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Red toyon berries hang over sagebrush at Sage Hill
Toyon is an important native species at Sage Hill. It's bright red berries show up around the holidays and provide an important food source for birds.

Practicum Project | 2023

A restoration and monitoring plan for Sage Hill

Sage Hill Restoration Senior Practicum Team
The 2023-2024 Sage Hill Practicum Team.

Student Team: Bec Chenowith, Kolby Emison, Jacqueline Gonzalez Hurtado, Isaac Law, Angela Sarunchartinonth, Sarah Schmitt, and Emma Strassner

Client: UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability

Advisor: Dr. Andy Kleinhesselink

A hillside covered in wildflowers at Sage Hill including bush monkeyflower, purple nightshade, and bush sunflower.
A profusion of native and exotic species cover Sage Hill in the spring. Flowers include purple nightshade (Solanum xantii), southern bush monkeyflower (Diplacus longiflorus), California bush sunflower (Encelia californica) and exotic short-pod mustard (Hirschfeldia incana).

How should we restore Sage Hill?

As the largest natural area left on the UCLA campus, Sage Hill is a unique setting for undergraduate education and research, and it offers a place for students to spend time in nature, a practice that promotes wellbeing and mental health. Despite its small acreage, Sage Hill supports hundreds of native plant, mammal, insect, and avian species. Nevertheless, many parts of Sage Hill are recovering from disturbance and are dominated by non-native exotic plant species. In order to help Sage Hill reach its full potential as a reservoir of native biodiversity, we are restoring its native vegetation and reintroducing native species that have been lost.

A barplot showing native and exotic vegetation cover at Sage Hill for forbs, grass, and shrubs

Seven students in the 2023-24 IoES Senior Practicum took an important step towards this goal by developing a restoration and monitoring plan for Sage Hill. First, they took stock of the current vegetation and soil conditions at Sage Hill using manual line-intercept monitoring, soil analysis, and high resolution drone imagery. These data paint our most detailed picture yet of the current state of Sage Hill. Vegetation data will be collected in the same way each spring which will help us evaluate restoration success over time. This is a key principle in effective ecological restoration programs worldwide (Gann et al. 2020). Previous IoES Practicum teams have also focused on Sage Hill, including reports outlining a vision for Sage Hill as an educational resource, documenting its use by students and classes, and a strategy for controlling non-native vegetation.

But how exactly should we restore Sage Hill’s native vegetation? Which native species should be replanted and where? To answer these questions, the practicum team used GIS to partition Sage Hill into 19 distinct microhabitats and assigned each of these a target for vegetation restoration. The team decided on appropriate vegetation types for each area by consulting vegetation data and atlases for the Santa Monica Mountains published by the National Park Service and the California Native Plant Society (Keeler-Wolf and Evans 2006; Mendelsohn et al. 2023).

A map showing color coded restoration zones at Sage Hill
The map above divides Sage Hill into distinct microhabitats each of which with a target vegetation for restoration. This serves as a blueprint for our restoration, helping us decide what to plant and where.

In addition to the vegetation data, students compiled a set of historical and contemporary images that track changes in Sage Hill’s vegetation from the 1960’s to today. These photos show how the site’s environment and vegetation has changed starting with the construction of the campus in the 1920’s to today. Repeat photography in the future from the same locations will help us track restoration progress over time.

Comparison of historical photograph (left) to contemporary photograph (right) shows the recovery of Sage Hill’s vegetation over the past 60 years. In 1963, much of the native vegetation was removed. Since then, undergraduate led restoration has helped re-establish a number of native species on the site.

The practicum team, packaged more photos, along with vegetation data, and restoration maps into an Arc Story Map available here: https://arcg.is/1H8fvb.

Sage Hill at UCLA acknowledges the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar (the Los Angeles basin and So. Channel Islands). As a land grant institution, we pay our respects to the Honuukvetam (Ancestors), ‘Ahiihirom (Elders) and ‘Eyoohiinkem (our relatives/relations) past, present and emerging.

Our Restoration PlanDownload

Bibliography

Gann, G. D., T. McDonald, B. Walder, J. Aronson, C. R. Nelson, J. Jonson, J. G. Hallett, C. Eisenberg, M. R. Guariguata, J. Liu, and others. 2019. International principles and standards for the practice of ecological restoration. Restoration ecology 27:S1–S46. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/rec.13035.

Mendelsohn, M., J. Tiszler, and T. Sagar. 2023. Vegetation monitoring in the Santa Monica Mountains and Simi Hills region: 2014 – 2020 annual report. National Park Service. https://doi.org/10.36967/2300992.

Sawyer, J. O., T. Keeler-Wolf, and J. M. Evans. 2006. A Manual of California Vegetation Online. Second Edition. California Native Plant Society, Sacramento, CA. http://vegetation.cnps.org/.

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