By Nicole Pepper, Ricardo Patlan, Abir Hossain, Alison Chi, Brooke Shimasaki, Cali Nguyen, and James Javelosa. Edited by Melissa Ikeda.
The 2018 Sustainability Action Research Urban Nature Laboratory Team is developing ways to make the best use of UCLA’s Sage Hill, a natural area on campus. See what they’ve been up to Spring Quarter 2018!
Week 1: Jumping back in!
The Urban Nature Lab team is coasting into Spring Quarter. As we have completed our key informant interviews, this week we met up to discuss our next steps. So what’s to come? We are ready to tackle our off campus “best practices” research, where we will survey other universities on management practices for similar nature reserve areas.
Week 2: Strolling into week 2.
The team takes a stroll after this weeks meeting.
Week 3: Earth Day Fair!
Making Lemon, Sage shortbread cookies for our Earth Day Fair booth! These are our incentives to engage people to come to our table so we can share what we’ve been up to and have them take a short survey about what they want to see at Sage Hill & the Boneyard to bring more people there.
Earth Day Fair in action – Brooke is explaining to a fair attendee about what our project entails
James is getting Manali to take our survey. At the end of the fair, we got 73 responses in total!
Week 4: Team Bonding
All work and no play is just not the SAR way! Team members enjoyed spending time with one another after a long week of planning for the Earth Day Fair- which went swimmingly!
Week 5: Rebranding!
Using the same comprehensive survey we had at our Earth Day Fair table, we tried a cold-calling method by approaching people on South Campus to fill out our survey. Students were generally enthusiastic about participating and team members got to improve upon their elevator-pitch skills. (p.s, nice job Abir and Brooke!)
Since the scope of our project has been narrowed down, we have given ourselves a different team name and also plan on renaming our site from “the Boneyard” to something without a negative connotation. This is a sneak peek of what our project’s official name will be.
Week 6: Working hard (and playing hard) while compiling data!
Urban Nature Lab working hard (and playing hard) to compile data from on-campus surveys and research from off-campus nature reserves sites!
Week 7: Progress Report
The group discussed the progress made in reaching out to other organizations and college campuses with multi use spaces. Afterwards, everyone celebrates Cali’s birthday with lychee jelly and other snack to end a productive meeting.
Week 8: Continuing Interviews!
First and foremost, happy early birthday to our team member Abir! The celebration commenced with some donuts after the SAR weekly meeting.
After sharing a few donuts with other SAR members, we head outside for our team meetings. Here we discussed our off-campus plans and data collected from the interviews. Abir is still marvelling at his box of doughnuts.
During the meeting. A phone call from one of Abir’s site rang. Wasting no time,we had to set Abir up for his interview. It was an interview with a director from USCS.
SaveSave