Land, Habitat, and Watershed
Download the Land, Habitat, and Watershed section of the 2007 UCSC Campus Sustainability Assessment here.
The UC Santa Cruz campus is located in an ecologically diverse area along the central coast of California, overlooking the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The magnificent setting of the campus provides opportunity to manage both undeveloped and developed land holdings while providing an education to thousands of students housed on or commuting regularly to campus lands. As a campus nestled within a complex natural environment, the University understands the need to balance the requirements of maintaining and developing facilities to support teaching, research, and public service while managing the natural environment that is an integral part of the campus and the surrounding region. A walk around the UCSC campus reveals the interactivity between the natural environment and the built campus: new buildings are co-located with old-growth trees, views of meadows extend beyond the music building, and a small herd of deer are seen often grazing on the shrubs on Science Hill. As one UCSC planning specialist puts it, “Natural environment and human activity are intertwined [at UCSC] in a raw way that doesn’t occur anywhere else in a campus setting.”
Summary of Activities and Performance
• The UCSC campus includes over 2,000 acres of land. 55%of the campus is designated in the 2005 Long-Range Development Plan (LRDP) as Campus Natural Reserve, site research area, and other land use designations that restrict development.
• The UCSC Campus Natural Reserve consists of 410 acres of natural land set aside to preserve natural communities for teaching, field research, and natural history interpretation.
• UCSC has approximately 4.8 million gross square feet (GSF) of building space.
• UCSC has undertaken a Water Efficiency Survey and is conducting a study of potential applications for recycled water systems on campus.
• UCSC has used an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) approach to control weeds, diseases, insects, and rodents on campus for approximately 15 years with success.
• The UCSC Storm Water Program is drafting a Storm Water Management Plan that outlines the best management practices to be used on campus to control erosion, minimize the potential for water pollution, and educate the changing campus population on behaviors that affect storm water quality.
For more information on land use at UCSC: