Ensuring people have access to reliable, clean water is no game.
Except when it is.
UC Merced's Secure Water Future interns, administrative assistant and coordinator joined the university's Game Development Club to host the "Aqua Arcade Game Jam" in early April. Dozens of students from UC Merced and Merced College competed to develop a game that included an aspect of hydrology education.
Federal and state government officials journeyed to the western corner of Merced County on Thursday to announce a new project to place solar panels on the water in the Delta-Mendota Canal.
The project is part of a $19 million investment through President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act announced by the Department of the Interior to install panels over irrigation canals in California, Oregon and Utah, with the aims of decreasing evaporation of critical water supplies and advancing clean energy goals.
Water is among the most precious resources on the planet. Some areas don't get enough; some get too much. And climate change is driving both of those circumstances to ever-growing extremes.
University of California researchers from the USDA-funded Secure Water Future project recently found that increases in crop water demand explain half of the cumulative deficits of the agricultural water balance since 1980, exacerbating water reliance on depleting groundwater supplies and fluctuating surface water imports.
Discussions around climate change often center around the bad news - the planet is warming, weather is getting more extreme, resources are increasingly scarce.
But there also is cause for hope. There are options to mitigate climate change, and some of them are already happening.
A new study co-authored by UC Merced researchers assesses the effect of a warming climate in pushing the elevation of snow to rain higher during a storm, increasing runoff and the risk of flooding.
In a paper published in Nature Communications, UC Merced Professor Roger Bales, collaborating with an international team, found that the height of neighboring trees strongly influenced whether a given tree survived California's record 2012-15 drought.
UC Merced civil and environmental engineering Professor Colleen Naughton has been included in the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists' (AAEES) 40 Under 40 Program.
According to the AAEES website, the program recognizes "talented individuals who have, either personally or as part of a team, been responsible for helping to advance the fields of environmental science or environmental engineering in a demonstrable way within the last 12 months."
A grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will fund a project led by a UC Merced researcher looking into predicting behavior of wildfires.
Jeanette Cobian-Iñiguez is leading a team from UCs Merced and Irvine awarded $1,179,479 to predict the impact of forest fuel treatments on fire behavior, focusing on an improved understanding of the influence of surface-fuel attributes on fire behavior and severity, and ultimately, on forest carbon storage, according to a project summary.
Climate change is a very real - and very scary - threat.
Climate change and its underlying primary cause - burning fossil fuels - are arguably the world's leading causes of preventable death and ill health, writes researcher Edward Maibach.
However, there are tangible ways to limit global warming, and research shows that getting the message from the health care professionals who are on the front lines of dealing with the effects of climate change can have a big impact.
