Bridge to a Bright Future

Undergraduates walk FUERTE's wild path toward environmental careers

Written by Sonia Fernandez | Videos by Jessie Ward O’Sullivan | Photos and design by Matt Perko

panoramic photo of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range

On a sunny, windy morning 10 UC Santa Barbara undergraduate students peer over the edge of the Long Valley Caldera, the remnant of a supervolcano that erupted 760,000 years ago. From their vantage point, on the side of Mammoth Mountain in California’s Eastern Sierra, they take selfies with the 20-mile-long, 11-mile-wide crater — ephemeral humans against a landscape forged by magma and sculpted by glaciers.

Only a few steps away is one of the world’s premiere snow labs, the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, also known as CUES. From the partially buried bunker and surrounded by supplies and equipment, climate scientist Ned Bair talks about a life spent studying snow: the cold, the rigor, the danger.

“It’s hard,” he said. “It’s hard on your body.” Indeed, even at this 9,600-foot altitude the air is thinner, forcing the unacclimated to breathe faster and deeper, and to be more deliberate about their movements. At an elevation this much closer to the sky, the sun also shines brighter, with less of the atmospheric cover that shields the lower elevations from the brunt of its rays.

None of these challenges faze UCSB environmental studies major Liv Valinsky, because she has just gotten a precious glimpse of her possible future, and it is bright. A lifelong outdoors person with a newfound interest in atmospheric science, Valinsky’s brief contact with Bair was enough to stoke her passion for the subject and sharpen her focus on a life in environmental science.

FUERTE participant Liv Valinsky at Valentine Camp

"It was really cool to talk to him,” she said. “Just to see someone that’s in a career that’s so similar to what I want to pursue and the instruments he’s using and where he ended up in life, it’s so exciting.”

Valinsky’s experience is just one of many doors that UCSB opens for its undergrads into the world of conservation and environmental science. As a participant in the FUERTE (Field-based Undergraduate Engagement through Research, Teaching and Education) program, she and the rest of her cohort are getting a firsthand taste of what it’s like to be a field scientist while developing the fundamental skills necessary to get their future careers off to a good start. Funded by a National Science Foundation program to enhance STEM education for underserved communities, the FUERTE students are taught and taken into the field by world-class UCSB scientists and mentored by a cadre of graduate students in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology (EEMB). They grow their skillsets over three summers, building an impressive resume of projects, fieldwork and internships before they graduate.

For each participant, the adventure begins with a two-week intensive summer course that exposes them to a variety of ecosystems located in the rain shadow of the “granite curtain” that is the East Sierra Nevada mountain range. In this region of California, UCSB administers, as part of its system of natural reserves, the Valentine Eastern Sierra Reserves (VESR), the collective name for two separate protected spaces: Valentine Camp in the town of Mammoth Lakes and SNARL, the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory, a former US Fish and Wildlife research station just a short drive away.

“The Eastern Sierra provides an amazing opportunity for training for environmental sciences with a wide array of ecosystems and habitats, ranging from the High Sierra alpine ecosystems to Great Basin sagebrush and including montane forests, high desert habitats and unique aquatic ecosystems from alpine lakes to saline lakes, and rivers, streams and high desert pools,” said VESR director Carol Blanchette. The reserves provide easy access to most of these habitats, she continued, and both of them offer opportunities to study stream ecology in a place where water is most precious.

Carol Blanchette headshot

Carol Blanchette, director of the Valentine Eastern Sierra Reserves.

Mountains at sunset

Alpine

At the highest elevations of the Sierra Nevada, conditions are harsh, yet life will take hold if it can find even a little bit of shelter and moisture. Despite the inhospitable environment, the alpine biome hosts hundreds of compact plant species and hardy animals, including bighorn sheep, and mountain lions.

Montane forest

Montane

The montane ecosystems of the Eastern Sierra are among the most biodiverse of the region, hosting a variety of plants and animals in its relatively mild climate. Conifers, aspens and oaks are the major trees of the area, while the grasslands provide forage and breeding grounds for black bears, mule deer and several species of raptor.

Sagebrush at sunrise

Sagebrush

Low-growing sagebrush scrub — a community of plants adapted to the arid environment of the lowest elevations of the Eastern Sierra — populate the desert floor in a vast sea of gray-green plants. This ‘sagebrush sea’ hosts hundreds of species, including the iconic sage grouse, as well as rattlesnakes and small rodents.

Waterfall in a mountain forest

Aquatic habitats

Water — its availability and lack thereof — ties together all of life in the Eastern Sierra. The region is heavily dependent on the seasonal snowpack, formed at the highest elevations, which is then funneled down through streams and creeks, and held in lakes and reservoirs.

Because of their locations and facilities, Valentine and SNARL are hubs for environmental scientists who study the area, making them ideal places for students contemplating a life in the environmental sciences, Blanchette added. Here, the students have access to decades of field science in this remote part of California, and also to its relatively untouched beauty. It’s a beauty that once led noted 19^th century environmentalist John Muir to call the Eastern Sierra “a country of wonderful contrasts,” while early 20^th century writer Mary Austin praised the area’s “luminous radiance” and its “lotus charm.” It’s a beauty that landscape photographer Ansel Adams never tired of as he aimed his camera again and again at the Sierra Nevada and where it touches the sky.

“For all the toll the desert takes of man it gives compensations, deep breaths and the communion of the stars.”

Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (1903)

Nature as Classroom

Have no doubt about it: The scientists who run the FUERTE program — Blanchette, biologist Gretchen Hofmann and ecologists Hillary Young and Douglas McCauley — are on a mission of love.

“The science is important, but really, we want (the students) to fall in love with these ecosystems,” said McCauley, who can recall with fondness when he fell for these natural places as a UC undergraduate — the forests and the babbling streams that run through them; the herbal, pungent smell of sagebrush after a good rain.

“We want to get these places into their bloodstreams, the same way they got into ours.”

Professor Doug McCauley showing a bird feather to students

There’s no lack of opportunity for this romance at Valentine Camp. Here, at roughly 8,250 feet above sea level (give or take a couple hundred feet), the ground is covered with ferns and other lush understory plants, and shaded by trees. A meadow sits at the heart of the reserve, one that changes colors with the seasons. In the summer, iridescent dragonflies hover above the little streams that wind their way downslope, while in the winter, the camp falls silent under a three- to six-foot blanket of snow.

It's a great place to perfect the art of noticing, as the students are encouraged to connect with their surroundings and engage creativity in a nature journaling class with VESR outdoor educator Anne Barrett. More than a feel-good class, it motivates the students to reflect on their relationship with nature and their place in it. The training comes just in time for McCauley’s camera trapping/animal tracking class the next day, when he teaches them how to detect the presence of various animals by what they leave behind. Nibbled leaves? Deer. A rust-colored feather? Maybe a Northern flicker or a Spotted towhee. Scars on the trees? Definitely a black bear.

students doing nature journaling

Outdoor educator Anne Barrett, left, guides the FUERTE participants through a nature journaling exercise

For some, if not all of the students, it’s their first time truly immersed in nature — a departure from the lecture halls and computer screens that dominate undergraduate education. Field work is different — researchers in the field are subject to forces beyond their control.

“It’s amazing and inspiring to have your office include clear mountain lakes in early summer,” Young said. “It’s also exhausting and hard when you realize you need to hike 40 miles in three days to get to enough lakes to get replicate samples of aquatic invertebrates at the same time. And then you get there and find that the snow didn’t melt and you have to snowshoe all those miles, or that a winter rockslide has wiped out all the vegetation you meant to study, or that a hurricane is coming your way, or that mosquito populations are going crazy this year and you are being eaten alive.”

But she wouldn’t trade any of the inconveniences of fieldwork if it meant not experiencing nature as it is — sometimes chaotic, sometimes harsh, often stunningly beautiful. “While many types of science can be done in the lab, natural systems are so large and complex that the questions can’t typically be taken out of the field and studied in sterile petri dishes or test-tubes,” Young said. Turns out, the noise and complexity in the field from which raw data must be collected are essential to understanding ecosystems and making informed predictions and management decisions for their — and our — future.

But field scientists are also witness to — and agents of — astonishing feats of resilience. To wit: state fisheries biologist Phil Pister, who in 1969 saved a rare species of local Owens Valley pupfish from extinction by carrying the entire population across the desert in two buckets. More recently, UCSB biologist Roland Knapp and his collaborators reported the success of their 17-year effort to revive the populations of the Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog, an amphibian that had only a decade ago disappeared from 90% of its historical range high in the mountains thanks to a deadly chytrid virus.

The hands-on experience with nature and the contact with enthusiastic mentors and professors is in fact what caused Jannine Chamorro to shift from her original major to environmental science.

“I wanted to be out there looking at animals and understanding how the environment affects animals,” said the newly minted marine ecophysiologist, who serves as FUERTE’s academic coordinator. “But I never really knew how to get that job. I’d never met a scientist, ever.” To her mind, veterinary school was the closest she could get to working with animals, until she was introduced to ecology — physiological ecology, in particular — as an undergraduate researcher at UC Davis.

“That transformed everything for me,” said Chamorro, who received her Ph.D. from EEMB. “It incorporated all the things I was so interested in.”

Building community

The mountains, the valleys, the trees, the stars — they all have a way of convincing you that nature in the Eastern Sierras is timeless, eternal. Visitors can trace the paths worn by earlier settlers; the same Milky Way that has shone upon the Indigenous people of this land for millennia continues to amaze the new hiker, the seasoned researcher, and the nature student.

But the truth is that things are changing. A warming world brings the threat of more frequent, more intense wildfires, as well as worsening droughts in an already parched landscape. The imbalance threatens biodiversity, which weakens food webs, which will ultimately affect how animals, including humans, sustain themselves in this environment.

“Now, a lot of these impacts that are coming at us from climate change are not going to be evenly spread across the state, but the burden is going to fall on communities that are underserved, that are already shouldering a lot — these are some of our most diverse communities,” McCauley explained. “So we need smart scientists, we need environmental leaders that are there taking on all of those challenges and finding a way through these challenges for California.”

In ecology, a healthy community — all of its interacting species — do things that support each other: The sagebrush hosts hundreds of species and in particular the greater sage grouse. The Clark’s nutcracker, a high-flying relative of crows and ravens, builds stashes of pine nuts for the winter and inadvertently plants new trees. Similarly, building future environmental leaders means building up their community, teaching individuals how to come together and blend their skills and strengths.

“We literally talk about community building,” Hofmann said. “How do we want to behave as a field team? How do we express that we’re responsible for one another? We teach kindness and compassion, and very quickly they start to automatically support one another."