Plan to Move Grove of Imperiled Cedars Sparks Controversy at UC Irvine : Ecology: Arboretum supporters don’t want the South African trees uprooted to make way for an aviary. Officials say no decision has been made.

Charlie O’Neill planted the seeds seven years ago, carefully watering the tender shoots as they sprouted in hot-house pots at UC Irvine’s arboretum.

Now that the grove of nearly 30 endangered South African cedars has finally taken root on a sandy arboretum hillside, the slow-growing 3-foot saplings are targeted for removal. But it may as well be elimination, says O’Neill, because there is no other compatible soil on the 12-acre experimental garden and gene bank for rare and endangered plants.

The threat facing the cedars is a plan to replace them with an aviary, where a distinguished new professor will conduct research on birds. Angry arboretum supporters who want to protect the trees say animal research is inappropriate at a botanical facility, especially one that is open to the public.

“I don’t like the idea at all because I don’t think that it would fit within this quiet little garden, and course they’re going to have to remove these rare African cedars to do it,” said Emily Ruhlig of North Tustin, a member of Friends of the Arboretum who criticized the plan in the September issue of her garden club newsletter, Orange Pealings.

Reacting to complaints from arboretum director Harold Koopowitz and a letter-writing campaign mounted by arboretum volunteers, the acting dean of the School of Biological Sciences insists that no decision has been made to proceed with the aviary.

“We are still exploring alternative sites for siting at least part of that aviary,” said Hung Fan, a molecular biologist who has served as acting dean of biological sciences for a year.

Fan said he is exploring at least one location near the arboretum that was suggested by Koopowitz. But Fan added that it was unclear whether that space was adequate for the needs of Nancy Burley, a distinguished bird behavior specialist that UCI has just lured away from the University of Illinois at Urbana. Burley, who is out of the country on a research project and is not expected at the Irvine campus until January, could not be reached for comment last week.

Another obstacle, according to Fan, is that he has no authority over the alternative site. He declined to identify the property under consideration, but a graduate student who has worked closely with Koopowitz said it was likely a storage yard at the southern edge of the arboretum where old lamps and lumber are stacked.

“It’s an ideal place, and it’s even on level ground,” said Alan Thornhill, a second-year graduate student at UCI.

At the arboretum site, Thornhill said, the university would have to enlarge an existing concrete pad, build a retaining wall for the sandy slope or extend the hillside--all options that would require uprooting the vegetation on the hillside, including the endangered cedars.

But Fan said if the aviary is ultimately placed at the arboretum, some provision would be made to relocate the cedars. “Certainly, we would not want to cut down or destroy those trees,” he said.

The controversial saplings belong to the family of Widdringtonia cedarbergensis, a type of cedar that is disappearing from South Africa’s Cedarberg Forest, said O’Neill, an arboretum employee who planted the seeds he got from a friend in the South African forestry service.

The cedars are just one of 5,000 varieties of plants found at the 12-acre arboretum at the northern edge of the Irvine campus, near Jamboree Road and Campus Drive. Their seeds are in suspended animation in freezers at minus 70-degrees centigrade along with those of more than 300 other endangered plant species in the arboretum’s gene bank, O’Neill said.

Koopowitz, the arboretum director, is on a research expedition in South Africa and could not be reached for comment. But O’Neill, who has worked at the gardens doing research and horticultural work for 12 1/2 years, said news of the animal research facility caught them by surprise earlier this summer.

“He heard about it by accident at a meeting,” O’Neill said of Koopowitz.

Both men were disturbed by the plan, but were even more concerned that the arboretum’s board of directors and its faculty oversight committee were never consulted, much less informed of the plans to take the space for Burley’s avian research.

But UCI officials say they viewed consultation as unnecessary because a shed housing research animals of graduate students has been on the site for longer than the arboretum.

“They were not consulted because it was not thought . . . that the arboretum was being impinged on in the first place,” said Walter Fitch, a renowned molecular evolutionist and chairman of UCI’s department of ecology and developmental biology, which has hired Burley. “It’s actually a modification of a facility already out there.”

Albert Bennett, an evolutionary biologist who studies reptiles, was one of two faculty whose students had animals in the small wooden shed at the arboretum. Bennett said he, too, was not consulted about the plan for the aviary and initially objected. He said he dropped his opposition when a place was found for his student’s research animals in the new biological sciences building on campus.

Now it appears only botanists such as Koopowitz, arboretum employees and supporters object to the aviary plan. Fan and others point out that such research has co-existed with the botanical gardens for years.

But Thornhill argued that such research was hidden. “If you put in a 60-foot aviary with dozens of birds, it’s going to be very visible, and that a different magnitude of research than a small building hidden by trees,” said the 25-year-old graduate student in botany.

“We are not opposed to the birds being researched, nor are we opposed to Nancy Burley,” Thornhill added. “It’s that they did this without consulting and so quickly. And it will endanger the cedar trees.”

Initial reports indicated the proposed aviary would be 60-feet by 100-feet and enclosed by chain-link and barbed-wire fencing, something arboretum officials say would be jarring in a garden that is open weekdays and Saturday to the public.

Fan said the aviary actually would be somewhat smaller. It would be fenced for security reasons, as the gardens are. “But certainly any kind of security we do, we would work with the arboretum to make sure that it is aesthetically suitable,” Fan said.

Fan has received about 10 or 15 letters from arboretum supporters opposed to the animal research facility. He said their devotion is testimony to the arboretum’s importance on the campus and in the community. And he emphasized that no decision would be made until after he has explored all options with Koopowitz, who returns to Irvine in early October.

For his part, Fitch predicted an amicable solution.

“I’m confident that . . . there will be every effort to optimize a solution that is to everybody’s benefit,” he said.

If the aviary is placed at the arboretum, at least some of the trees would be protected, he said, adding: “They are very small trees that were only planted recently. . . . It shouldn’t cost a great deal to transplant them, although they happen to be in a site that is particularly well suited to them.”

That’s hardly a solution, as far as Thornhill and arboretum supporters are concerned.

“They should just relocate the birds to the other site,” he said, “where there is no question about destroying other species and no question about the inappropriateness of having animal research in a botanical gardens.”