NEXT HYBRID MEETING: Agave Restoration And Corridor Conservation For Bats And People Of The American Southwest And Mexico - June 21, 2025, 1:30p - 3p, SD Oasis, Rancho Bernardo & Zoom
- k-england
- 23 hours ago
- 3 min read
NOTE: This is a hybrid in-person meeting and in this instance the speaker will be Zoomed-in to the meeting and will not be on-site at Oasis Rancho Bernardo. We have done presentations this way several times before with great success and, if given permission, we will record the presentation for our YouTube channel. However, the newly reinstituted Plant Forum (to learn more, please read the Plant Forum article by Susi Torre-Bueno in this newsletter) will be for the in-person meeting attendees only and will not be broadcast on Zoom. We are looking for a volunteer videographer to record the monthly Plant Forum for our Youtube channel. (Want to volunteer to video the Plant Forum for our YouTube Channel or learn more about what is needed to do this for the Society? It might be helpful to know that once a video is uploaded to our Dropbox account the videographer's job is done and others will do any editing needed and the uploading and posting to YouTube. Contact Karen England info@sdhort.org to help with doing this.)
Conservation of an Agave Corridor for Bats and People: Agave Restoration in the American Southwest and Mexico with Kristen Lear, Ph.D.
Saturday June 21, 2025, 1:30p - 3p at San Diego Oasis, Rancho Bernardo, CA.
Zoom and In-person,
at Oasis Rancho Bernardo
Online registration required -
SD Hort Member (and their guest) registration is FREE and
in-person non-member registration is $15.00
Dr. Kristen Lear, Program Director for Bat Conservation International’s Agave Restoration Initiative, is in charge of BCI’s bi-national Agave Restoration Initiative.
She got her start in bat conservation in 6th grade when she built and installed bat houses for her Girl Scout Silver Award project. Since then, she has worked on bat research, conservation, and education projects around the world.
She earned a BA in Zoology from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2011, where she assisted with a project studying the pest control services of bats in pecan orchards and led a bat house study for her Honors research. Following graduation, she earned a Fulbright Scholarship to study the critically endangered Southern bent-wing bat (Miniopterus schreibersii bassanii) in South Australia. In 2020, Kristen earned her Ph.D. in Integrative Conservation from the University of Georgia. Her Ph.D. work combined natural and social science approaches to aid in the conservation of the endangered Mexican long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris nivalis) in northeast Mexico.
Kristen is a National Geographic Explorer, AAAS IF/THEN Ambassador working to encourage girls and young women in STEM fields, and a Lifetime Member of Girl Scouts. She is also passionate about public outreach and education, giving numerous bat talks at schools and organizations around the world, leading public bat walks and bat house building workshops, and making numerous media appearances, including on CBS’ “Mission Unstoppable” TV show. More information about Kristen’s work can be found here.
Dr. Lear will tell us about this successful bi-national collaboration that is counteracting the downward ecological spiral that threatened these co-dependent desert dwellers.
In recent years, habitat loss and roost disturbance had led to the rapid decline of three nectar-feeding bats, the Lesser Long-Nosed Bat, Mexican Long-Nosed Bat and the Mexican Long-Tongued Bat, that follow corridors of flowering agaves and cactuses for sustenance during their annual migration north from Mexico to their breeding sites in the US Southwest. The agaves likewise rely on the migrating bats for pollination as the bats brush pollen from plant to plant as they feed.
The broad-ranging efforts of the Agave Restoration Initiation have led to equally broad-ranging successes for the plants, the bats, and the local humans impacted by this project.
Join us at our June meeting to hear this fascinating story.
MEETING LOCATION:
San Diego Oasis
17170 Bernardo Center Dr
San Diego, CA 92128
