Natural Resources
2025-2026 Program Review

Environmental Conservation is an interdisciplinary program that advances understanding of ecological systems and their interrelationships, including those with human society. Core study involves plant and animal ecology and natural history, field methods and study design, and conservation and management of ecosystems and natural resources. Students are able to further focus their studies in conservation and sustainability; plant ecology, conservation and management; and/or vertebrate ecology, conservation and management. This program covers a wide range of environmental studies, provides many unique opportunities for hands-on and real-world field experience, and prepares students for a variety of careers as well as transfer at the upper division level to academic programs involving environmental sciences. We appreciate the diversity of our students in all aspects of their identities.

• DI manifests in course success. As a group, students identifying as male have lower course success rates (70% vs 79% in comparison group).
• African American students are very underrepresented in our courses. Because of this, numbers are quite low to draw broad conclusions; however, generally, African Americans (males especially) have lower course success—39% vs 76%. 

We care deeply about all of our students, and they feel it. We work hard to create safe, productive, and positive spaces for all. In recent years:

• We have established and expanded more flexible grading and due date policies.
• We have started to better integrate examples of DI groups into curricula.
• We have started a process of identifying and replacing language that could be offensive to different groups (e.g., use of the term “colonize” in the context of plant establishment). 
• We continue to expand adoption of OER and ZTC instructional materials.
• We use “early and often” check-ins, which take various forms, including start-of-term questionnaires to gauge possible learning hurdles, individual student needs and concerns, and (completely voluntary) health (physical and mental) forms. The latter has revealed an apparent and large increase in students self-describing as suffering from an array of mental health problems, especially depression and anxiety.
• We have made strong efforts in reaching out to queer and neurodivergent folks over the past several years especially, and representation of both groups has grown within our program. Much of this outreach has been informal via former and current students that identify in these ways themselves. We also have strong connections with native students and hope to see that continue to grow.
• Recently, we have started including—at the very start of the semester—a presentation explicitly about equity, inclusion and intersectionality given by a former student and UNITE center staff member who happens to be queer and Latino.
• We recently developed a new course that addresses problems in the DEI space: NATR 499: Experimental Offering in Natural Resources (Contemporary Perspectives in Environmental Science: Expanding Natural Resources’ Definition of Diversity).
• Our program chair has been teaching incarcerated students at Mule Creek State Prison and Folsom State Prison for the past 3 years. This experience has been very powerful and informs teaching in our department, e.g., trauma-informed pedagogy, which applies well beyond prison walls.
• We have been fighting for years—actually decades now—for the support requested in #5 below.

• It seems that the DI for males is not unique to our department at this time. We are, however, very concerned about DI for our African American students, especially males. This impact is likely tied to very low enrollment within this group. Our program is overwhelmingly dominated by students identifying as white or Latinx and non-male. We will step up our connections with the UNITE Center, especially the Black Student Success Center and Umoja Sakhu Learning Community (but also El Centro, the Native American Resource Center, the Puente Project, PRISE Learning Community, and Rising Scholars).
• We are also increasing our outreach to area High Schools, e.g., we were involved with the El Dorado Unified High School Career Expo on 3/5/26 and have a Field Day planned for 4/10/26 with High School students from Grant Union H.S. (in collaboration with the Center for Land-Based Learning).
• Over the long term, we would like to diversify our department faculty (in addition to our students).
• Lastly, we will continue to develop and strengthen our program’s special opportunities to attract, engage and support disproportionately-impacted students and all students. These programs include our internship program, U.C. CA Environmental Stewards Certification program, 3 active restoration projects (Kohler/Arcade Creek Restoration Project, Del Rio Trail Prairie Restoration Project, Empire Creek Field Station Forest Management Project), development of job opportunities for current students and graduates, and strong, direct field experiences.

• Additional FTE
• Release time for faculty to develop more and better practices and approaches
• 2^nd FT instructor
• FT IA position (to replace our current single temp IA)
• 2 or more student help positions
• Fiscal support (e.g., we got zero dollars from Strong Workforce this year and have been supported almost exclusively by grants for close to 20 years)
• Modern, functional, and safe classrooms
• Additional storage and lab prep space
• Reduction in class sizes for lecture-lab courses that involve extensive field labs

• Our program is unique. Our students get hands-on/experiential learning and access to field methods/practices/equipment (and places, e.g., restricted-access sites) that most folks in this field don’t see until graduate school.
• We are motivated to explore development of a Bachelor’s Degree Program (even though this has so far been shut down from higher up).
• We have had to search for loose change between the couch cushions (but we are good at it! E.g., multiple years awarded watershed stewardship grant from Sac county DWR).