Flexing their philanthropic muscle for the first time, the Shoreline Preservation Fund -- set up with money from UCSB undergraduates -- has doled out more than $75,000 to local environmental projects.

The fund was created last year when students voted to charge themselves $3 per quarter to pay for preserving and protecting the sensitive shoreline habitat around campus. Fund directors announced this week that 14 local environmental groups would be receiving cash grants.

"This is students putting up their own money," said Laura Brands, an environmental studies and French major, who is chairwoman of the fund's board of directors. The students, she said, are taking responsibility for protecting the local environment.

The grants this year will go toward such things as digital mapping, native habitat restoration and beach water-quality monitoring, Brands said.

The largest recipient of this year's grants was a group called the Conception Coast Project, which received $28,780 to create digital maps highlighting sensitive ecological areas and land-use and recreational resources along the local coastline.

The group plans to create a workbook that details some of the local resources, which will be provided to incoming students next fall, said Mike Summers, outreach director for the Conception Coast Project. The group also plans to have field trips for students and conduct workshops to teach incoming students about some of the sensitive habitat in the region.

"We'll be reaching a very impressionable audience and getting a chance to let them know about the unique nature of Santa Barbara," Summers said.

The fund awarded $13,015 for a shoreline water-quality monitoring program along the Isla Vista coast. The money will pay for detailed sampling of water by members of the Surfrider Foundation, which will augment a continuing water-quality testing program by the county's Project Clean Water.

Scientists working in the Coal Oil Point Reserve, which is owned by the university and encompasses about 20 acres of dunes from Devereux Slough and Coal Oil Point west toward Ellwood Mesa, also received $13,015 for a dunes restoration program.

The money will pay for the removal of invasive shrubs and trees, including a grove of acacia trees, said Cristina Sandoval, the director of the Coal Oil Point Reserve and a biology teacher at UCSB's College of Creative Studies. The reserve is one of the few remaining native coastal dunes in California, Sandoval said.

"We lose several square yards of habitat each year due to the spread of acacias and Myoporum," she said. "The canopy's very thick and prevents anything else from growing there."

After removing the non-native species, researchers will begin planting native species such as beach primrose and coastal California poppy, Sandoval said.

"This will be an opportunity for students and the community to be involved with an important restoration project," she said.

Another grant will pay for a naturalist to work on community outreach at Sands Beach to teach beach-goers about the endangered Western snowy plover that uses the dunes there for nesting.

Deadline for the next round of grant applications is April 7. For more information or an application, call 893-5166 or log onto to the Web site at http://orgs.sa.ucsb.edu/spf/.