Cal State East Bay Concord

🌼 Not Every Yellow Flower Belongs Here 🌼

At first glance, yellow star-thistle may look like just another wildflower. However, it’s one of California’s most damaging invasive plants.

Native to the Mediterranean region of Europe, yellow star-thistle was accidentally introduced to the United States in the mid-1800s through contaminated alfalfa seeds. Today, it has spread across more than 10 million acres in California.

Why Does This Matter?

🌿 It isn’t native to California. Our native plants and wildlife did not evolve alongside yellow star-thistle, making it a poor replacement for the diverse plant communities that belong here.

🐝 It reduces habitat for native pollinators. While yellow-star thistle produces nectar that attracts some insects, including European honeybees, it replaces the diverse native wildflowers that California’s native bees, butterflies, moths, and other pollinators depend on year-round. Healthy pollinator communities need plant diversity, not landscapes dominated by a single invasive species.

🌱 It crowds out native plants. Its deep taproot allows it to compete aggressively for water and nutrients, displacing native species like milkweed, California poppies, and buckwheat.

🔥 It impacts Indigenous stewardship. For the Ohlone, healthy lands are living cultural landscapes. When invasive plants dominate, they displace native species that provide food, medicine, fiber, and habitat, making it more difficult to care for the land using traditional ecological knowledge.

🌎 Restoring Balance

At the Concord Center, we’re removing yellow star-thistle by hand, restoring native habitat, and using cultural burning as one of several tools to help native ecosystems recover. Following this summer’s cultural burn, we found that yellow star-thistle was much easier to remove by hand, an encouraging step toward restoring biodiversity and creating space for California’s native plants to thrive.

🔥 Good hiyyiš (Fire) Returns to the Land 🌱

Ohlone leaders Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino recently held the second cultural burn in over 60 years. 🔥 The first was in October 2024; both burns were conducted at Concord Center! 🔥

Unlike high-intensity wildfires that can sterilize soil, this was a low-intensity cultural burn. The burn was designed to recycle nutrients into the soil, reduce excess vegetation, strengthen native ecosystems, and lower the risk of catastrophic wildfires. ♻️
Throughout the day, Cal Fire and Contra Costa Fire Protection District worked alongside the Ohlone to honor traditional practices while ensuring safety. 🚒 Fire crews intentionally kept fire dragging to a minimum to avoid disturbing the soil and native seeds, and water was only applied in a few areas that did not extinguish naturally. 💧 Their partnership demonstrated how Indigenous stewardship and modern fire management can work together toward a common goal. As the fire settled, a monarch butterfly was seen flying through the smoke. 🦋

People from many communities came together for this special day: members of the Ohlone Indian Tribe and We Wai Kai First Nation, students and faculty from CSU East Bay, CSU San Francisco, and UC Berkeley, staff from Contra Costa Resource Conservation District, staff from East Bay Regional Park District, firefighters, restoration practitioners, researchers, and a journalist from Bay Nature. Many attended to learn how cultural burning can help restore landscapes throughout the East Bay. It was a collaboration in action. This was not just a burn, but the return of Ohlone-led knowledge, relationships, and stewardship of the land. 🤝🔥🌿

Wishing everyone a successful Finals Week! Remember, progress is made one step at a time!

🌿 Meet čayya 🌿

čayya is the Chochenyo name for California buckeye, the native buckeye to California. It thrives below 4,000 feet in oak woodlands, grasslands, and along creeks. This plant is drought tolerant.☀️ In the hot summers, čayya will drop its leaves early to conserve water.🪾

In late spring, its tall clusters of white or pale pink flowers provide nectar and pollen for native bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. 🐝🦋 The nectar is toxic to bees that are not native to California. The honey produced by the bees that use čayya is is nontoxic to humans.🍯

For the Ohlone, čayya has always been an important cultural plant. Although most of the plant, including the nut-like fruit, is naturally toxic, the Ohlone have careful methods to make the fruit safe to eat. 🍽️

There are a few čayya at CSU East Bay, Concord! Have you seen them? 👀 (Hint: They are not in the ṭuuštak Ecocultural Garden.)

Have you visited our free H.O.P.E. food pantry on our campus yet? It’s stocked with basic food items, such as peanut butter, soup, rice, beans, pasta, oatmeal and cereal. It also has fresh vegetables and fruit, meat, and healthy snacks. Make an appointment today here: https://shorturl.at/S810F

The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute on our campus is conducting several online and in-person courses this month for learners over 50 years of age. Some of the topics include: Art history, technology, and music! Visit OLLI’s website for more information: https://shorturl.at/dRX2M

In observance of Independence Day, our campus will be closed today on July 3rd. We hope everyone has a fun and safe 4th of July weekend!

🌿 BioBlitz & Pre-Burn Research Day 🔥🔬

Last week, ṭuuštak Ecocultural Garden became an outdoor classroom as scientists, students, and Ohlone community members came together to document the landscape before an Ohlone cultural burn. 🔥

Faculty and students from Cal State East Bay collected soil and plant samples that will help us understand how cultural fire influences soil health, native vegetation, and ecosystem recovery. Teams also worked on mapping the site and documenting the incredible biodiversity that makes this landscape unique. 🗺️

The day was enriched by the presence of Ohlone project partners, Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino, who shared their ecological knowledge and planted native lupine seeds in two study plots. These plantings build on previous restoration efforts and will help us learn how cultural burning may support native plant regeneration. 🪏🌱

One of the most meaningful moments of the day came when Vincent shared a story about his grandmother. After the tragic 1991 Oakland Hills Fire, she saw a remarkable bloom of wildflowers, many of which she had heard about but never seen before. This was a powerful reminder that fire, when applied with care and cultural knowledge, can create opportunities for renewal and resilience. 🪻

The BioBlitz and Research Day brought together Indigenous knowledge and ecological science to better understand the relationship between fire, soil, plants, and biodiversity. ⚖️

Workday at the ṭuuštak Ecocultural Garden 🪏

It was a cool, windy, and incredibly productive day at the ṭuuštak Ecocultural Garden as the Concord Center climate resilience team joined members of the Contra Costa Resource Conservation District (CCRCD) and Ohlone partners to care for this growing landscape. 🤝

Together we:
🌱 Weeded all 20 planting areas to give native plants room to thrive
🦋 Discovered 6 naturally self-seeded šiška (milkweed) plants, which is a wonderful sign that the pollinator habitat is beginning to regenerate on its own
💧 Installed and adjusted temporary irrigation to support new native plantings
🌿 Added 12 sirkewiš miryan (black sage), 2 California asters, and 1 rawwen (soaproot) plant in the garden
🪧 Installed an additional Habitat Restoration sign to welcome visitors and share the Ohlone-University partnership for restoration taking place.

One of the most rewarding parts of the day was working alongside so many people who care deeply about this land. Every plant placed in the ground and every conversation shared helps build something that will continue to grow for years to come. 🌎

Thank you to everyone who joined us and helped make this workday a success! 💛 Keep an eye out for the next workday at the Concord Center!

📍Concord students: this is your chance to lead!
Apply to be ASI’s Senator of Concord.

📅 Priority Deadline: June 20, 2026
📲 Scan the QR code to apply or visit: https://tinyurl.com/2x3vwuja

Must be a Concord student enrolled in at least 4 units per semester. Additional eligibility requirements apply.