Pictures accompanying Professor John Abatzoglou's presentation on the 2025 fire season were blurry. That was intentional, he said, because so much about wildfire is unpredictable.
"There's a lot that we know, and a lot we don't know," he said.
What will California's fire season look like in 2025?
A panel of UC Merced experts, joined by the founder of a public safety information nonprofit organization, will conduct an in-depth discussion of the risks, repercussions and forecasts, and what communities can do to be prepared.
The Fire Resilience Seminar and 2025 Wildfire Outlook will take place from 1 to 3 p.m. April 17 in the UC Merced Conference Center. It is free and open to the public.
UC Merced researchers are taking part in a comprehensive, multi-agency effort aimed at efficiently measuring and mitigating methane emissions.
IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory are leading the effort, which earned a $20 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy in December.
Measurements and data collected from space can be used to better understand life on Earth.
Helping diplomats navigate new cultures, removing mircroplastics from stormwater and automating raisin processing: These are some of the projects awarded winning scores at UC Merced's fall Innovate to Grow event.
Innovate to Grow, or I2G as it's known on campus, is a twice-a-year showcase for UC Merced engineering and computer science students to demonstrate projects they have been developing.
Teams of students work to address challenges presented to them by clients, then present their results to judges who are experts from around California.
As water becomes an ever more precious and unpredictable resource, particularly in the Central Valley, finding ways to precisely irrigate crops is a valuable tool in the fight against climate change.
Climate shifts have triggered more frequent and more severe droughts that have reduced the amount of water available for farming in key agricultural regions. Current methods to check the water needs of crops are costly and inefficient, making it difficult to use precision irrigation techniques that can save water while maintaining or improving crop yield.
In 2010, former President Jimmy Carter made his way to a young University of California, Merced campus to accept the Spendlove Prize in social justice, diplomacy and tolerance and to speak to the National Parks Institute.
"This is an honor for me," the president said, according to news accounts of the event. "The fact is human rights should encompass all those things, the basic freedoms that we cherish because of our constitutional commitments and the right of people to live a decent life."
The first four faculty members named to UC Merced's Agricultural Experiment Station look to make a big impact on farming in the San Joaquin Valley and beyond.
As wildfires grow in intensity and frequency, it's vital that agencies and local stakeholders work together to rehabilitate and restore resilience to wildlands in California.
This finding is underscored in a paper in the journal Restoration Ecology published in October by UC Merced researchers.
Fast-growing fires were responsible for nearly 90% of fire-related damages despite being relatively rare in the United States between 2001-2020, according to a new study.
"Fast fires," which thrust embers into the air ahead of rapidly advancing flames, can ignite homes before emergency responders can intervene. The study, published recently in Science, shows these fires are getting faster in the Western U.S., increasing the risk for millions of people.
