Local Ecologist

I've been listening to NPR and television broadcasts on the fires in San Diego County: 100,000 acres burned, 500,000 people evacuated, 1,000,000,000 in damages to houses, businesses, and infrastructure. Ron Roberts, San Diego County Board of Supervisors Chairman, told Jim Lehrer that the major contributors to the fires are weather related: fast winds, high temperature, and low humidity. Neither Roberts nor other people interviewed mentioned the role of trees in the fires. I find this incredibly interesting because vegetation is usually mentioned as a contributing factor in fires. In fact, a new term - firescape - has been developed to describe fire-related residential landscape design. Reuters/Mike Blake; Max Whittaker (right) In the East Bay, trees are a significant factor in fire safety plans for the hills. UC Berkeley and the City of Oakland have plans to remove eucalyptus from the hills. The university plan is being opposed by the Hills Conservation Network, a 10-m

In September and October I wrote about specialty book stores in Berkeley. The current issue of Via , the AAA magazine, has an article about "amazing and unusual" bookstores found in northern California and Nevada. Via recommends Kepler's Books and Magazines in Menlo Park; Carpe Diem Fine Books in Monterey; Dark Carnival in Berkeley (one of our recommendations); Gallery Bookshop and Bookwinkle's Children's Books in Mendocino; Garden Bookstore in Golden Gate Park; Mark Twain Bookstore in Virginia City, Nevada; and Friends of the Stockton Library Book Store (Berkeley Public Library has a stand alone book store in the Channing-Durant alleyway). Speaking of the library, I returned Zola's The Belly of Paris and borrowed The Unnnatural History of Cypress Parish (Elise Blackwell) and Edward Trencom's Nose (Giles Milton, author of Nathaniel's Nutmeg) . I came across these two books while browsing the new fiction section of the Main branch in downtown

  Taken after noon during a windy spell As an enthusiastic member of the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association (BPWA), I attend as many events as possible. I woke up two hours before the start of today's Harvest Walk because I intended to walk leisurely to the meeting point - the North Berkeley BART station. A typical morning includes reading the New York Times , but an article about croquet absorbed my attention until 9:30 a.m. Realizing I no longer had time for a walk - certainly not a leisurely one - I quickly left the house and hoped to take a bus as far as Shattuck and Delaware, then walk briskly to the BART station. I did not have any luck. A #51 drove by as I reached the Downtown BART station, so decided to take the BART for one stop to North Berkeley. I missed the 9:42 Fremont train and waited 20 minutes for the next one. (BART is a commuter train, not a rapid transit train.) In spite of the wait, I did not miss the start of the walk. I arrived at North Berkeley

The Fremont Park neighborhood in Sacramento - home to Fremont Park and former Mandella Community Gardens - is one of the city's oldest districts. The park itself is one of the oldest open spaces in the city; according to Mark Francis (1987), it dates "back to the days of Sutter's Fort and the California gold rush." Francis compared the different meanings users and non-users attach to parks and community gardens using Fremont Park and its neighbor, Mandella Community Garden (now Fremont Community Garden) and concluded that "parks provide for many activities that cannot be engaged in a community garden and vice versa." Furthermore, Francis foregrounded the need for alternative open spaces with his finding that community "garden users typically are not park users." I have read Francis's study several times and wanted to see if his observations still held in 2007. During a recent trip to Sacramento, I toured Fremont Park and the former Mand

There are many ways to arrange a tree: a bosque, an allee, a single row, or a specimen. There are also many ways to prune trees. I have noticed more pollarded trees in the East Bay than in other areas of the U.S. (I have heard that San Francisco is the most European American city.) The technique was developed in rural forests (woodlands) to ensure a quick, steady supply of firewood. The technique was adapted to city trees to create a narrow crown for the cramped street conditions of industrial cities. My tree botany sensibilities override my appreciation for the technique's aesthetics. I prefer trees whose crowns exhibit a more natural growth pattern. This preference is influenced in part by the ecosystem benefits of large-statured trees which tend to have large crowns. (Most pollards are large-statured tree species like the London plane tree or sycamore.) Studies have shown that large trees, and by implication trees with large crowns, provide more shade and thus more e

local ecology and local ecologist are participants in Blog Action Day . This photograph was taken on Friday, October 12, the first full day of rain this season. I was struck by two things: (1) the volume of runoff along the sidewalk and street and (2) the inability of the soil in the tree well to absorb throughfall and stem flow water. In the Bay Area, the fall is the best time to plant trees and other vegetation. Our neighborhoods and cities need more trees, but we should also maintain our existing trees. One type of maintenance is improving soil permeability so that less of our rainfall becomes runoff. The decomposition of mulch helps to aerate the soil; lower layers of vegetation - planted simultaneously with a new tree to prevent root damage - also helps to maintain soil permeability. For established trees, the soil can be aerated by carefully creating two-inch wide, twelve-inch deep, (avoid cutting the large, woody roots) and filling the holes with pea gravel, sand, or a

This weekend I was lucky enough to ride on the abbreviated redux of the Hidden Gems Tour held in May. I started on the May tour but my a rear tire puncture forced me to leave the tour. Saturday's tour was again led by John Steere, president of Berkeley Partners for Parks (one of the sponsors of the May tour) and avid Berkeley historian! Along the way I took photographs and made notes; the photo map below is one product of my and (John's) observations. There are numerous mapping technologies available to neighborhood geographers. I used Pixagogo for the photo map (below), but am using Map My Ride to develop a route map. The latter will be appended to this post as soon as it is completed. Other photo mapping tools include Wayfaring (used to developed the Solar Panels in Berkeley map), Flickr, Picassa, and Platial. Map My Ride (Run; Walk)and Gmaps Pedometer are the only route-based mapping tools I have encountered. Pixagogo Photo Maps

In the last Tree Walk Wednesday post, I highlighted the upcoming California ReLeaf conference, but failed to include the November 14 Ella Baker Center discussion panel Green Cities, Brown Folks . The panel, as in previous years, will advocate for the role of people of color in the urban environmental movement. The event will be held at the Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1330 Lakeshore Avenue, Oakland, between 6 and 8 p.m., with a reception starting at 5:30 p.m. RSVP to Maka at maka@ellabakercenter.org or 510-428-3939 x247. Speaking of people of color and the environmental movement, Wangari Muta Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her project, the Green Belt Movement. This year's Peace Prize awardees are Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Al Gore is decidedly not a person of color, but his elevation of the effects of climate change in the popular imagination and in policy circles has positive implications for cities (increasingly

The 2007 California Urban Forest Conference , The Professions, Cultures and Communities that Shape our Urban Forests , will be held on November 1 to 3, 2007 at the Cathedral Hill Hotel in San Francisco. Presentations will made about Palo Alto's urban forestry program, the California Climate Action Registry Greenhouse Gas Accounting Protocols for Urban Forestry and the City of San Francisco's "Better Streets Plan." The conference is sponsored by California Releaf, a state-wide nonprofit that provides technical, advocacy, and financial support for community and urban forestry programs.

local ecologist will participate in Blog Action Day by writing an environmentally-themed post on October 15. We here at local ecologist blog about neighborhood nature quite often so we are accustomed to writing about the environment. But what specific issue should we focus on? You can participate by emailing us your topical suggestions. If you'd like to officially participate in Blog Action Day, register your blog and choose all or any combination of three options (post on your blog; donate your earnings; promote Blog Day). [via Garden Rant ]

Oakland looking west from a downtown office. The area of Berkeley now known as Westbrae was once a coastal prairie. A portion of this neighborhood, along the Ohlone Greenway, is being restored as coastal prairie by the California Habitat Indigenous Activists or CHIA. (I recently wrote about seed collecting with CHIA.) Also along the Westbrae portion of the greenway is a moral depicting the landscape changes in the area. Click here for a larger version.

The colour made me stop. I made a u-turn with my bicycle so I could photograph a row of Liquidambar styraciflua , or sweetgums (below). The red leaves were like liquid amber against the drab backdrop of the North Berkeley BART station and parking lot. The genus designation, Liquidambar , refers to the resin (or sap, or balsam) from the tree which resembles a liquid form of amber. The resin is also sweet, hence the popular name, sweetgum. According to the author of The Urban Tree Book , the "yellowish gum" produced by the tree is used to prepare syrups and ointments for "skin irritations and wounds." Plotnick also observes that with "plenty of sun, moisture, and ample root space" sweetgum saplings can grow between 12 and 30 feet in six years. These conditions, with the exception of sun, are generally associated with street tree planting areas, but Plotnick also notes that well-established sweetgums can tolerate "most soils, poor drainage, and

Four seemingly healthy street trees, about 6" diameter at breast height, have been severely cut; the crowns have been removed and branch stumps and trunks are all that remain. The trees are located in front of a yellow house on Stuart between Telegraph and Ellsworth. The trees bear no orange paint, the typically marker for tree removal made by tree professionals (as is the case for a purple-leaf plum across the street). I cannot identify the species; I am still a novice at Bay Area tree identification, so I would appreciate help from a reader. Photos of the leaf and fruit are included below.

The UC Berkeley Botanical Garden sale reminded me of the UCBBG bookstore, a bookseller I did not include in a post about specialty bookshops . The botanical garden sells books through its Garden Shops; subjects include tulips, toads, and cacti. Another specialty bookshop, one that sells science fiction and fantasy books, is The Other Change of Hobbit at 2116 Shattuck Avenue (above). University Press Books on Bancroft might be considered a specialty bookshop as it primarily sells books published by university presses. The Berkeley Art Museum Store sells art-related books, though the store is not a bookshop per se. For children's books, visit Mr. Mopps Children's Books on MLK, Jr. Way. The Jazz School for Music Study and Performance, located on Addison Street in the Arts District, sells jazz-related books "for the jazz student" in The Bassment. In the original post about specialty book sellers I also did not include Afikomen which is located on the same block