Standardized, distributed remote monitoring approaches have become a powerful tool for collecting and sharing large amounts of reliable information about trends in wildlife distribution, abundance, and behavior. Here, we will describe efforts by a team of students and mentors at Cal Poly - SLO to establish a long-term monitoring site at Chorro Creek Ecological Reserve in western SLO County. Our approach integrates with the CDFW Sentinel Site Network and Snapshot USA, allowing students to learn contemporary field and data processing techniques using camera traps and acoustic recorders for both bats and birds, as well as access data from large-scale monitoring efforts. This project also allowed for evaluating wildlife response to a controlled burn using a BACI design, and provides opportunities for evaluating other future management efforts in an adaptive framework.