![]() That tangible energy in the land is what drew Schloss to it. “This is a special place you can just feel it,” Bryant said. Watching the morning sun filter through the sycamores and cottonwoods from inside Pablo Bryant’s rusty-yet-reliable old truck, it’s easy to imagine the world beginning here. Features of the land figure prominently in their creation story, especially a site called temeku (from which the city of Temecula’s name derives), where the sun and the sand met to create the earth. And earlier this year, a consortium of private companies partnered with SDSU to build a solar array on the land that will provide power to Temecula.īefore Schloss came to this land, it was a holy place to the Luiseño Native Americans who lived there. There are also dozens of signal stations in the reserve that offer wireless internet in this remote region, feeding into a larger National Science Foundation project to provide wifi connectivity throughout rural regions of San Diego, Riverside and Imperial counties. Pablo Bryant, who graduated from SDSU with a biology degree in 1993 and has been reserve manager at SMER for the past six years, has helped set up more than 100 cameras throughout SMER and the county to detect smoke from wildfires both near and far. It’s also a boon to many other organizations in the community. “We found the combination of invasion by weeds and extreme drought causes the ecosystem to lose carbon and nitrogen, and this could represent a feedback with climate change and human disturbance that eventually degrades these ecosystem types,” Lipson said.Īnd last year, SDSU’s Natural History Club, advised by SDSU biologist and spider expert Marshal Hedin, conducted a “BioBlitz” at SMER, recording the numerous living species they encountered. ![]() Molly Clemens, a doctoral student in ecology, is researching how differing carbon dioxide levels affect the viticulture of wine grapes growing in SMER.įall 2017 Cover of 360: The Magazine of San Diego State University“Fallbrook wineries will be producing and bottling the wine once grapes from our experimental vineyard are harvestable, and we can label and test these as ‘wines of the future,’” Clemens explained.īiologist David Lipson and graduate student Sherlynette Castro recently completed a National Science Foundation–funded project to examine how different levels of rainfall affect the growth of invasive weeds. ![]() ![]() SMER is one of two field stations managed by SDSU that offer students and professors opportunities to learn from their rugged wilderness. Today, the Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve (SMER) in southern Temecula is managed by San Diego State University as a critical wildlife corridor, a sacred ground for the region’s indigenous people and a field site for the SDSU students and researchers who study its fragile ecosystems. Rather than being a paradise on earth for believers in his utopia, the land he purchased has become a refuge for endangered wildlife and imperiled wilderness besieged by development on all sides. When Murray Schloss came to Riverside County in the 1920s to found a utopian society, little did he know his dream would come true-just not in the way he had planned. “This is a special place you can just feel it.” This story appears in the fall 2017 issue of 360: The Magazine of San Diego State University.
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