The Desert Studies Initiative of UCR's Center for Conservation Biology is focused on answering research questions regarding the ability for us to maintain and manage a sustainable environment for people and our region's rich natural biodiversity. Questions currently being addressed involve the impacts and control of exotic weeds in native habitats, determining sufficient habitat area and patch configuration to sustain populations of sand dune species, and developing a framework from which to evaluate local environmental health, or in other words, when to we need to step in and manage versus when do we let nature take its course? Additional areas of activity include developing programs to engage local middle/high school students in answering environmental research questions, and creating a collaborative research program with conservation biologists working in arid lands in Mexico.
Learn more: www.ccb.ucr.edu