San Diego Pollinator Monitoring Program

The San Diego Pollinator Monitoring Program (SDPMP) was started by Christina Simokat (ENVS, BIOL) in 2019, when the �� Pollinator Garden was created with a Campus as Living Lab grant won by Nathan Serrato, an Environmental Studies major. The initial program goals were to 1) determine the efficacy of the native plant garden in supporting native insect pollinators and guide its maintenance in the future, and 2) to maximize the gardens’ utility to students by affording them learning opportunities as “high-impact educational practice”.

SDPMP’s work has grown to include surveys of plant-pollinator networks in nine coastal and inland sage scrub community sites within San Diego County, which is a global biodiversity hotspot increasingly impacted by climate change. In 2022 Elizabeth Ferguson (BIOL) joined our team to guide our development of innovative non-lethal methods of assessing pollinator activity through a combination of camera traps and deep learning detection of insect tracks.

Since our inception SDPMP has engaged more than 40 students – predominantly students under-represented in STEM – in our research, in collaboration with six local conservation partners. Our team has won numerous grants and awards and participated in various related conferences and events. Our paper “A Multi-method Approach to Assessing the Flower-Visiting Insect Assemblage of Rare, Ambophilous Plant Baccharis vanessae in Southern California" will be available soon in a special edition of the journal Ecology and Evolution.