Blogs

The Anthropocene has arrived, and at Jasper Ridge, we have been using a record of the past century archived in Searsville Reservoir to understand what that means. The Anthropocene is being proposed as a new geologic epoch by an international group of investigators, to recognize an emerging body of evidence that humans have changed the planet so dramatically that the... more

Ecology is full of scientific names. Escherichia coli, Homo sapiens, Canis lupis . You’ve probably heard of these before. But what about Ixodes pacificus, Dermacentor occidentalis , or Haemaphysalis longicornis ? What are these? And more importantly, who cares? The three species listed above are commonly known as the western black-legged tick, the Pacific Coast tick, and the Asian longhorned... more

Over the course of my first year at Stanford, I became increasingly interested in how people interact with their landscapes. I came to Stanford set on majoring in earth systems, but I accidentally fell in love with art history when I got here. As I navigated my first year, I began to contemplate how the sciences and the humanities overlap... more

Throughout my entire Stanford career as an Earth Systems major, I have focused on learning about the many different intersections of the ecological and human dimensions in environmental science. I still remember sitting in Earth Systems 10 during my sophomore year watching Rodolfo Dirzo’s lecture on how the study of biodiversity in Latin America is strongly connected to the country’s... more

In these turbulent times of environmental and social unrest, rigorous study, personal (and collective) appreciation, and active protection of our planet’s beautiful biological and cultural diversity, can serve as critical tools to help us address the increasingly steep trajectory of such crisis. Globally and regionally much damage has been done, but there is still much action that we can take... more

According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service around 45 million Americans are birders, so it’s a pretty good bet that you have an idea of what birders do: They wander across fields, along shorelines and through woods, peering frequently through some optical device or other, and—increasingly—tapping away on their phones to record sightings. So don’t bird photographers do pretty... more

May and June of 2019 were busy months filled with educational and outreach activities here at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. The activities and everyone I have met in the Jasper Ridge community made me feel both the 1975 spirit that has persisted since the educational programs began and the 21st century energy of our current students! Our educational programs were... more

The Jasper Ridge herbarium team has monitored plants on the Preserve for 25 years carrying on the fieldwork tradition of Herb Dengler, John Thomas and many prominent botanists, spanning 150 years. Because the local flora is rich, the rewards of fieldwork are reaped year after year as plants and docents come and go. In October, Diane Renshaw and Rebecca Reynolds... more

Counting ants is a study in irony and mindfulness. And why would you count them anyway? The answer lies in human curiosity and our quest to understand just what is wild. For 25 years, each spring and each fall, a dedicated group of volunteers – scientists, naturalists, and citizen scientists – has counted the ants in Jasper Ridge. They have... more

Birds are the only terrestrial animal group that connects the globe. This may partly explain why they so captivate the imagination of humans: the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 2013 estimated that there are 47 million bird-watchers in the United States alone. Some birds, like the red knot, travel tens of thousands of miles between the poles each year... more