Stanford Conservation Program

We are super excited to announce and celebrate the culmination of the Lagunita interpretive signage project!

Come out for a day of fun in the sun at Lagunita on June 1st!!! Stay for the raffle of some brand new conservation program stickers and merch—alongside live music and food, stewardship activities, and most importantly the unveiling of the brand new interpretive signage! Once the signs are up, you can learn all about Lagunita, including our local species, Lagunita's history and hydrology, the California tiger salamander, and more. Join us to celebrate all the hard work of our Conservation Program staff, our student interns and artists, the signage design team, campus planning, heritage services, and all of our other colleagues and collaborators who helped make this possible. See you there!!

Super bloom season 🌸☀️🌱

Drop by the Earth Systems student office any time between 11am and 1pm this Wednesday, March 6th to chat with Maddy and John from the Stanford Conservation Program and learn about our environmental stewardship work on campus. We're happy to share all about our work at Lagunita, salamanders, native planting, wildfire fuel management, and more, and chat about opportunities with the Conservation Program, including support on your projects. Snacks will be provided!

From our winter quarter newsletter—check it out if you haven't already, link in bio!

This quarter, I'd like to take some time and write about the California tiger salamander as I sit and lament the end of their glorious migration season. As you learned earlier, Ambystoma californiense (or the CTS, as they are affectionately known at the Conservation Program), are a species of mole salamander which migrate to seasonal wetland ponds each winter in search of a mate. Females lay eggs during the rainy months which hatch in the following months. The newly hatched salamanders live out their larval stage in these ponds, sporting gills and undeveloped legs and feeding on fairy shrimp and other small invertebrates before undergoing metamorphosis and becoming fully grown salamanders of their own. Adult salamanders spend the rest of the dry year living in underground burrows.

The California tiger salamander is a federal- and state-protected species of particular conservation concern on Stanford's campus, where they are threatened by non-native predation, habitat fragmentation, disease, and increasingly unreliable rainfall. But, for the record, the filling of Lagunita does not threaten the species; rather, the salamander lavishes in the expanded wetland habitat (in the absence of nuisance boaters and off-leash dogs, that is). Though rainfall on campus is still picking up, we at the Conservation Program will soon bid farewell to our annual pitfall trapping (and the wandering CTS) as the salamanders wrap up their breeding season. Until next year!

A daring escape? One can dream...

Happy Tiger Salamander Thursday! This morning, we checked our pitfall traps and found several California Tiger Salamanders, who are currently migrating in the recent rainy weather. Here, we are getting photographs of this salamander for our data collection, after weighing and measuring it and before letting it back on its way into a nearby burrow.

Thanks to everyone who made it out to our planting day today! :)

Interested in art/illustration? Love nature, too?
Combine your interests by submitting artwork to potentially be featured in signage for Lagunita!

Lagunita is a diverse and dynamic ecosystem where many California native species thrive. Stanford students and staff, with the help of professional designers, are working on new educational signage with the goal of deepening the connection between Lagunita’s wildlife and its human visitors.

The design team is currently looking for artwork to represent some of Lagunita’s key species and how those species interact with the ecosystem through the year. For more information and specific art prompts to get you started, follow the link below!

Key Details:
each selected piece will receive $100
any medium accepted, but must be digitized
minimum 8x8 inch
submit by Feb. 1

Key Species:
Tarantula, Fairy shrimp, Monarch butterfly, Ground squirrel, Killdeer

More Information: http://bit.ly/41nTuaG
Contact: [email protected]

We are excited to announce our first community work day of the new year! Join us Saturday, January 20th to help with habitat restoration along Deer Creek. Please RSVP using the link in our bio, and bring a friend!

This week's views from the field—happy Friday!

Lake Lag—as it’s affectionately known—actually isn’t a lake. Lagunita is a naturally occurring wetland on Stanford’s campus, specifically, it’s a vernal pool. This means Lagunita collects water during the rainy season and naturally dries in the dry season. The species native to Lagunita are adapted to this type of environment. For example, the California Tiger Salamander—a species listed by the federal and state endangered species acts—lives and breeds at Lagunita. Tiger salamanders love the water, and they need it to breed, but they can also live for years in burrows on land, waiting for a season with enough water to emerge and lay eggs.

This past winter was particularly rainy, and Lagunita filled with water. While the tiger salamanders were enjoying the extra full wetland, old lore and misinformation were circulating amongst the humans on campus. Concerns about the negative impact of this misinformation on the life in Lagunita lead a group of students to start the Lagunita Signage Project with the goal of installing educational to inspire greater care for the other organisms thriving there, both when the basin is wet and when it’s dry.

If you want to get involved with the Lagunita Signage Project, we would love to have you in any capacity! If you want to show your love for Lagunita by getting involved with this project, please sign up using the link in our bio.


Photos: Alan Launder & Mitchell Zimmerman

Happy Friday! This week, our field technicians have been hard at work on our fire fuels management project.

Stanford’s ecosystems, like many in California, have experienced decades of fire suppression. In an effort to reduce the risk of high severity fire on Stanford property, Stanford has been implementing vegetation management consistent with the Stanford Wildfire Management Plan. Tree thinning, branch trimming, and shrub removal can mimic the effects of fire and help to maintain native grasslands and create sufficient spacing between trees so that individual trees can thrive.

Some of this week's encounters: a wandering Monarch caterpillar, and a tarantula just in time for Halloween Season!🕷️🎃

Our beloved local tarantulas, Aphonopelma iodius, live underground most of the year but go wandering in search of mates in late summer and early fall. However, they have very small venom glands and their bite is no more painful than a bee sting. But don't worry, our field technicians were keeping a close watch on the lil guy anyway. Happy Friday!

Join us for our first volunteer work day of the new school year! We will meet at the dish trailhead at the Stanford Avenue entrance. RSVP using the QR code or the link in our bio.