Climate Change

UC Merced researchers are taking part in a comprehensive, multi-agency effort aimed at efficiently measuring and mitigating methane emissions.

IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory are leading the effort, which earned a $20 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy in December.

Faculty members at UC Merced are taking the lead on four Multicampus Research Program Initiatives (MRPI), working with colleagues around the University of California system to address challenges around labor and agriculture, active matter, Indigenous health and fusion energy.

Measurements and data collected from space can be used to better understand life on Earth.

Sugar pines are the tallest pine species in the world, and they only grow along the West Coast of North America. They are a valued source of timber with cones as large as an adult’s forearm. But they face several problems that a new paper argues should be quickly addressed.

The sugar pine population has been declining because of changing fire patterns, drought, bark beetle mortality, a disease called white pine blister rust – and now the impacts of climate change.

A major study publishing Friday in Science reveals that carbon dioxide emissions from forest fires have surged by 60% globally since 2001, and almost tripled in some of the most climate-sensitive northern boreal forests.

A group of researchers at UC Merced has found that climate change means it takes about three months longer for California to recover from drought, and probably longer.

“Climate change has fundamentally changed the odds of getting out of drought. It has weighted the dice,” said Emily Williams, a postdoctoral scholar with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. “This is happening because of warming in summer months, and a good portion of it is because of human-caused climate change.”

Scientists, policymakers and concerned community members will gather at UC Merced this week to compare notes and chart new directions to improve air quality and public health in the San Joaquin Valley.

A group of UC Merced researchers modeled predation behaviors, as well as changes in those behaviors, among large carnivores, developing a new theory that will help biologists assess the health of various ecosystems.

UC Merced's resident shark expert, Professor Sora Kim, will be featured on the prime-time, premiere-night episode of Discovery’s Shark Week discussing an enormous, legendary sea creature that takes on different forms in different cultures but has a basis in science.

At 9 p.m. EDT Sunday, audiences all over the world can watch Kim as she dives with great white sharks off the southern coast of New Zealand for the episode titled “Jaws vs Leviathan.”