Cal Poly Humboldt Leads 17 CSU Campuses in Statewide Wildlife Monitoring Network

Cal Poly Humboldt is leading a $2.5 million expansion of California's Sentinel Sites for Nature network, pulling 17 California State University campuses into a coordinated, long-term biodiversity monitoring effort backed by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The collaboration, announced March 16, also partners with the U.S. Geological Survey California Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit and will add dozens of monitoring sites across California to track ecosystem change and support the state's conservation goals. Two of those sites will land on the North Coast in Humboldt County.

Micaela Gunther, a Cal Poly Humboldt Wildlife professor and lead researcher on the project, said the CSU network brings something the Sentinel Sites for Nature program has lacked until now.

"The CSUs will make a unique contribution to the initiative by including workforce training as a critical element of the sentinel site deployment and data collection methods," Gunther said. "We're also bringing in a diversity of habitats not previously included as part of the SSN, especially by including two locations right here on the North Coast in Humboldt County."

What that looks like in practice is already visible at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, which established a monitoring site at Chorro Creek Ecological Reserve before the broader network expansion was formalized. A trail camera there has photographed mule deer, mountain lion, and gopher snake, the kind of species-level data the network intends to collect consistently across every participating campus.

The Sentinel Sites for Nature system is California's established framework for long-term biodiversity monitoring, designed to generate comparable data across diverse ecosystems over time. By folding the CSU system into that framework, the project scales up both the geographic reach of the monitoring network and the pipeline of trained researchers doing the work.

Cal Poly Humboldt can be reached at 1 Harpst Street in Arcata at (707) 826-3011.