Here you will find an ever-evolving selection of our CSU Channel Islands research and teaching efforts related to the restoration of degraded ecosystems.  Our colleagues, students, and community partners tackle a variety of topics related to characterizing the existing level of functioning of a given system, planning efforts to recover functioning, construction and management activities, and performance assessment.

    Our restoration-related activities can be broken into three broad categories;

1. 1)monitoring and assessment = What (if anything) is wrong?
   

2. 2)cessation or amelioration of the stressor = Stopping the damage.
   

3. 3)restoration design and construction = Repairing whatever is broken.
   

   

    Current projects span a range of ecological communities, geographic locations, and complexities.  While most of our work occurs in the coastal zone, we do have projects far from the sea.  The single unifier amongst all of these projects is their proximity to human-dominated systems.  Whether our sites are on California’s Oxnard Plain, Louisiana’s Mississippi Delta, or Asia’s Anatolian Steppes, all share in their proximity to human-dominated ecosystems and all face the increasingly common challenge of managing landscapes at the wildlands-urban interface.

    Our group aims to measurably improve the ecological communities wherein we work, foster sustainable use of these systems in active collaboration with local communities, serve as an interface between the academic research and practitioner communities, serve as an evaluator and creator of tools and techniques for restoration professionals, and function as a regional training center for the restoration community.

    Please feel free to contact us about any of our efforts and consider stopping by next time you are in our neck of the woods here in Ventura County.  Welcome and please have a look around!

click H E R E for Dr. Anderson’s contact info