Field Guides

Field guides are easy enough to find, but here are some harder-to-find tools you can use to develop your identification skills. I'll update this page from time to time if I find particularly good resources.

• Sagehen Basin Custom Field Guides: we have created downloadable iNaturalist field guides to Sagehen botany (and other biota) for your smart device that will help you identify the most likely candidates in the Sagehen basin and adjacent areas. 
• Guide to Western Bumblebees. You would think that bumblebees would be easy to identify, but it turns out to be non-trivial. Fortunately, there's now a real guide to western bumblebees.
• Butterfly Families. There are really only 6 Families of butterflies, and learning them will jumpstart your IDs, giving you the skill to immediately narrow down the candidates.
• Feathers: identifying feathers can be a challenge, but here are a couple of really good resources:
• Bird Feathers: A Guide to North American Species, Scott and McFarland
• The Feather Atlas: Flight Feathers of North American Birds

BioBlitz model

 Kaitlin Backlund organized Sagehen's first BioBlitz in 2015, and it was a great success, due to excellent planning. See more photos.

Kait has generously shared her management tools with us for the next event.

Volunteer Shift Schedule | Sagehen BioBlitz Guide

From Kaitlin:

Here is some info for a BioBlitz. Its a lot of work, but also a ton of fun. I recommend reading through items here. http://www.inaturalist.org/pages/bioblitz+guide

I relied heavily on the Nerds for Nature Guide and have attached their 10 Step Guide with modifications made for the 2015 Sagehen Blitz in green print. Also attached is the Volunteer Shift Schedule. The Sagehen Blitz was a highly managed event because it was held at a Field Station, but as you will see by looking at other Blitzs, there are a variety of formats. (I happened to use Nat Geo's Blitz at Hawaii's Volcano National Park as a template.) It is also worth noting that the BioBlitz Guide doesn't discuss liability etc.. which is something you should discuss with whoever you partner with to do a Blitz.Most groups or agencies that work with volunteers in the field have procedures in place for you to follow.

I hope this is helpful!

Sagehen Mammal Collection digitization project

A specimen label needing to be transcribed.

Sagehen is busy digitizing and curating our teaching collections to share with large data portals, creating new research and citizen science opportunities. With the advent of new technologies, like various isotopic and genetic sampling techniques, old collections are yielding important new information that informs research into changing environmental conditions. Here's one spectacular an unexpected example from Sagehen's visiting artists program. And another from our research program, where DNA from fur samples was compared with historic museum specimens to determine relatedness, and isotopes confirmed where the animal had been drinking its water.

At present, we need help digitizing the labels from our mammal collection. You can help out from home using the instructions found here.

UPDATE, 8-4-19: we have largely completed the first phase of this project. All animal skin records are now available to researchers and the public through CSVColl.org, a Symbiota portal. Select "Sagehen Creek Field Station (UC-Berkeley) - Mammals (SCFS-Mammals)". Complete transcribed label data is available here.

This project was completed thanks to the efforts of Erica Krimmel, Sagehen Collections Manager, and our amazing volunteers:

• Terry and Emily Gollub, Sagehen California Naturalist (specimen photography)
• Alexander and Robert Gallandt, Volunteers (label transcription)
• Kathy Mullen, Sagehen California Naturalist (label transcription)

We still need to accession our collections of bones, scat, hair and fish scale slides, so keep an eye out for announcements. If you would like to help right now, we have a Zooniverse project that needs your help identifying animals in camera trap photos.

iNaturalist Animal Track Project

Here's a great description of an iNaturalist project that you might like to participate in, or on which to model your own project.