Climate Change

The environment affects the way genetic populations move, and similar environments likely play a bigger role in how a species develops than does geographic distance.

Those are just two of the discoveries Professor Jason Sexton has made while studying the monkey flower, a California native that is practically in his back yard, now that he has joined UC Merced.

In a megadrought like the one California is experiencing, people tend to look at how much rainfall has come along.

But it also matters when the snowmelt releases its cache, because the snowpack is the state’s natural reservoir.

Large, naturally occurring low-oxygen zones in the Pacific appear to be expanding, and there is a sharp change in the number of bacteria that produce and consume different forms of toxic sulfur, according to a UC Merced researcher’s latest paper in Nature Communications.

These expanding deoxygenated zones could also contribute to climate change, which, in turn, appears to contribute to their growth.

Like many children on long car trips, Erin Mutch often asked "Where are we?" But instead of telling her, Mutch’s parents gave her a map to figure it out.

The protected land adjoining the northeast corner of campus is officially part of the UC Natural Reserve System now that the UC Board of Regents gave the proposed reserve final approval today at its January meeting.  

The Merced Vernal Pools and Grasslands Reserve is the 39th reserve in the statewide system, adding more than 6,500 acres to the more than 750,000 acres already being conserved and studied. UC Merced’s reserve, though, is the first one in the San Joaquin Valley, and the first one in the heart of the greater Central Valley.

Research in the Sierra Nevada central to addressing challenges to California's water security and its link to the health of Sierra Nevada ecosystems will continue into 2018.

The National Science Foundation awarded the University of California, Merced, $5 million to continue this work on the water, forests and climate of the Sierra Nevada for another five years, said Professor Roger Bales, who also heads UC Merced’s Sierra Nevada Research Institute.

Graduate student Ryan Lucas is living a mountain-lover’s dream through his research.

As part of engineering Professor Martha Conklin’s meadows-hydrology lab, he gets to spend a lot of time in the Sierra Nevada in Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings Canyon national parks, collecting data on how much water is flowing through the meadows, how it’s moving and by what process.

Using some of the tiniest fossils in the world to help clarify how climate change is modeled has earned Professor Jessica Blois a big honor – publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The theory that temperature limits how far up in the mountains trees can grow looks like it’s true, but not in the way researchers had expected.

Working with Professor Lara Kueppers, UC Merced postdoctoral researcher Andrew Moyes’ examination of how warmer temperatures affect alpine-area trees has been published in the international journal Oecologia.