spearheaded by Neil Havlik, collected seeds and planted them for two years, into more than 30 sites, at Sobrante Ridge Regional Preserve, Tilden and Wildcat Regional Parks, and also, properties owned by East Bay Municipal Utility District. These populations only continue to grow currently in three locations, all of which are within Wildcat Canyon, and the largest stand is along the Mezue trail. Arana Gulch population studies The entire Arana Gulch wild population dropped to a single plant in October 2020, in "Area A", the last of the four original "areas" where 100,000 plants were originally found growing 35 years earlier. January, 2021, the City of Santa Cruz Parks & Recreation Department’s Open Space & Greenways team, in collaboration with the Arana Gulch Adaptive Management Working Group, the UCSC Greenhouse, and UCSC volunteers, did an experimental outplanting of 400 Santa Cruz tar plant, to try and ensure its persistence as a key goal of the Arana Gulch management plan. An additional 400 tarplants were scheduled to be planted in February. The short-term goal of this experimental outplanting is to identify the best outplanting methods. The long-term goal is to increase the seedbank of the tarplant at Arana to a level that will ensure a high probability of persistence for 100 years, or in perpetuity. This planting is something of a landmark—if successful could potentially exceed the targeted population goal for the Santa Cruz tarplant management program. Also in 2021, four studies were conducted of the Arana Gulch Critical Habitat Unit, where in the 1990s tarplants were divided into four population clusters--"Areas" A, B, C and D. Areas A, C and D have been grazed for several years, with the hopes that would increase the tarplant population. Instead, the tarplant population dropped to zero in two of the last six years, and only one single plant survived in 2020. These studies were conducted, to determine the health of the Coastal Prairie habitat which the tarplant is a member, and what improvements could be made to produce future self-sustaining populations. Study 1: How many exotic seeds are in the soil, that could potentially interfere with tarplant seedling survival? One square foot boxes were filled with topsoil, three inches deep from the four "Areas" in November 2021, and sown with California poppy seeds as a native plant stand-in for tarplant seeds, and watered daily. As seedlings germinated, they were identified and counted. Weed