Environmental Research

MERCED, Calif. — Though UC Merced looked back this year to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of the campus’s groundbreaking, signs of what the future will hold continue to come into focus.

Those signs include cutting-edge research moving forward in the San Joaquin Valley -- the state's fastest growing region -- and around the world, the growing campus, and the ever-strengthening bond between the campus and the community.

Professor Carolin Frank is concerned with the inner lives of trees.

She looks inside them to see whether microbes are part of – and perhaps even critical to – life functions such as growth.

Students with a variety of skills and perspectives make up a team that’s taking engineering principles into some of the area’s wildlands to further education and promote awareness about the environment.

Counting the number of species that live in the Earth’s oceans sounds as impossible as counting the grains of sand on a beach.

But a global collaboration involving a UC Merced researcher and a graduate student is doing just that, and found that about a third of all the oceans’ species are still undescribed.

That doesn’t mean they cannot be counted, though.

Graduate student Kaitlin Lubetkin and several sure-footed assistants spent much of the summer in Yosemite National Park.

MERCED, Calif. — The effort to create a natural reserve out of nearly 6,000 acres adjacent to UC Merced has been jump-started by the hiring of two people to share the management duties. 

MERCED, Calif. — California isn’t going to face a superstorm like Hurricane Sandy because the Pacific Ocean is too cold to feed that kind of weather system.

But that doesn’t mean California won’t see extreme weather, say researchers from the University of California, Merced.

Chemistry Professor Jason Hein and his students make a lot of compounds in the lab.

They also make a lot of chemical waste.

But Hein found a way to clean up the waste and reuse it, saving money and helping the environment at the same time.

MERCED, Calif. — A global sustainable architecture competition is turning all eyes to the University of California, Merced, the newest campus in the UC system, and the only one to have all its buildings certified by the US Green Building Council as meeting LEED standards.

Architecture at Zero 2012 is a competition in which student and professional participants from around the world are invited to design examples of a new administration or student housing building and a district energy plan using the principles of zero net energy use.

MERCED, Calif. — A $1.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation will support a five-year investigation by University of California, Merced, researchers into environmental changes in marine lakes, including why some species adapt while others go extinct.

The grant also is helping spread UC Merced’s research and reputation across the Pacific.

“This research is an outstanding example of our faculty efforts to understand the links between the physical and the biological world,” said Sam Traina, UC Merced’s vice chancellor for research.