10th Channel Islands Symposium. Research comes back home
When you wake up in Santa Barbara Basin, your eyes are filled with the golden, orange fire and purple lights to the east with a beauty that it’s hard to describe. But then, your gaze moves quickly to the ocean. And there, among the blue reflections in the grey water, the Channel Islands emerge from the coastal fog on the clear days.
From Ventura or Santa Barbara we could only see the northern Channel Islands – Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, San Miguel and Anacapa- but the southern Channel Islands – San Clemente, Santa Catalina and San Nicolás, plus the little Santa Barbara – were also invited to the 10th Channel Islands Symposium which we had the chance to attend in early November 2023. The MeSCAL team was able to present the research we are all doing around the Santa Barbara Basin and the Channel Islands: Ana shared the interesting transformation of the vegetation around Echo Lake, in Santa Catalina since the Pleistocene, Reyes showed the first results of the marine core, while Yannick shared the first conclusions of our modern pollen and NPPs-vegetation referential calibration. Scott, who chaired our session “Paleoecology and Geomorphology” talked about the old forest on Santa Rosa Island, while Alex shook up the audience when he talked about the tsunamis recorded in the Channel Islands.
We spent three days making new friends, catching up with old ones and meeting face to face with people we only knew through email. They were days of learning science from the best teams in California, days of learning how research and conservation can meet and make a real difference to some species, and they were days of learning about how the history of the Islands is more present than ever. We learned how conservation can come from science and the coordination of many different teams and administrations to achieve a greater goal. We felt how close these islands are to the continent, and how deeply rooted they are to those who once crossed the Channel waters to land on this last frontier before the great blue ocean.
