Hidden in Harder: UCSB’s natural history museum

Thursday November 21, 2024 at 4:00 p.m.

While cheers erupt from students celebrating a game-winning goal, a quieter, yet equally momentous victory takes place just under the stomping feet — one for the preservation and knowledge of our natural surroundings. Encased in tall metal lockers, hundreds of bird and mammal specimens are taxidermied. Marine plants like lichen and seaweed are preserved and pressed onto cardstock, and reptiles are meticulously jarred in ethanol. These specimens, collected over time and managed by a team of directors, researchers and students, largely represent the evolving biodiversity of the Southern California coast.

“The Cheadle Center is a biodiversity science center and part of our multifaceted mission is to mobilize the UCSB Natural History Collections to enhance the quality of research in the academic community, to provide work and research opportunities for UCSB students, to inform restoration ecologists and conservationists in the Santa Barbara region and to widen the accessibility of biodiversity and ecological knowledge for everyone,” Gregory Wahlert, Shirley Tucker curator of biodiversity collections and botanical research at the Cheadle Center, said. Shirley Tucker, a retired botanist and previous student of Vernon Cheadle, supports the Shirley Tucker Curator position, created in 2015, to continue curation of the center’s specimens and propel research.

The Nexus toured the Cheadle Center with Wahlert and walked through all of the collections to gain a better understanding of the work being done there.

“The Cheadle Center is a science and research center that is part natural history museum and part center for ecological restoration and management,” Wahlert said.

Their vast collections of preserved organisms are home to hundreds of thousands of specimens collected mostly in California, but some specimens have originated in other states such as Arizona or countries such as Mexico. The Cheadle Center also contains a wide array of biodiversity, from seaweeds and flora to microscopic wasps and enormous great horned owls.

Many of these specimens have been collected over many years from different sources and varying locations, although many come from the central and southern coast of California. The Cheadle Center is working to digitize as many specimens as they can, according to Wahlert.

A visual of the breakdown by class of the Cheadle Center’s digitized vertebrate collection with the majority of specimens being from the Reptilia class and Aves class. (Andrew Liang / Daily Nexus)

Student interns play an active and important role in the maintenance and improvement of the Cheadle Center collections, as well as the digitization project and research. Lily Strange, a third-year microbiology and earth science double major, has been involved as a student museum curator since her freshman year.

“As a student curator, I work with the herbarium collection, the vertebrate collection, and then also occasionally, the herb chamber.” Strange said. “There’s certainly some [tasks] that stay the same, like record management, pressing or mounting herbarium specimens, making labels, that kind of thing.”

“I was really interested in natural history collections,” Strange said. “It’s really neat seeing, kind of the behind the scenes work. I wish more students knew about it.”

“Natural history collections play an important role in many areas of scientific inquiry because they represent a physical record of the biodiversity and ecological conditions of the area from where they were collected. The scientific community uses biodiversity data in order to investigate many questions in biology and climate change science,” Wahlert said.

Fourth-year art history major and student museum curator Izzy Devlin agrees.

“Without our preservation work, there’d be no way to tell how plants have moved, how the climate is changing and how that affects environments,” she said.

According to Devlin, maintaining these specimens is not a simple task, and organization is especially critical to the center’s work.

“Otherwise, everything gets lost and suddenly all your specimens are out of order and, even though they’re all there, it’s pretty much useless because you can’t find anything,” Devlin said.

Their work changes based on what management and preservation work is needed in the center.

“At one time, I had to chop off the toe pad of quails to send it [in the] mail to researchers in Berkeley who were doing genetic sampling,” Strange said.

Aside from cataloging, student interns also encounter unexpected obstacles to the preservation work they do. Strange detailed an infestation of dermestid beetles about a year ago that threatened the Cheadle Center’s collections.

“They’re essentially insects that’ll eat at collections, especially all of our dried-out vertebrate collections,” Strange said. “I had spent a lot of that quarter packing up birds and then hauling them into the freezer and freezing them, and you got to take them out to thaw so that the eggs can hatch and then refreeze them.”

The tribulations of the curators at the Cheadle Center only highlight the vital importance of the collections entrusted to them. Their work not only safeguards a physical record of our region’s natural history but also empowers scientific research that addresses pressing global challenges such as climate change and habitat loss. But the work of the Cheadle Center is not limited to their collections.

Apart from preserving and recording biodiversity within the Cheadle Center, ecological restoration is the other pillar of the center’s mission, with crucial projects currently taking place at the North Campus Open Space and the Ellwood Marine Terminal.

“North Campus Open Space is a big project we started in 2017, and we just continue to add endangered plants and animals and do research and find creative ways to manage the grassland,” Lisa Stratton, the director of ecosystem management for the Cheadle Center said in regards to one of the primary restoration projects.

The center also aims to work with the Chumash people to restore culture as well to these open spaces

“We engaged the Chumash [people] in that cultural burn [at the North Campus Open Space] last year. And then this year, we brought in sheep as a way to kind of work on managing these sorts of native grassland habitats. So that’s a research slash management interest,” Stratton said.

According to Stratton, a separate project at the Ellwood Marine Terminal is focused on removing oil tanks from the area and restoring the topographical landscape to its original state before the tanks were added. The Cheadle Center also aims to open up the space for public use by adding walking trails, gathering areas and bird-watching blinds.

In addition to these, Stratton detailed many other projects that are in the works, including those at the Storke Wetlands and Jalama Beach, an off-campus project in Lompoc.

“[The Storke Wetlands] are kind of fragments, partially filled, really impacted, so we have some little corners that we’re working on removing soil to get back down to salt marsh elevation or bringing in special, unique wetland plants that are suited for these certain sites,” Stratton said.

Similar work is also being done at Jalama Beach.

“We are also partnering with the Nature Conservancy out at [the Jack and Laura] Dangermond Preserve, and that’s that big area out by Jalama Beach that was preserved,” Stratton added. “We are doing restoration and research in partnership with them, and we have a lot of students who get to come out and experience this really remote kind of place.”

At restoration sites like the Campus Lagoon, North Campus Open Space and the Goleta Monarch Butterfly Grove, student workers are hired to replant valuable vegetation, monitor wildlife and help conduct controlled burns among other restoration activities, according to Stratton. Impactful educational progress is also advancing.

Map of ecological restoration sites including the North Campus Open Space and Ellwood Marine Terminal. (Source: Cheadle Center)

“There is a lot of students who are being trained to be environmental educators, and they’re getting to go out there and work with junior high and high school students from Lompoc schools, which don’t get a lot of opportunities to do field trips and give them experiences in [the Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve],” Stratton said.

Stratton explained that student interns also work with preschoolers from the Orfalea Family Children’s Center to teach them about nature in local areas.

However, such valuable work does not come for free.

“We have, I’d say, four funding streams,” Stratton said.

According to Stratton, the restoration work is primarily funded through a series of grants from the federal and state governments and non-governmental organizations, payments from UC Santa Barbara, payments from campus dorms and the Cheadle Center’s own endowment. The various dorms pay the Cheadle Center to maintain the wilderness areas around the dorms. The Cheadle Center is also responsible for restoring the Campus Lagoon.

Stratton said that the value from ecological restoration work lies not only in the environments themselves but in the psychological and social impacts they can have on the surrounding communities.

“For the community, like North Campus Open Space and the Ellwood Marine Terminal and the city of Goleta project, these are people’s backyards, essentially,” Stratton emphasized. This is their connection to nature and the coast and lifting up all that it could be. We don’t have to live with those problems.”

There are numerous opportunities for students to get involved with the Cheadle Center’s work. Positions are advertised through various listservs, including the environmental studies and art history email lists. Internship and course opportunities are offered through Handshake and several courses. Prospective students may also get involved by directly emailing the directors of the Cheadle Center: Lisa Stratton (stratton@ccber.ucsb.edu), Greg Wahlert (wahlert@ccber.ucsb.edu) and Katja Seltmann (seltmann@ccber.ucsb.edu).

Devlin stated that while she initially pursued an internship with the Cheadle Center to complete a major requirement, she has greatly enjoyed her time there as a student museum curator.

“Interns are a great asset here since we’re not the most funded institution,” Devlin said.

A version of this article appeared on p.12 and p.13 in the Nov. 21, 2024 print edition of the Daily Nexus.