What happens when rattlesnakes stalk ground squirrels? UC Davis grad student Bree Putman chose Blue Oak Ranch Reserve to find out. UC Berkeley’s newest research station, the Blue Oak Ranch Reserve, threw an open house to show off its new facilities on March 19, 2016. The pristine reserve, nestled amid rolling green, flower-studded hills east of San Jose. is operated by the campus for UC’s Natural Reserve System. It has become a field research site for biologists interested in California’s oak woodlands and comes complete with an embedded wireless sensing network that rivals many urban networks. Each of the nodes spread over the 3,280-acre reserve measures temperature, rain, sunshine, soil moisture and more, sending it back to the campus to be processed and analyzed. Donated to the campus in 2007, the reserve came with buildings that were a bit run-down and uncomfortable for the many students and scientists conducting research there. Over the past eight years, that included several thousand students and numerous UC faculty members, many of whom shivered on cold nights in unheated tents. So the campus found the money – nearly $5 million from the State Wildlife Conservation Board provided through state Proposition 84 – to renovate a barn into a classroom and meeting space, replete with kitchen and bathrooms, and build warm dormitories as well as tent spaces and screened cabins for use during the warm summers. Donated to the campus in 2007, the reserve came with buildings that were a bit run-down and uncomfortable for the many students and scientists conducting research there. Over the past eight years, that included several thousand students and numerous UC faculty members, many of whom shivered on cold nights in unheated tents. So the campus found the money – nearly $5 million from the State Wildlife Conservation Board provided through state Proposition 84 – to renovate a barn into a classroom and meeting space, replete with kitchen and bathrooms, and build warm dormitories as well as tent spaces and screened cabins for use during the warm summers. (Excerpted from full story: http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/03/30/berkeleys-newest-field-site-blue-oak-ranch-reserve-gets-a-facelift/) Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally Rattlesnake footage provided by Bree Putman. Turtle footage provided by Ute Stumpf. ...