Program areas at Tahoe Institute for Natural Science
EDUCATION:In 2022, we had a total of 4740 student contacts from over 26 different schools and homeschool groups. We returned to in-school and field trip programs for all schools/districts, covering topics from insects, bats, birds, frogs, mammals, and geology. We presented 51 field trip programs, and 58 in-school programs, and gave 24 Nature Day Camps, 10 camps/outings for other organizations (e.g. Courage Project, Boys and Girls Club of South Lake Tahoe), and 11 Nature Club programs. We hosted 460 children over the 24 nature camps.
OUTREACH: In 2022, we returned to a more typical slate of in-person Outreach events and festivals. We hosted a Tahoe Wildflower Big Year with 1766 observers contributing of 26,000 observations. We hosted 51 outings with 714 participants, and hosted 16 talks, with at least 765 participants. We also attended several Earth Day festivals, the Mono Basin Bird Chautaqua, and the Truckee River Day festival, as well as hosting our own Lake Tahoe Bird Festival and Native Species Day, resulting in solid education engagement with approximately 800 people.
RESEARCH: TINS continued with our usual suite of Citizen Science coordination, including the Lake Tahoe Mid-winter Bald Eagle Survey, South Lake Tahoe Christmas Bird Count, Mid-winter Raptor Surveys in both Sierra and Carson valleys, North American Butterfly Association Butterfly Counts, U.S. Nightjar Surveys, and the annual Odonates Mini-blitz. We continued to participate in joint monitoring efforts of Peregrine Falcon nesting sites around the Tahoe/Truckee region. We had 213 volunteers participate in Citizen Science programs. We continued avian and snowshoe hare monitoring in California State Parks around the Lake Tahoe region.