The Public Safety Committee meeting on Monday begins at 4:30 p.m. at the City Council chamber, Room S249 at City Hall.

http://www.pasadenanow.com/main/pasadena-health-department-to-update-city-committee-on-progress-of-its-urban-wildlife-management-plan/#.W-BayZ-IbqB

It is late in the day and still very hot—approaching and possible reaching 100 degrees—and, besides that, it’s a Wednesday, so I think there’s no way anyone’s going to be out looking at trees. But I have underestimated the human ability to disregard nature when trying to commune with it.

https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/secret-life-of-trees/

Owens Lake in southern California was one of the largest inland bodies of water in the United States. By the mid-1920s, it was gone, drained to provide water to a mushrooming Los Angeles. Over the past 30 years, the city has spent around US$2 billion to undo the damage. It has failed to restore the lake, but in The Spoils of Dust, Alexander Robinson describes how the effort has succeeded in another way: by creating a landscape no less valuable ecologically. By documenting the transitions the lake has undergone, he suggests a way forward for engineers, geologists, ecologists and landscape designers hoping to bring other environments back from the brink.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07353-6

Researchers at the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area are trying to better understand animal survival tactics.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-does-californias-wildlife-cope-with-massive-wildfires

Swaths of the Santa Monica Mountains, including parkland west of Los Angeles that is home to mountain lions, bobcats and other wildlife, and which is popular with outdoor enthusiasts, has burned in the Woolsey Fire.

https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/2018/11/13/southern-california-woolsey-fire-burns-national-park-service-land-santa-monica-mountains/1988408002/

“The national recreation area has become an immense natural experiment,” Seth Riley, a National Park Service ecologist, said. “The big question now is this: What happens when a huge wildlife refuge hemmed by freeways and development abruptly loses more than half of its habitat to wildfire?”

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-mountain-lion-wildfires-20181118-story.html

Two dozen biologists with binoculars and telemetry equipment fanned out across the smoldering gulches and slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area on Friday to take a preliminary accounting of the damage caused by wildfire to prime mountain lion country.

https://www.gazettextra.com/news/nation_world/la-area-mountain-lions-face-a-smaller-harsher-world-after/article_98ae055b-35c4-56ae-97ed-affd987e5568.html