Biodiversity Initiative & Urban Rewilding

SRJC Biodiversity Initiative

The SRJC Campus Biodiversity Initiative is a collaborative endeavor between faculty, staff, students and community partners. Together, we seek to increase awareness of and deepen our knowledge of the species found on our campus and engage with campus biodiversity through course-based learning, stewardship, and research.  Our goals are to monitor the current biodiversity and take action to increase the diversity of native plant, animal and other species on the campus. 

Why Care About Campus Biodiversity? 

As development increasingly expands into wild areas, the future of biodiversity will depend not just on conservation of species in more remote wild areas, but also on our ability to provide habitat in our cities.

Worldwide there  has been on average a 68% decrease in the number  of bird, mammal, fish, reptile and amphibian populations since 1970. Since the early 2000's insect diversity has dropped 20-75% depending on the location. 

Cities can provide valuable habitat for the native plants, insects, reptiles, amphibians, small mammals, and birds that make up most of a region's total biodiversity.  

Cities have been shown to harbor high levels of native biodiversity, of the many of the same species found in outlying areas.  For example, one study of 110 cities found that almost all regional native plant and bird species were retained in cities, though native plants were found at only 25% of their original abundance, and birds were found at only 8% of their original abundance.  

Through the SRJC Campus Biodiversity Initiative, we will begin the task of documenting the biodiversity within our campuses, learn what has been retained, what has been lost, and hopefully, we can begin the work of restoring native plant diversity that will support the native insects and birds that depend upon them.

What is Urban Rewilding? 

Some people use the term “Urban Rewilding’’ for what we are trying to accomplish with our SRJC Biodiversity Initiative. This is the goal of bringing nature back into our cities and towns.  During the Covid lockdowns, wild animals began to make their way back into our urban environments. 

This tells us that we can improve and increase the populations of wildlife.  It will include developing parks and reserves, but if we are going to make a significant difference we will need to focus on home gardens and public/private spaces like the SRJC Santa Rosa Campus.  Examples of successful urban rewilding: include London, England where a  increase of green roofs, walls, planters, flower boxes, street trees lead to the return of one of the country’s rarest birds: the black resdtart

Urban Rewilding Project and Native and Invasive Species:  

Our goal is to help restore the biodiversity of the campus, this means restoring the species that are native to Sonoma County. The reason that this is important, is that most species live in a web of interactions and relationships. Plant species that depend on specific insects to pollinate their flowers. Insects that require certain plant species as food sources. Birds that require plants to feed on, nest in, or supply them with the right insects to eat. All of those species depending on the fungi in the ground that decompose dead matter, or connect to plant roots and help them to acquire water and nutrients. 

But we live in a world where we have moved species all over the world either deliberately ( horticultural species to make gardens beautiful)  or accidentally (grass seed in the bedding of the animals brought to the Americas by the Spanish). Some of these new species ‘play well with others’ but some become aggressively invasive. They crowd out a native species and the other species that depend on the first.   Often urban rewilding requires the removal of weedy species before native species can be reestablished.