We are hiking up a steep hill in a Santa Barbara park. There’s thick brush on both sides of the trail. Suddenly, as we reach the crest, there’s a spectacular view.
"We're up at the top of the Elings Park south bluffs. Behind us there are sweeping views of the city...you can see the Mission over there...you can see downtown, and State Street," said Dean Noble, who's the Executive Director of the 230 acre park. "Over here, on our left are the Channel Islands."
The park is huge. It's more than double the size of Disneyland.
Parts of the four decade old park were once used for farming. Many of its rolling hills are overrun with non-native species. A new collaboration between Elings Park, and the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden is going to try to start restoration of some of the land.
It’s kicking off with an effort to document what’s in the park.
"We're exploring the park, to see what kinds of plants and animals we can find, and were trying to document the biodiversity with an app called iNaturalist, with the help of friends from the public." said Denise Knapp, who's the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden’s Director of Research and Conservation.
Knapp says the public will be able to use the app to help with the research, and learn something about nature at the same time. People post what they find, and if they don't know what it is, others help identify it.
As we hike on down a trail, we run into a volunteer, Laurie Robinson, who is doing some bird-watching.
"Well, we're just seeing the yellow-throated warblers," said Robinson. "They are just everywhere in the mustard here...we're listening to them," said Robinson.
One of the birds suddenly flies out of the brush. "See, there's one," Robinson said excitedly.
The goal is to get more volunteers involved, with Elings Park and the Botanic Garden hosting a series of weekend nature hikes beginning in June.
Knapp said all of the information being gathered will help with a pilot project to restore an acre of land. They’re also hoping some of the citizen-naturalists will want to be involved with the actual work.
Much of the undeveloped land in the park is infested with invasive species of plants. But, if the restoration of the pilot plot of land is successful, the goal is to expand the effort, and to chip away at the problem.
