Facilities Available for Graduate Studies

Home Graduate Program Facilities Available for Graduate Studies

Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems

The program is a research and education group working toward the development of sustainable agricultural systems. It gives high priority to forging links with farmers, gardeners, researchers, and faculty at other facilities. It manages two facilities: the 25-acre Farm on a lower meadow of campus and the four-acre Alan Chadwick Garden on the upper campus. The Farm is the primary research facility and includes research plots, raised-bed gardens, row crops, orchards, a laboratory, and a solar greenhouse. Graduate students may arrange to use the facilities as part of their course work or research.

Computing Facilities

The Department of Environmental Studies maintains a graduate computing facility for the exclusive use of its students, in addition to the more specialized geographic information systems facility mentioned below. The
campus as a whole also maintains computer labs for student use. The Department of Environmental Studies hosts the campus Center for Integrated Spatial Research (CISR), formerly the GIS/ISC Laboratory, which serves as a central facility for spatially-focused research and training at the UCSC. CISR is focused on integrating
state-of-of-the-art spatial technology, methods, and data (geographic information systems, global positioning systems, remote sensing, spatial modeling/statistics) with pressing interdisciplinary research and fostering cross-domain cooperation in the application of these tools. Graduate students engaged in spatially-focused courses and research
projects have access to facilities managed by CISR. For more information go to http://spatial.cisr.ucsc.edu

McHenry and Science Libraries

The University Library consists of two facilities: the main or McHenry Library, which provides centralized support for instruction and research in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, and the technologically innovative Science Library. The University Library contains over 1.25 million volumes, nearly 9,000 periodical titles, and over 500,000 non print items. Daily shuttles to the UC Berkeley campus libraries and Interlibrary Loan services expand UCSC's information base to the UC system; there is also access to the Stanford University libraries. The online MELVYL® catalog indexes the holdings of all UC libraries; the holdings of the California Digital Library are also available.

UCSC Arboretum

The campus Arboretum is a research and teaching facility containing representatives of nearly 300 plant families. Greenhouse facilities are available for research, and special collections of conifers, primitive angiosperms, and plant families of the Southern Hemisphere are available for study.

Museum of Natural History Collections

The Museum of Natural History Collections (MNHC) is dedicated to cultivating an increased understanding of and appreciation for the natural world by promoting the use of its natural science collections for teaching, research, and aesthetics. The museum is the main repository for natural science collections at UC Santa Cruz. Collections include specimens of plants, insects, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. The museum loans specimens for use in teaching, research, and artwork to faculty, students, staff, associates, and others. In addition, the museum maintains the department's field-equipment pool. Equipment such as measuring tapes, thermometers, binoculars, and soil-sampling kits are loaned to students and others working on class, internship, or independent study-related field projects.

Natural Reserve System

The University of California Natural Reserve System (NRS) provides access to and maintains 34 natural areas that encompass diverse and undisturbed examples of California's terrain, both aquatic and terrestrial. The reserves were established for teaching and research. Although graduate students may work on any of the reserves, the Santa Cruz campus has administrative responsibility for four: the former Ft. Ord military site, Landels-Hill Big Creek Reserve, Younger Lagoon, and Año Nuevo Island. In addition, the 400-acre UCSC campus reserve includes a remarkably diverse array of communities to study.