The Santa Cruz Island Reserve is committed to the wise stewardship and conservation of the California Island through active research and data procurement. The primary role of the Reserve is to facilitate research and this research is interdisciplinary and far-reaching. Santa Cruz Island has never been connected to mainland North America. The fact that it has been adjacent to the continent but never connected means that there are many endemic species on the island that have closely related relatives on the mainland. Evolutionary questions about island endemism, speciation, adaptation, and biogeography are actively researched in many biological fields based on island species. Santa Cruz Island is also as close to a natural laboratory as you can get; it has similar topography as coastal California, cool marine coastlines and hot, dry interiors, comparable species, and comparable geology, but it is does not have the significant human impact that mainland California does. This means that research on the Island is informative for species on the island itself, but also as a model for broader patterns in California, the United States, and globally.
The Santa Cruz Island Reserve, with the participation of the California Heartbeat Initiative and The Nature Conservancy, has installed a series weather monitoring stations across Santa Cruz Island. Recent funding from The Moore Foundation allows us to actively expand this network and refine the data produced by it. All weather stations on this network provide live, open-access data through the UC Natural Reserve System’s database, Dendra. This data provides foundational weather information for researchers around the world and makes the Santa Cruz Island Reserve a significant hub for climate change research in marine and terrestrial ecosystems.