires have a throat restriction that won't allow them to eat solid food. They hunt centipedes, but there is not enough juice to keep the adults nourished. So they feed the chunks of centipede to their larva--who lack the throat constriction--then puncture the babies' abdomens & drink their blood! The procedure is not fatal & all adult ants apparently bear scars from this bizarre adaptation.

00:19 [.MOV-548 KB]

Spawning native California Catostomus Tahoensis

Here's a quick video we shot last summer of spawning native Tahoe Suckers.

What a bad name for such a cool fish! They really should call the Brook Trout "suckers" because they vacuum up the native fish eggs, whereas these guys just eat things like worms & mollusks.

01:33 [.MOV-4.4 MB]

Or watch on YouTube at lower resolution:

Sagehen Researcher discusses snow-water measurement.

Sagehen researcher Chris Skalka of the U. of Vermont talks with Vermont Public Television about his work measuring snow-water equivalents using gamma radiation.

Here's the longer, more detailed video about remote sensing.

More info here.

Sagehen Videos Available for Amazon Download

You can download videos from Amazon, or order a DVD here.

Big storm cycle ends.

A big winter storm cycle just ended.

Here's a clip of us mountaineering on the house to do "cornice control". Pretty tricky getting up the icicle without crampons, but jumping the "bergschrund" was easy!

See more pics from the storm at our blog.

Orphaned bear cub released at Sagehen.

The California Dept. of Fish & Game released another orphaned bear cub at Sagehen yesterday. Learn more about this cub's story & all of Sagehen's other bear research on our blog.

Read story & watch video on KGO-TV ABC7, San Francisco. Or download the video here:

PC [WMV-6.6MB | WMV-4.1MB]
Mac or iPod [MP4-7.2MB | MP4-5.1MB]
Flash [5.8MB]

There's another story & video on KOLO8-TV, Reno. Or download the video here:

PC [WMV-8MB | WMV-2.9MB]
Mac or iPod [MP4-8.2MB | MP4-3.1MB]
Flash [6.9MB]