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.