Week 10—Wrap Up and Reflection

This week I focused on the community education component of my project. While I had finished mapping the vast majority of the park as best as I could, the main component of my project was educating the general public and Fremont residents about the plants and helping them form connections with their ecosystem. After extensive discussions, with my External Advisor, she highly recommended using the resource Calscape, which focuses on native plants to describe some of the prominent native flora.

So, I wrote description for 30+ of the main plants on Sabercat’s main trail this week. I supplemented Calflora’s factual information (properly cited throughout my map) with a paragraph about my own observations about the plant and my own educated theories about their ecological significance. This was a bit overwhelming, but I tried to make it fun as there were so many different plants that I’d never heard of that I’d seen for so long and could finally write about.

That’s why in each of my descriptions for my map, I’ve tried to include fun facts about the plants. For example, box elder since it’s a relative of maple produces a syrup that can be used to make a kind of maple syrup. We aren’t in Canada, but it’s so cool a Native California plant has the same properties as a maple tree in the Northeast. It really helps to show the connectedness and similar adaptations that plants have if they belong to the same family, even if they are in completely different parts of the world.

Previously, I could only really identify coast redwood and the coast live oak. But now, I can really appreciate the immense diversity of plants and have seen how some famous trees like the sycamore, and birch have native Californian relatives. The earth and its plants are really connected! More so, I really have a newfound gratitude to restoration ecologists and people like my mentor who went out into the field, every day, planting to transform the park into the oasis it is today.

Finally, I purchased the stickers with the QR code linked to my map. I have gotten approval to put them up around the park. My external advisor is currently working with the city to see if they can formally publish my map on city websites. This has been a fun and very fulfilling project!