Our students are now featured in an exhibit at the Natural History Museum!

November 17th, 2024

Los Angeles, CA

Alayna Gonzalez (12) reports her final counts for the evening to NHM Community Science team.

Students from Healthy Footprints Adventure Community (HFAC) are now featured in a permanent exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM), celebrating their contributions to community-powered science through the Backyard Bat Survey.

The exhibit, housed in The Commons, a new public space at NHM dedicated to community engagement, science, and storytelling, highlights how local youth are playing an active role in understanding and protecting urban wildlife. HFAC students appear on screen in a short film documenting their participation in a nocturnal bat roost count, now part of the exhibit experience for thousands of museum visitors.

The Backyard Bat Survey is a community science initiative led by NHM and made possible in part by a generous grant from the Disney Conservation Fund. The project collects critical data on urban bat populations throughout Los Angeles and empowers local residents, including youth, to become contributors to regional conservation research.

While many dedicated volunteers across Los Angeles participate in the Backyard Bat Survey, we’re honored that the museum chose to highlight our students. It affirms that they belong in science. That their voices, their data, and their effort truly matter.

For the past two years, HFAC students have participated in bat roost counts along the San

Gabriel River, beneath freeway overpasses, where bat colonies quietly thrive. Students trained in field methods to identify bat roost signs such as glittery guano, urine stains, and high-frequency echolocation calls, and used clickers to count bats emerging at dusk.

In 2025, the group will begin their third year contributing to this meaningful science.

As Sam Tayag, NHM’s Community Science Program Manager and an HFAC educator, explains:

“Community science works because there's nothing quite like many people's local knowledge put together to build data sets that help us understand and protect nature in our neighborhoods. This method of doing research collaboratively is a powerful way of tackling the big issues of climate change, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction and fragmentation, and environmental injustice.

This impacts everyone and everyone deserves the power to develop the new knowledge needed to create a sustainable future for us all. It is the next generation who will be looking back at these data to move the research forward, who will take these projects and grow them in ways we can't even dream of yet, and who will share this knowledge through advocacy, education and art.

Now, when youth visit our exhibit in the Commons, they can see kids just like them involved in real scientific research right here in our community and that they, too, can get involved thanks to the youth and families at Healthy Footprints.”

While the bat monitoring programs are always no cost, space is limited. To share this experience more widely, we also host occasional Bat Hikes giving families across Southern California a chance to engage in hands-on science and explore the mysteries of the night.

We encourage you to visit The Commons at the Natural History Museum—an open-to-the-public, no-charge space where anyone can explore science through the eyes of the community. Come see the work of our students and other local changemakers brought to life in this groundbreaking exhibit.

Want to learn more about the science behind it all?🔗 Explore the Backyard Bat Survey information here: https://nhm.org/research-collections/backyard-bats

Support the Next Generation of Environmental Stewards:

Healthy Footprints Adventure Community is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit offering hands-on outdoor education, community science, and leadership opportunities for youth across Southern California. We remove financial barriers so that more youth can access nature, science, and real adventure.

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Contact: info@hfadventurecommunity.com

Learn more: www.hfadventurecommunity.com

From https://nhm.org/nhm-commons :

NHM Commons is supported by NHMLAC’s Opening New Doors Campaign, which has exceeded $106 million and includes funding for NHM Commons construction as well as endowment and programmatic fundraising efforts.

The NHM Commons project is supported by leadership gifts and grants from the following public and private contributors:

County of Los Angeles - $30 million

State of California - $9 million

Annenberg Foundation - $5 million

Ron Perlstein, in memory of Judith Perlstein - $5 million

Joan Payden - $2.4 million

Ahmanson Foundation - $2 million

The Rose Hills Foundation - $2 million

The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation - $1 million.