Sustainability Is Key in Mountain Yellow-legged Frog Exhibit

Story by:

• Joanna Volavka - [email protected]

Topics covered:

• Birch Aquarium
• Sustainability

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In March, Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography leaped into a new era with its newest temporary exhibit, Imagine Wild: Mountain Yellow-legged Frog. While Imagine Wild highlights decades of collaborative conservation efforts to bring these frogs back to the wild, it also represents a significant step forward in sustainable exhibit design.

"Imagine Wild is an exhibit about choices in re-wilding. Our exhibition philosophy is, too," said Megan Dickerson, director of exhibits at Birch Aquarium.

The aquarium's museum space is intended for rotating displays to keep information current. However, short-term exhibits often create a huge emissions impact due to shipping, transportation costs and single-use materials like display cases and temporary walls.

"Imagine an exhibition of 2,500 square feet, or the size of your local Gap store, being completely taken down at the end of its run, with most of it ending up in a dumpster. We wanted to find a way to craft a system that goes to the root of that waste," said Dickerson.

With Birch Aquarium's mission to connect understanding to protect our ocean planet, along with the University of California's own call to climate action to reduce emissions, Imagine Wild offered a unique opportunity to put a philosophy of sustainability into action.

Reclaim, reuse

More than 75% of the exhibition's materials are reclaimed or reused, drastically reducing the environmental impact typical of a brand-new installation. Reclaimed items include more than 400 cardboard boxes and over 25 pounds of linens, plus 84.5 linear feet of painted theater backdrop sourced from San Diego Shared Resources for the Arts. Reused components include Mila partitions, a modular truss system, carpet tiles, beanbags, reupholstered furniture and audiovisual equipment.

"Compromise, in its Latin root, means making a mutual promise," said Dickerson. "People often see sustainability decisions as a 'compromise' and being 'less than' or not as good, but when you think about 'compromise' in terms of a mutual promise, it changes the perspective. Then we stop to think about how we build within our own circle, in terms of both physical materials and people's skills. We consider how each part of an exhibition rolls into the next one. Compromise turns into creativity."

Paying it forward

That creativity extends to passing the knowledge, skills and philosophy of sustainability forward to the next generation. More than half of the artists who contributed to the exhibition are UC San Diego students who work at the aquarium as exhibits assistants, learning how to create experiences and produce large-scale art through mentorship and hands-on training.

For Imagine Wild, the students primed walls, painted murals, cut over 5000 individual pieces of cardboard "bark" for the trees, glued and painted those bark pieces onto drop-clothes that became trunks and even helped sculpt the giant frog figure that stands at the entrance to the exhibition.

"What inspires me most about Imagine Wild is how it shows sustainability as a creative practice, not just an operational one. When we reuse materials, collaborate across disciplines, and invite students into the process, we're modeling the kind of imaginative, culture-shaping climate action we want to see across campus and beyond," says Carrie Metzgar, the campus sustainability officer at UC San Diego.

"This exhibit beautifully reflects our campus culture of innovation and care," Metzgar says. "By blending conservation science with student-driven art and reclaimed materials, Imagine Wild shows how sustainability can shape not only what we build, but how we learn and collaborate at UC San Diego and beyond."

Birch Aquarium is proud to be part of the Mountain Yellow-legged Frog conservation story. In 2024 the aquarium joined a long-standing effort that began in 2006, raising more than 200 frogs from tadpoles to adults. In 2025 it partnered with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and other collaborators to reintroduce 350 frogs into the wild - one of the largest releases to date and the aquarium's first-ever species reintroduction. Imagine Wild: Mountain Yellow-legged Frog celebrates that milestone and invites guests into the story to experience the journey firsthand.