Environment

The question: What happens when UC Merced holds Research Week in the middle of a pandemic? The hypothesis: An annual, weeklong presentation of ground-breaking work reaches a big, new virtual audience.

With the Research Week’s usual in-person seminars, tours and showcases untenable because of COVID-19, the event will be accessed primarily through Zoom. Instead of attendees coming to campus March 1-5, Research Week is coming to them.

The millions of people affected by 2020’s record-breaking and deadly fire season can attest to the fact that wildfire hazards are increasing across western North America.

Both climate change and forest management have been blamed, but the relative influence of these drivers is still heavily debated. The results of a recent study show that in some ecosystems, human-caused climate change is the predominant factor; in other places, the trend can be attributed mainly to a century of fire suppression that has produced dense, unhealthy forests.

A character in a very famous movie about a great white shark once said all sharks do is “swim and eat and make little sharks.”

It turns out they do much more than that. Sharks have roamed Earth’s oceans for more than 400 million years, quietly recording the planet’s history.

Professor Sora Kim has been named one of this year’s Emerging Scholars by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education magazine.

Only 15 researchers, out of hundreds of nominees, have been selected.

Two new projects designed and led by UC Merced researchers will address challenges facing many Californians — wildfire recovery and agricultural labor — but will also have global reach.

Soil biogeochemistry Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe has been recognized by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) as one of this year’s recipients of the Joanne Simpson Medal for Mid-Career Scientists.

One of the biggest challenges in managing crops, especially in large fields, is knowing how much water each section of a field needs. Determining that accurately is a cumbersome process that requires people to hand-pluck individual leaves from plants, put them in pressure chambers and apply air pressure to see when water begins to leak from the leaf stems.

That kind of testing is time consuming and means that farmers can only reach so many areas of a field each day and cannot test as frequently as they should.

Ward Eldredge warily monitored the fire’s progress. As curator of the archives of the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, he deliberated what would need to be done if the nearby Castle Fire continued its approach toward the parks’ headquarters.

The air around Three Rivers grew thick with smoke. It was looking bad.

“The fire had exhibited some very alarming behavior — long runs, great distances travelled,” Eldredge recalled.

School of Engineering professors Roger Bales and Martha Conklin have written a new article for The Conversation discussing the changes that need to be undertaken in land-management practices in California's mountain forests:

Since 2007, UC Merced researchers have been extremely productive in the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory (CZO), delving into investigations of hydrology, climate change, geology, biology and more.

But the National Science Foundation, which funded the CZOs, is decommissioning the sites and has reconfigured the program around themed research clusters in a new program called the Critical Zone Collaborative Network (CZCN).