COSAM E-newsletter, May 2011
Students Get Ready to Track Hi Mountain Wildlife, Plant Life
The view from Hi Mountain Lookout
Photo courtesy Nancy Reid
SAN LUIS OBISPO -- Cal Poly’s Hi Mountain Lookout project is going into its 10th year this summer. This year, the university will send four paid student interns to staff the remote Forest Service lookout station in the Los Padres National Forest, halfway between Lopez Lake and Santa Margarita on the Central Coast.
The interns will be taking shifts monitoring designated mountain areas to document plant and wildlife numbers and species, as well as using radio telemetry to search for any nearby California Condors. The Condor work done by the interns benefits several Condor Recovery Program collaborators, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Pinnacles National Monument, and the Ventana Wildlife Society. The inventories on plants and wildlife provide data for Climate Change and Fire Ecology studies being conducted in collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service. Through the project, the students gain field research skills working on the projects.
The Cal Poly interns are funded by the U.S. Forest Service, and stay in the Forest Service lookout station for three days at a time in teams of two through the university’s summer quarter. Additional student volunteers also help with research at the station.
The long-term study on the Hi Mountain environment will allow the university to compare pre-fire plant and animal diversity to post-fire data should the area ever be the site of a wildfire. According to supervising Professor Francis Villablanca of the Biological Sciences Department, it’s a study that has not yet been done in the western United States. A climate change study is also taking shape.
Biological Sciences staff at a Hi Mountain workday
Photo courtesy Nancy Reid
The Hi Mountain project’s budget is tight; Villablanca and a team of five Cal Poly Biological Sciences and two Forest Service staff spent two days at the lookout station in March, making repairs and getting it ready for students to inhabit.
Private support could allow the Hi Mountain environmental monitoring program to expand. Villablanca’s hope is to eventually be able to staff Hi Mountain Lookout with four Cal Poly interns in spring and summer quarter. Spring would be essential for improving the quality of the breeding bird data collected in the study, Villablanca said.
To check in on the Hi Mountain Lookout and its projects, visit http://condorlookout.org/.