We are approaching the final weeks of the semester and the end of the first year of the SRJC Campus Biodiversity Initiative - a good time to reflect on all that we and our partners have accomplished! Here are some highlights:

• We organized 8 stewardship days, which brought together over 120 students, staff and faculty to work in native gardens on campus, including weeding and planting local native species new to the SRJC campus
• We've added almost 40 species to native gardens on campus, including 20 species of native annuals that were not found on campus
• Students from seven classes participated in course-based campus biodiversity research or stewardship work: Bio 10, Bio 12, Bio 16, Botany 10, Botany 60, Bio 2.3 and Hort 12. Projects included journaling, writing, invasive species management, native plant propagation, planting, pollinator surveys, and estimating population sizes of native bees.
• With support from Avanzando, we supported two Campus Biodiversity Interns who helped with stewardship work and completed independent research projects
• Finally, we were awarded a $5000 Randolph Newman Cultural Enrichment Grant to create a new native garden on campus in the area formerly occupied by Bech Hall in 2025/2026.

This was our first day working in what will soon be the newest native plant garden on campus. We were thrilled to be awarded a Randolph Newman Cultural Enrichment grant to hold a series of culturally- and sustainability-focused events through which we hope to transform a bare, mulched area of campus (the former Bech building site) into a thriving ecosystem, the foundation of which will be culturally relevant and ecologically important California native plants. 

We began some work prepping the site by pulling out bur clover (Medicago polymorpha) and ripgut brome (Bromus diandrus) before they released this year's seeds. This will help with future weed control in the site so that the native plants we add will have the best possible chance of thriving. While we didn't finish the whole area, we accomplished a lot! 

Thanks to all who came out for the morning! 
​

We had over 20 volunteers help out at our March workday. We had a great time, despite the drizzle of rain! We completed some important tasks like weeding in our new native chaparral garden, removing an invasive onion from an area that we aim to transform into an oak woodland understory community, and we planted some native annuals around Baker Hall. 

Check out some of the images from the day. Thank you to Tina Mills for the great photos!
​

Two more of the 10 annual species planted by students in November have begun to flower! These are Baby Blue Eyes (Nemophila menziesii) and Lacy Phacelia (Phacelia tanacetifolia). That's half of the species now in bloom. We invite you to walk over to Baker 1805 to see the flowers in person.

​The warm weather this week should be waking up our native bees soon, so we'll hope to start seeing some pollinators out there in the next week or two!

During our second campus stewardship workday in November 2025, volunteers participated in an act of hope for the future, the sowing of seeds. On an overcast and chilly morning, we planted seeds of 12 California native annuals in the native garden by Baker Hall. 

The first of those have just begun to flower! The early bloomers are:

• California Goldfields, Lasthenia californica, shown below, top row
• Tidy Tips, Layia platyglossa, bottom row
• Yellow Rayed Lasthenia, Lasthenia glabrata, not pictured

Come on over to Baker Hall from time-to-time this spring to check in on these and the other 9 species that are yet to bloom this spring.

Students in SRJC's botany courses will be collecting seed from these flowers to sow next winter. The 2024/25 SRJC Bee Team will monitor the native bees that visit these flowers over the course of the spring to better understand the plant-pollinator network on our campus in hopes of informing effective landscaping for pollinators in the future. 

Most of these species do not occur elsewhere on campus and would not occur here without the help of our community of campus stewardship volunteers. Thank you!