May 2016
SEEDS Fundraiser
May 26, 2016
Did you come get frozen yogurt with us on Monday? If you did, you helped support all of the wonderful things SEEDS does, such as having camping trips, field trips, and other events through out the year! Doing fundraisers helps us insure that SEEDS can keep providing top notch events without costing anyone that wants to participate much money, which is important for many students. Next time SEEDS has a fundraiser, please attend and bring your friends so that we can keep doing awesome things!
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Tahoe Camping Trip
May 26, 2016
This past weekend we had our annual Tahoe camping trip! The cold (and snow) couldn’t stop us from having a great trip with some amazing hikes and tours! We went on several hikes throughout the weekend. One of the hikes even lead us to a beautiful waterfall hidden in the Sierra Nevada mountains. We even got to hike around Fallen Leaf Lake and found many interesting plants. We even found a tree that was big enough that we were all able to fit inside its fire scar!
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We also got a tour of the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC), where we learned about the issues facing the lake and the research UC Davis is doing to protect the lake. We got to learn a lot about why the lake is naturally so clear along with how the lake itself was formed through the carving of glaciers and tectonic activity directly under the lake. We also learned about how food webs in the lake have changed due to invasive species and how those invasive species got there in the first place. There was also a demonstration of the way that TERC measures many important aspects of the lake, such as clearness.
We also got to bond with fellow SEEDlings and eat lots of delicious camping food, along with getting to experience the beauty of the Sierra Nevada mountains!
We also got to bond with fellow SEEDlings and eat lots of delicious camping food, along with getting to experience the beauty of the Sierra Nevada mountains!
Herbarium Workshop
May 18, 2016
At our most recent meeting, we were lucky enough to have Ellen Dean from the UC Davis Herbarium come teach us a little bit about plant identification and the importance of preserving pressed plants for the future. We got to use Jepson Manuals to identify the plants we collected and pressed at the McLaughlin reserve in early May.
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We were able to identify several of our plants. It turns out that we even collected a plant that the UC Davis Herbarium didn’t have in its collection! We donated the plant to the herbarium, which makes Davis SEEDS contributors to the collection!
This was a very cool workshop and we even got to do some more creative art projects with the pressed flowers we had left over after identification. |
2016-2017 OFFicers!
May 11, 2016
Congrats to our 2016-2017 SEEDS officers! We have many new and returning officers this year. This is a great group of people and they will definitely make sure that the next year of SEEDS events will be a great one! Please make sure to congratulate our new officers if you see them!
2016-2017 OfficersJenna Yonenaga – Co-President
Ann Le – Co-President
Emma Hansen-Smith – Secretary
Seth Strumwasser – Co-Research Coordinator
Asa Holland – Co-Research Coordinator
Lillie Oravets – Fundraising Coordinator
Brianna Garcia – Outreach Coordinator
Catherine Nguyen – Grant Writer
Dylan Chiu – Treasurer
2016-2017 OfficersJenna Yonenaga – Co-President
Ann Le – Co-President
Emma Hansen-Smith – Secretary
Seth Strumwasser – Co-Research Coordinator
Asa Holland – Co-Research Coordinator
Lillie Oravets – Fundraising Coordinator
Brianna Garcia – Outreach Coordinator
Catherine Nguyen – Grant Writer
Dylan Chiu – Treasurer
Eco Explorer Photography
May 10, 2016
Another one of our amazing SEEDlings, Gabriella Garcia, has been taking beautiful photographs of birds around California for her Art/Science Fusion Photography Honors Capstone Project at UC Davis. She will have descriptions and other information about the different species on her website. Please visit her website and like her Facebook page!
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Wild California Documentary
May 10, 2016
We have a lot of SEEDlings in our chapter that do a lot of amazing things! Including creating documentary films! Andy Parks, who is one of our members, recently finished part 3 of his documentary about different communities in the Central Valley. The documentary includes sections on California riparian, wetland, and grassland communities. It is a very interesting documentary full of wonderful information about what can be found right around us. Please take the time to watch it if you haven’t already had the chance!
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McLaughlin Field Trip
May 2, 2016
This weekend, members of SEEDS took a trip out to the McLaughlin Natural Reserve, which is one of the 39 natural reserves in the UC system. It also happens to be the home to lots of serpentine soil, which is low in nutrients and high in heavy metals. Because the serpentine soil is so resource poor, it leads to lots of specialized plants that can handle the harsh soil and are only found on serpentine. Many of these plants are rare or endangered.
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We got to see lots of amazing plants and even got to learn how to press flowers! We will be using the flowers we pressed at one of our future meetings in order to learn to prepare plants for a herbarium. We also got to learn about the research our graduate student adviser, Moria Robinson, is conducting at the McLaughlin reserve. Her research focuses on the relationships herbivorous insects maintain with their host plants and natural enemies. Along with pressing flowers and learning about research on the reserve, we also found some amazing insects that we were lucky enough to catch, including a swallowtail butterfly and lots of caterpillars! We even got to see an osprey working on expanding its nest when we walked down to the lake to eat lunch! It was a very fun (and tiring) trip and we are excited to see how the flowers we pressed will turn out!
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