The La Kretz Center facilitates and supports a wide variety of research efforts at Sedgwick, but the full set of projects underway at the reserve is much larger and spans a wide range of disciplines and topics. Every month we will post the title and summary of newly approved and ongoing projects at the reserve. If your project is not listed but should be, or if it is listed incorrectly, please contact the La Kretz Center Director at frankdavis@ucsb.edu.
Maladapt (PI Frank Davis, Leander Love-Anderegg, Victoria Sork and Jessica Wright)
This project uses laboratory, greenhouse, and field experiments to evaluate climate adaptation in oak species across their current ranges. It focuses on the degree of maladaptation in Quercus lobata (QULO) populations depending on location, with particular attention to which areas within their region are best suited to their existing climate conditions. The study plants a total of 960 acorns in common garden experiments, split evenly between drought-treated and irrigated conditions to assess differences in water-use adaptation. Researchers measure leaf functional traits and physiological responses in greenhouse facilities at University of California, Santa Barbara, while University of California, Los Angeles conducts genomic analyses to identify genetic structure and markers of heat and drought tolerance. The project spans four years, beginning in fall 2026, with plans to remove all non-local plants to better isolate local adaptation effects.
Ongoing Projects
Impacts of prescribed fire on oak recruitment (PI Shane Dewees)
This project focuses on oak recruitment as an important part of maintaining a diverse demography and healthy oak woodlands. Due to periodic mast events, the synchronized large acorn production by most-to all oak trees in an area, seedling recruitment may happen in periodic pulses. As prescribed fires are increasingly being used as a management tool across California, including in oak woodlands, the impact of fire on oak recruitment is important to understand. Here, we propose to take advantage of the recent mast event at Sedgwick and subsequent high presence of first-year seedlings to study the effects on prescribed fire on seedling recruitment and survival. We will conduct seedling surveys in areas that will remain unburned throughout the duration of the study, areas that burned in the 2023 TREX, 2024 TREX, and are scheduled to burn this upcoming fall. Additionally, we will measure microsite temperature and humidity at a subset of these survey locations, along with seedling physiology, to help determine drivers of mortality. These findings will give important insight into both environmental controls on oak seedling survival and the effect of prescribed fire on oak recruitment.
Divalent Cation (Di-Cat) Soil Lithosequence (PI Heath Goertzen)
This project is devoted to examining soils developed upon different parent material rocks in a method called a lithosequence. The goal of the project is to compare how inorganic and organic carbon contents and forms change across the different units of parent material within the reserve.
March 2026
Controls on pyrogenic carbon accumulation in oak savanna soils following prescribed burning (PI Sawyer Fleming)
This project investigates how prescribed fires influence pyrogenic carbon (PyC) storage in California oak savanna soils. PyC is a highly stable form of carbon, representing a potential long-term carbon sink from fire. Although oak savanna ecosystems burn frequently, and are increasingly targeted for vegetation management with prescribed fire, they have largely been overlooked in the context of the climate-carbon-fire cycle. They will sample soils across multiple years of prescribed fires from the TREX program, as well as adjacent controls, to evaluate how slope position, soil type, and time since fire influence the quantity of PyC across soil depths.