Capstone Projects
CalNat capstone projects require eight hours of outside of class service
learning in support of an environmental or nature education
organization. Capstone projects must fall into one of six categories:
environmental stewardship or habitat restoration, education or
interpretation, program support, climate and environmental justice,
community resilience and adaptation, or participatory science. Under
traditional in-person instruction, capstone projects have been a mix of
data collection for management purposes (e.g., water quality
measurements in the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden waterway),
infographics and public signage (e.g., infographic on data collected by
the Lake Tahoe Environmental Research Center’s participatory science
project Snapshot Day), and hands-on product development (e.g., bee
nesting post for the Davis Central Park Pollinator Garden).
Under remote instruction, capstone projects needed to be coordinated and
completed solo and exclusively online. These restrictions meant that the
majority of capstone projects were interpretive resources such as
infographics and guides (e.g., raptor ID guide for the UCD Raptor
Center, https://crc.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/) or educational activity books
for elementary age students (e.g., Take Care Tahoe activity booklet;
https://takecaretahoe.org/) which could be disseminated online.
Additionally, several students used the participatory science project
GLOBE at Night to track patterns in urban light pollution. This project
was not formally used as a group activity in the course, but worked well
for capstone projects given its focus on urban observations and so is
included in Table 1 .
Two capstone projects related directly to the COVID pandemic. One of
these involved a “Truth About Bats” infographic developed in
conjunction with the Yolo Basin Foundation (http://yolobasin.org/) to
counter misinformation on the relationship between bats and disease. A
second capstone project focused on mapping the location of CNC
observations in urban centers to compare the frequency of observations
in urban greenspaces versus residential locations in the 2019 CNC versus
the 2020 CNC. This project was developed in conjunction with the UC
Davis Center for Community and Citizen Science
(https://education.ucdavis.edu/center-community-and-citizen-science), an
organizer for the Sacramento Region CNC.