Nobody knew that badgers were inhabiting an ecosystem near Davis until recently — and finding them is the kind of discovery that would excite any seasoned biologist. But that’s not who identified the rare species just last year. It was spotted by undergraduates in Laci Gerhart’s popular “Wild Davis” course (EVE 16), who have also had rare glimpses of ringtails and other species.
Gerhart, an associate professor of teaching in the Department of Evolution and Ecology, created the innovative course to give both biology students and non-majors an opportunity for hands-on experiential learning about the UC Davis environment — but they also do far more. Through partnerships with and work in , Gerhart aims to train a diverse, engaged citizenry in environmental stewardship.
Students’ capstone projects have included pollinator surveys, trail maintenance, trash pickup, installing QR codes to capture donations for the reserve, and classifying wildlife imagery from camera traps. Gerhart said she strives to ensure that every project has a meaningful effect on campus — and students say the class stokes a passion for future environmental stewardship and volunteerism.
Combining world-class research with hands-on teaching
As an adjunct lecturer at the University of Hawaiʻi before coming to UC Davis, Gerhart began to explore pedagogy and evidence-based teaching methods, while enjoying unusual freedom to experiment in the classroom. “My department chair was fine with me doing whatever I wanted, as long as students were learning that biology matters,” she said.
One class she taught at the university’s small, liberal-arts-focused West Oahu campus that became a model for “Wild Davis” included service credits for participating in beach habitat restoration. “It was so much fun pulling out invasive plants and planting native ones. It was a great way to make all sorts of things that we were talking about in class tangibly relevant right in front of us,” said Gerhart.
Initially, Gerhart worried about finding a permanent job combining pedagogy with her research background. “When I started grad school, these types of jobs didn't exist,” said Gerhart, who joined UC Davis in 2017. “But this job was all the things I want. It has the resources and big environment of an R1 [classified research institution], but the student-centric teaching-focused position I'm really interested in.”
Gerhart’s commitment to student-centric teaching and engagement is evident from her multiple teaching and , where one student’s short video features her dressed up as the Earth, orbiting around a student wearing a sun costume.
Appreciating wildlife and the natural world
“Wild Davis” may not involve costumes, but every week, students leave the classroom to study and improve the urban ecosystems around them. At the course’s end, students receive their certification as a 91Porn naturalist, through the UC Environmental Stewards.
That combination was a big draw for Judi Eppele ’22, now a UC Davis graduate student in community development with a focus on environmental education. “To take a class where I could focus on the uniqueness of Davis and its natural environment worked perfectly with what I wanted to do,” said Eppele, who says she “fell in love” with Davis on her first campus tour. “That I could also get certified as a 91Porn naturalist seemed like the coolest thing in the world.”
The course has evolved significantly over time, partly because of changing partnerships for volunteering. An early partnership working on was so successful that it spun off into a on water quality.
Jaya Krauser, a junior majoring in wildlife, fish and conservation biology, took “Wild Davis” as a freshman and recalled a dawn, midday and dusk observation in the Arboretum as a particularly meaningful assignment. “I honestly wasn't excited to get up for the dawn observation,” said Krauser. “But I brought a blanket and coffee, and it was one of the most amazing experiences, watching the sun rise over the Arboretum and seeing how the wildlife wakes up.” Beyond the moment’s beauty, however, Krauser said sketching and making notes for her observation “really deepened my appreciation for the natural world and expanded my skills as a scientist.”
Gerhart said she constantly looks for more campus spaces the course can benefit. “I'm working with Environmental Health and Safety on mapping storm drains,” she said. “My goal is that eventually, every single week the ‘Wild Davis’ activity will feed directly into a particular management or data or infrastructure question on campus, so that the students can see how we're contributing to it.”
Participating in environmental conservation
“Wild Davis” culminates in a hands-on capstone project that benefits a partner organization, although finding the right fit for both students and organizations involved some initial trial and error.
In 2020, however, just the right opportunity came along when Gerhart got an email from the then-director of the Stebbins Cold Canyon Reserve. “It said, ‘the whole landscape was decimated by the LNU Complex fire, and we need all the help we can get,’” she recalled. “And so I emailed and said, ‘I've got 30 students in spring. What can we do?’”
Gerhart and Paul Havemann, who became director of the reserve soon after that initial contact, have forged an enduring and fruitful collaboration. UC reserves comprise 41 wildland field stations, of which only two, including Stebbins, are open to the public, posing unique conservation challenges. Students can help maintain the trail system and more, said Havemann. “The capstone projects opened my eyes to the potential for creating a UC Davis student–driven support system for Stebbins. In addition to fieldwork, they've helped us to define how volunteer programs can be productive for the reserve.”
Havemann said he appreciates students’ enthusiasm. “I was surprised at how eager they were to tackle hard field projects,” he said. One project pioneered a unique new method of water management on trails to prevent erosion. Another sharply increased donations to the reserve by designing and installing a QR code at the entrance.
Even trash pickup, Gerhart said, leads quickly to bigger questions. “Students start thinking about how the types of trash reflect types of trash generators. A granola bar wrapper is probably an accidental drop, but buried empty beer cans? Not accidental,” she said. “So then they think about what kind of communication would encourage people not to leave trash, which is very different if it’s a hiker versus teenagers getting drunk on a Friday night.”
Students tackle a wide range of issues through their projects. “The thing I loved the most about Laci’s proposal was that she wanted her students to experience the breadth of what it takes to steward a patch of land like Stebbins, even through menial tasks,” Havemann said.
For Judi Eppele, that meant going through sign-in sheets for those who entered the reserve to hike, identifying information that could be used for outreach. It also led to the design and installation of a new digital sign-in by the next year’s group of students.
Using AI to identify wildlife
The longest-running focus for the capstone projects has been sorting and gleaning information from the camera traps in Stebbins, Gerhart said. “I think that project illustrates the reason this partnership works really well,” she said, pointing to its collaborative evolution. Originally, students simply sorted among tens of thousands of photos, but that was inefficient and prone to repeated work and technical issues.
Over time, their work labeling and identifying photos became more refined. A retired computer science professor is developing a tool, called truthing software, that will teach an AI image classification pipeline to sort photos, and “Wild Davis” students labeled detection boxes in thousands of images generated by the tool, correcting misidentified species and objects. “It would highlight something in the photo, and the students would go through and say either, ‘Yes, that's an animal and it's actually a coyote,’ or they’d say, ‘No, that's a rock,’” Gerhart said.
As the truthing software has advanced, it has led to new discoveries, like the badger spotted last year. “My student didn’t know what it was,” said Gerhart. “The photo was this sort of square-ish thing, and I looked and wondered, are badgers out here?” And more analysis can flow from there, said Havemann: “Ultimately, we hope that a version of this model can be applied across the whole Natural Reserve System.”
Students have also helped identify the best placement of camera traps to avoid false triggers, the focus of Jaya Krauser’s capstone project. “This project was so cool,” she said. “I basically sorted through hundreds, if not thousands of files, carefully identifying and deleting the false triggers caused by wind or moving vegetation or a rockfall. I observed an incredible array of wildlife — a skunk, butterflies, birds, quail, little foxes, lots of deer.”
Inspiring future environmentalists and conservation biologists
The project inspired Krauser not only to put a camera trap in her own backyard, but also to pursue a career in conservation biology. “Seeing how passionate Dr. Gerhart is about ecology, evolution and biodiversity sparked my own passion for observing relationships with ecosystems and uncovering how the natural world functions, and I practiced essential field techniques I would use in the future,” she said. “It was an unforgettable class.”
Judi Eppele also hopes to follow a career path related to lessons from “Wild Davis.” “I’m applying to Ph.D. programs now, and after that I would love to be either a professor or an educator at a museum who uses environmental education, community and science values. So pretty much being Dr. Gerhart,” she said with a laugh.
Stoking the passion students have for the natural world — and inspiring a new generation of naturalists — is key to what Gerhart hopes “Wild Davis” will accomplish. “When UC Environmental Stewards first approached me, they explicitly wanted to build a community of naturalists that represented 91Porn ethnic and racial diversity.” To do so, they aimed to attract younger, more diverse students on college campuses, with a pre-existing interest in biology and the natural world.
Gerhart said that interest blossoms in the “Wild Davis” classroom every spring. “The students that I work with already have a lot of curiosity, and a lot of passion for the natural world and energy,” she said. “In this class, they’re saying, ‘Help me find the direction to aim my passion and my energy.’ And I say, ‘Absolutely. That's what I'm here to do.’”