Environment

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).

Bird species usually are counted twice a year by wildlife surveyors: once during the breeding season and again during the Christmas Bird Count .

New technology, however, is increasing the accuracy of bird population studies. A team of UC Merced researchers is developing a model to recognize bird calls.

UC Merced’s national reputation for sustainability continues to grow, with the Sierra Club naming the university No. 5 on its 2020 “Cool Schools” list and The Princeton Review placing it on its Green College Honor Roll.

Forest restoration is often associated with mitigating wildfire risk and improving ecosystem health throughout the Sierra Nevada. But restoration also dramatically affects water use within forests and the amount of runoff that flows downstream.

The world is a complex place, and humanity faces major challenges. Climate change mitigation might be the most difficult, in large part because of the interdependency of living things and their ecosystems.

How do people transform economic systems so they are also sustainable for people and the planet?

“If we don’t consider how everything connects from a systems perspective, we’re not going to solve grand challenges such as climate change,” Professor Tracey Osborne said. “Not even close.”

Wildfire is a natural process necessary to many ecosystems. But wildfires are getting worse and more damaging, and it is our fault, according to new research.

A paper by two UC Merced researchers and their colleagues, published in a new Nature journal called Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, indicates the global economic and environmental damage caused by wildfire will only increase because of human-caused climate change.

However, we are also able to save ourselves, the researchers said.

California’s leaders want the state to reach 100 percent clean energy in the future, including being 60 percent powered by renewable energy by 2030 and being free of fossil fuels entirely by 2045.

But if the state wants power without fossil fuels, School of Engineering Professor Sarah Kurtz said, there must still be a balance between the state’s supply of and demand for electricity.

There’s a whole world of activity beneath your feet. Soil holds a large proportion of Earth's biodiversity, and is the place where organisms interact with each other and with plants, serving important functions for their ecosystems.

It is said that rainforests are the Earth’s lungs, capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, building it into lush vegetation and releasing oxygen and water back into the air.