Valerie Cassity - Special to the Sun

During the first three weeks in June, Audubon California’s Kern River Preserve hosted 13 researchers from UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, who are conducting a five-year intensive study of the fauna of all of California’s ecosystems. Their work follows similar studies by scientist Joseph Grinnell 100 years prior, and the data collected will show the change in California’s birds and mammals during the past century.

Grinnell co-founded the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley in 1908, and his surveys were always meant to be used as a frame of reference in the future. He led surveys organized into transects in different eco-zones in California, and meticulously took samples of every vertebrate found in the state to be studied and documented. In 1910, he stated, 'At this point I wish to emphasize what I believe will ultimately prove to be the greatest purpose of our museum. This value will not, however, be realized until the lapse of many years, possibly a century, assuming that our material is safely preserved. And this is that the student of the future will have access to the original record of faunal conditions in California and the west, wherever we now work.' Taking this to heart, UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology is now resurveying the very areas their founder did a century ago. They have completed their studies on the largest transects in Lassen and Yosemite, and have moved in to the Southern Sierras this year to continue the research. The teams have already found a shift in vertebrate habitat elevation, which they theorize is the result of rising temperatures.

The project consists of three teams each focusing on a different aspect of the surveys. The first is a bird point count; the second team is in charge of bird collecting and doing a systematic pencil census and taking tissue and feather samples to do genetic comparisons; and the third team is in charge of mammal trapping. 'The surveys are important in this area as the landscape transitions from the coastal region to the Mojave,' explained Staff Curator of Birds and team leader Carla Cicero.

The team will return to the Kern Valley in September to conduct further surveys to document changes in the diversity and distributions of small mammals and birds in this area. The data from all areas resurveyed after Grinnell’s studies a century ago will be used to test the performance of model-based predictions of species’ responses to changes in climate and land-cover, improving current understanding of wildlife’s ability to adapt to change in the long-term. 'We wouldn’t be able to do this if we didn’t have the legacy of historical field notes and specimens,' said Cicero. 'Grinnell was very meticulous and far sighted and wanted to preserve the information he gathered for the future.'

The UC Berkeley teams are also doing their studies with an eye on the future. Their project has two goals: the first to collect the data and compare it with what Grinnell discovered 100 years before, and the second to standardize the studies so that they can be done again for comparison in the next 100 years.

To learn more about the studies being done and what has been discovered thus far, visit www.mvz.berkeley.edu.