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General
This year, Channel Islands Restoration (CIR) has increased our capacity for conservation along the Central Coast! Our field operations team has nearly doubled to accommodate habitat restoration work in Santa Barbara, Santa Paula, Malibu, Thousand Oaks, the Gaviota Coast, and the Channel Islands, to name a few of our project sites.
We are incredibly grateful for your philanthropic support that has made it possible for us to provide educational opportunities for children and adults. Your support, large or small, is also critical to the continued ecological improvements being made for our local wetlands, grasslands, and woodlands throughout the Coast.
On one side of a path in the idyllic hills of Santa Barbara, a dense clump of dried out mustard rises more than six feet. Meanwhile, just across the way, the invasive plant is thinned to wisps.
Carolyn Chaney, 77, pointed out the difference in vegetation and also provided the reason: sheep.
“This is where they’ve been,” she said, pointing to the cleared patch of land.
Chaney would know. She’s a regular sheep docent at the 300-acre San Marcos Foothills Preserve, owned by Santa Barbara County and located between Santa Barbara and Goleta.
Our backcountry trips into the Los Padres National Forest are underway! The objective of these trips is to restore and maintain habitat for riparian dependent species such as the federally listed arroyo toad, California red-legged frog and steelhead trout.
A tremendous thank you to everyone you could join us for our trip to Santa Rosa Island last week and we hope you enjoyed the event. It was wonderful to see everyone together again on the Channel Islands. A big thank you to our extraordinary guides and sweeps for providing insight and knowledge throughout the entire day!
Join Rare Plant Ecologist, Kevin Alison, as he discusses an advanced method of propagating plants to conserve rare, endangered, and difficult-to-grow plants. When all traditional forms of propagation fail, Kevin at the Catalina Island Conservancy utilized micropropagation (also known as Plant Tissue Culture) to grow rare plants in test tubes.
Being part of the World Oceans Day 2023 festival was an absolute honor. The Sea Center welcome Channel Islands Restoration and other community partners to make the event a success. From the moment we set up our booth, there was a sea of smiling faces eager to engage with our activities.
Carol Gravelle, a long-time volunteer for CIR and a fairly new member of our Board said to me recently, “I’m an island gal, but what you showed us from your desert trip looks amazing!” Maybe only a few of you attended CIR’s annual trips to Death Valley National Park and other locations in the Mojave Desert. Over the course of more than a decade, botanist Steve Junak and geologist Tanya Atwater took us to dozens of amazing desert locales, on trips that sold out just about every year.
Some may remember how the 2023 rainy season began. A few gentle rains in October and November and by News Years we had a nice manageable germination of weeds happening across all our project sites. Conditions were very favorable, and we assumed we would be starting early on many of our projects.
On February 28th, Channel Islands Restoration (CIR) staff gathered at Fillmore City Hall for professional development and knowledge sharing. The workshop aimed to provide field techs with some bilingual skills and riparian knowledge, supporting effective communication between crews in the field and enhancing their understanding of restoration work and related topics such as ecology and natural resource protection.
We’re all rightfully concerned about climate change and global warming, and most of us are taking actions on a daily basis to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions in our lives; actions like driving less and moving towards electrification of our lives with the electricity generated by renewable sources like wind and solar.
A few hours away from Santa Barbara and Ventura, the Carrizo Plain is a hidden gem that will allow our community to view the full bloom of California poppies, lupines, goldfields, fiddlenecks, phacelias, owl's clover, and blue dicks that are seen during late March or early April, coinciding with our trip date.
For many years CIR has contemplated forming a docent program at the San Marcos Foothills to help share these stories. Nearly a decade in the making, the San Marcos Foothills Educational Docent Program will now provide opportunities for those who love nature to pass on mind-blowing environmental principles to their friends and neighbors who visit the Preserve. It will also provide the opportunity to learn from Chumash people about their traditions and connections to the land.
The goal of the docent program is to provide information and to engage in conversation with visitors of the Foothills. We need your help with explaining this restoration project to people visiting the West Mesa.
One special element of the San Marcos Foothills West Mesa is the perennial spring in the northwest corner that provides the only natural, year-round water source on the entire San Marcos Foothills. The spring was likely used to provide water for cattle during ranching times. At some undetermined point in the past, a long metal pipe was inserted in the hillside at the top of a small arroyo. This pipe apparently converted a natural seep into a controlled stream of water that falls into a bathtub, perhaps placed there at the same time. Water accumulates to as much as 7 to 10 inches in depth, depending on the state of repair of the tub that has cracks in the bottom.
Painted Cave is a sea cave on the north shore of Santa Cruz Island, thought to be the fourth largest sea cave in length in the world and second largest in volume in the US. With weather and tides permitting, Island Packers Captains can make the decision to immerse the boat completely within the cave. The entrance is over 130 feet high, over 100 feet wide and over 1200 feet in length. Naturally occurring algae and lichens give Painted Cave its artist’s palate appearance.
KEYT Santa Barbara news covered Channel Islands Restoration’s 20th anniversary gathering at Manning Park in Montecito on October 22nd, 2022. The event was held in celebration of CIR’s 20 year history as an environmental organization and habitat restoration contractor, providing a variety of services to the Central Coast, Santa Barbara County, Ventura County, and of course the Channel Islands. Watch KEY’s full coverage of the 20th Anniversary event below.
Thank you to the Santa Barbara Noozhawk team for covering our 501(c)(3) environmental nonprofit in your latest news story. Written by Ray Ford, the Noozhawk article covers the history of Channel Islands Restoration and our growth as a nonprofit organization over the last 20 years.
We help support local Santa Barbara businesses through our sponsorship programs! Channel Islands Restoration puts together educational events every year that bring together volunteers, supporters, students, and friends who are interested in furthering the sustainability of our natural world on the Central Coast.
At some point toward the end of a busy 2021, I rather suddenly realized that CIR had been in existence for nearly 20 years. One-third of my life had gone by in that time, and it was the most productive and personally satisfying time of my nearly 60 years.
