Susan Harrison was headed for medical school when she took a summer job counting bugs at Bodega Marine Reserve and found her true calling: ecological field studies.

At the time, Bodega was the only one of the six units in the UC Davis Natural Reserve System that was truly fulfilling its mission of teaching and research. While the other UC campuses supported their 27 reserves with staffing and maintenance budgets, UC Davis did not. As a result, its reserves were, as Harrison puts it, "the slow child in the system."

Yet the UC Davis reserves held fabulous potential. They encompassed more than 10,000 acres in diverse California ecosystems including the coastal bluffs at Bodega, montane forest at Eagle Lake, vernal pools at Jepson Prairie, chaparral and savannah at McLaughlin, oak woodland at Quail Ridge and riparian forest at Stebbins Cold Canyon.

Today, 18 years after the Bodega reserve showed her a new future, Harrison is returning the favor. A UC Davis professor of environmental science and policy, she now directs the campus Natural Reserve System and is the first director given the time and money needed to help the slow child speed up.

Much of the credit for getting things rolling goes to Alex Glazer, a longtime UC Berkeley innovator, administrator and professor of molecular and cell biology who became director of the University of California Natural Reserve System in January 1998.

Glazer's office administers and partially funds all of the UC NRS sites, now totaling 34; the balance of the funding comes from the campuses. For day-to-day administration, each campus manages some of those 34. (Complicating matters, some campuses also manage reserves that are not units of the UC NRS, such as UC Davis' Putah Creek Riparian Reserve - see related story page 2 - and UC Berkeley's Sagehen Reserve.)

"I immediately saw that Davis was the only campus with so many of its reserves nearby," Glazer says now. "That's a huge asset, to have those resources close enough to regularly reinforce the classroom instruction and provide protected sites for research.

"And Davis is one of the two UC campuses that are truly strong in environmental sciences, and the strongest in terms of faculty numbers in this area. Yet the reserves Davis administered were very underfunded."

Glazer urged then-UC Davis Vice Chancellor for Research Kevin Smith to make changes. In 1998 Smith tapped Harrison, a specialist in conservation biology, to be the director of the UC Davis NRS reserves. Smith funded a partial release from teaching so Harrison could seriously address the system's problems and gave her $40,000 a year for five years to work with. Campus deans whose programs used the reserves matched that amount.

Harrison's first major act was hiring a doctorate-level reserves manager. She landed Virginia Boucher (known to all as Shorty), who had managed other UC reserves for 11 years and been a student and postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley's Hastings Natural History Reservation for 10 years.

Harrison and Boucher's top priorities for program upgrades have been the four of UC Davis' six Natural Reserve System sites that they run directly - Donald and Sylvia McLaughlin Natural Reserve, Quail Ridge Reserve, Jepson Prairie Reserve and Stebbins Cold Canyon Reserve.

The other two reserves are Bodega Marine Reserve, which is operated by UC Davis' Bodega Marine Laboratory, with a full-time reserve manager, Peter Connors, whose salary partly comes through the UC Davis Natural Reserve System, and Eagle Lake Reserve, which is owned and operated by California State University, Chico, with financial assistance from the UC Davis reserve system.

Together, Harrison and Boucher have:

• Built an organization of three full-time and two half-time staff members;

•Collaborated with other UC Davis researchers in winning $3.9 million in grants to the campus for two interdisciplinary research and graduate-student training programs; and

• More than tripled reserve use by researchers, students and the public. In 2000-01, those groups spent 7,256 days on reserve lands - the equivalent of nearly 20 years.

Glazer is delighted. "Susan has done miraculously well. She has transmitted her enthusiasm for the reserves to her colleagues and to the students. There is now widespread awareness of the value of these sites on the Davis campus."

Harrison herself is proud of the team's progress, but says the reserves still have far to go before staff levels are adequate, long-deferred maintenance is completed and basic upgrades are under way.

"We've achieved our goal of reaching most of the UC Davis ecologists and evolutionary biologists who might use the reserves," Harrison says. "Now we are broadening our base of users to include people from other disciplines, such as the humanities and earth sciences, as well as people from other UC campuses and other universities."

She adds that the value of the reserves' outdoor laboratories and classrooms increases over time. "Breakthroughs in ecological science often don't come until someone has studied a place for 10 years or more - time enough for uncommon natural events, like El Nino, to occur and the impacts to unfold," Harrison says.

"As knowledge about the particular place grows, we begin to understand how its complex systems work." •

For profiles of the reserves, see http://www-dateline.ucdavis.edu/032902/dl_profiles.html