Students Integrating Academics and Conservation, University of Arizona
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Provide educational opportunities for University of Arizona students in the form exposure to cross-border conservation issues, biological diversity, and an array of topics in field biology. To accomplish this goal, we hope to continue to involve graduate students from a wide range of departments in weekend survey trips to the preserve. However, we also wish to greatly increase undergraduate involvement in the project. We believe that this project, through field trips and on-campus sample processing, provides great opportunities for a variety of courses at the University, including conservation biology, systematic botany, ornithology, entomology, and rangeland management.
Establish connections between the University of Arizona and education and conservation in Mexico. Across several of our trips to the preserve, we interacted with and conducted field work with conservation workers and university students from Sonora. These interactions were incredibly valuable: not only did we learn many things about Mexico and conservation in Mexico, but we also we able to mutually share some of our field and identification techniques. In the future, we hope to more actively build these collaborations, with both conservation groups in Sonora (e.g., BIDA), and also with students from college and universities in Sonora (e.g., University of Sonora).
Continue long-term monitoring of biological diversity at Los Fresnos. Los Fresnos provides important riparian and grassland habitats for rare and endangered plants and birds. Now that we have preliminary data on many of the birds, plants and insects found at Los Fresnos, we can begin longer-term monitoring programs that may be useful for conservation efforts not only at Los Fresnos, but also other areas in the region. These monitoring techniques, such as counting insects caught in sweep nets or sampling plants and comparing to reference collections, can be conducted by students from many different classes. Growth of long-term data sets on the biological diversity at the preserve will allow assessments of conservation value of various locales and eventually may permit publications on basic research questions in ecology and evolution.
Students from the conservation biology course heading back
to the ranch-house after a day surveying plants