Water is among the most precious resources on the planet. Some areas don't get enough; some get too much. And climate change is driving both of those circumstances to ever-growing extremes.
University of California researchers from the USDA-funded Secure Water Future project recently found that increases in crop water demand explain half of the cumulative deficits of the agricultural water balance since 1980, exacerbating water reliance on depleting groundwater supplies and fluctuating surface water imports.
Discussions around climate change often center around the bad news - the planet is warming, weather is getting more extreme, resources are increasingly scarce.
But there also is cause for hope. There are options to mitigate climate change, and some of them are already happening.
What does the greater Merced community need to know about climate change? How might the Central Valley play a significant role in discussions and solutions about carbon dioxide removal? What new projects are on the horizon, and can they bring economic and community benefits to the region?
The new film "California's Watershed Healing" documents the huge benefits that result from restoring forests to healthier densities. UC Merced's Sierra Nevada Research Institute partnered with the nonprofit Chronicles Group to tell the story of these efforts, the science behind them, and pathways that dedicated individuals and groups are pioneering to scale up these urgent climate solutions.
A new study co-authored by UC Merced researchers assesses the effect of a warming climate in pushing the elevation of snow to rain higher during a storm, increasing runoff and the risk of flooding.
In a paper published in Nature Communications, UC Merced Professor Roger Bales, collaborating with an international team, found that the height of neighboring trees strongly influenced whether a given tree survived California's record 2012-15 drought.
Rocks, from ponderous boulders to tiny grains of sand, are subject to the whims of moisture, weather and time as they tumble from surrounding slopes into rivers, pools and lakes.