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.
"In California, we've been transfixed by so-called megafires because of their massive size, but it turns out that the most destructive fires are ones that grow so fast they can't be stopped," said Professor Crystal Kolden, director of the UC Merced Fire Resilience Center and a co-... |
A group of researchers at UC Merced has found that climate change means it takes about three months longer for California to recover from drought, and probably longer.
“Climate change has fundamentally changed the odds of getting out of drought. It has weighted the dice,” said Emily Williams, a postdoctoral scholar with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. “This is happening because of warming in summer months, and a good portion of it is because of human-caused climate change.”
As Californians know, water is a precious resource and needs to be carefully managed to make sure there is enough to meet all needs, from those of the agriculture industry to everyday water users.
Williams worked with engineering... |
A major study publishing Friday in Science reveals that carbon dioxide emissions from forest fires have surged by 60% globally since 2001, and almost tripled in some of the most climate-sensitive northern boreal forests.
UC Merced faculty John Abatzoglou and Crystal Kolden were part of a research team led by the University of East Anglia in England. The team grouped areas of the world into "pyromes" — regions where forest fire patterns are affected by similar environmental, human and climatic controls — revealing the key factors driving recent increases in fire activity.
Increased emissions were linked to a rise in fire-favorable weather, such as the hot, dry conditions seen during heat waves and droughts, as well as increased rates of forest growth,... |
Scientists, policymakers and concerned community members will gather at UC Merced this week to compare notes and chart new directions to improve air quality and public health in the San Joaquin Valley.
The Conference on Air Quality and Health on Thursday and Friday, Oct. 17-18, at the UC Merced Conference Centers is sponsored by the university’s Health Sciences Research Institute and Department of Public Health. Presentations and discussions will address the pervasive problem of poor air quality in the Valley basin, emphasizing its effects on health in disadvantaged communities.
“The goal is to bring folks together from across the region to discuss what research is going on, what is needed and how to move ahead on... |
A new five-year pilot study to place solar panels on the water in the Delta-Mendota Canal is just the beginning of a formal working relationship between UC Merced and the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority.
The two entities signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Friday, agreeing to work together using science-based and data-driven decision-making on efforts to mitigate climate impacts. The partnership also aims to develop a skilled workforce in the water industry, a crucial industry to improve the socioeconomic outcomes of the people of the San Joaquin Valley.
The pilot project includes deploying up to three different technologies to assess the viability... |
A new five-year pilot study to place solar panels on the water in the Delta-Mendota Canal is just the beginning of a formal working relationship between UC Merced and the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority.
The two entities signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Friday, agreeing to work together using science-based and data-driven decision-making on efforts to mitigate climate impacts. The partnership also aims to develop a skilled workforce in the water industry, a crucial industry to improve the socioeconomic outcomes of the people of the San Joaquin Valley.
The pilot project includes deploying up to three different technologies... |
As California lawmakers consider a package of bills aimed at increasing the production of clean energy, a major question arises: How would we store all this new power?
Storage is a vital issue because while the state can create plenty of energy through solar, wind and hydro power, there must be ways to effectively stockpile it for use overnight or on calm, overcast days or when the waterways dwindle.
A project commissioned by the California Energy Commission and led by UC Merced electrical engineering Professor Sarah Kurtz aims at evaluating solutions for long-duration energy storage.
Researchers examined various scenarios to better understand the value of long-duration energy storage to meet... |
More than 170 students have enrolled this fall for classes in UC Merced’s new environmental humanities major, a degree that will prepare them to be advocates and storytellers for the living world.
The debut of the bachelor of arts degree is the culmination of years of preparation by faculty and staff in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts. The work continued over this summer, as faculty worked with a UC Merced alumna Emily Reyes to interview professionals such as environmental lawyers and artists for insights into careers and best practices.
The major was borne out of a need to develop communicators who can speak and write in a compelling voice about environmental issues and research. Students will be prepared for careers... |
A group of UC Merced researchers modeled predation behaviors, as well as changes in those behaviors, among large carnivores, developing a new theory that will help biologists assess the health of various ecosystems.
Department of Life and Environmental Sciences Professor Justin Yeakel, Department of Physics Professor Ajay Gopinathan and their former graduate student V. P. S. Ritwika use the new theory to predict how predators forage — do they predominantly hunt, scavenge or steal from another predator?
The study results are detailed in the March issue of the Journal of Animal Ecology, published by the British Ecological Society.
The predicted behaviors are based on several sets of variables:
· The size of... |
Students and faculty are converging on Long Beach this week for the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. Seven students will present their research and Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe will serve as one of the meeting’s keynote speakers.
This is the first time fourth-year Ph.D. candidate Jarrod L. Brown Jr. has been invited to present his sociology research. He will speak about ¿field curious? a program offered through the natural reserve system at UC Merced.
The immersive opportunity is designed to enhance undergraduate students' sense of belonging in the field and encourage them to ask questions about the natural world.
“So far there has been evidence of an increased sense of belonging... |
California's agriculture faces challenges from a highly variable climate with temperatures that will increase over the next several decades. Droughts are worsening and the Sierra snowpack, integral to the water supply, is volatile.
However, there are a number of ways to mitigate those changes, as outlined in a new paper coauthored by a group of UC faculty.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences, published a special issue on "Climate Change and California Sustainability - Challenges and Solutions." It includes the paper titled "Cultivating Climate Resilience in California Agriculture: Adaptations to an... |
California's agriculture faces challenges from a highly variable climate with temperatures that will increase over the next several decades. Droughts are worsening and the Sierra snowpack, integral to the water supply, is volatile.
However, there are a number of ways to mitigate those changes, as outlined in a new paper coauthored by a group of UC faculty.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences, published a special issue on "Climate Change and California Sustainability - Challenges and Solutions." It includes the paper titled "Cultivating Climate Resilience in California Agriculture: Adaptations to an... |
Construction has begun on a pilot project to install solar panels above two sections of Central Valley canals. This innovative initiative, which studies significant power and water issues, has already garnered recognition.
Project Nexus, a partnership between the Turlock Irrigation District (TID), the California Department of Water Resources (DWR), Bay Area development firm Solar AquaGrid, and UC Merced, received the Edmund G. "Pat" Brown Award from the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance (CCEEB).
CCEEB describes itself as a "nonprofit, nonpartisan coalition of business, labor, and public leaders, which advances balanced policies for a healthy environment and a strong economy."
The award named... |
As the climate continues to change, the risks to farming are only going to increase.
That's the key takeaway from a recent paper published by a team that included UC Merced researchers. The paper dives into what those challenges are, how farmers are working to address them and what should come next.
"Climate Smart Agriculture: Assessing Needs and Perceptions of California's Farmers" was first authored by Samuel Ikendi, academic coordinator, with engineering research Professor Tapan Pathak as a corresponding author. Pathak is also a project director of National Institute of Food and Agriculture-funded project "Multifaceted Pathways to Climate-Smart Agriculture through Participator Program Development and... |
Almost 3 billion people worldwide are projected to suffer from severe water scarcity by 2025. Thousands have already been affected in California alone, where more than 1,200 wells ran dry in 2022.
It's never been more important to find ways to make the best use of this precious resource.
A project with co-principal investigators from UC Merced and two universities in Texas, led by a UC Berkeley professor, aims to significantly reduce residential water consumption by re-using much of that water before it is flushed into the sewer system.
With a $650,000 award from the National Science Foundation, architecture Professor Maria-Paz Gutierrez of UC Berkeley is leading... |
UC Merced's resident shark expert, Professor Sora Kim, will be featured on the prime-time, premiere-night episode of Discovery’s Shark Week discussing an enormous, legendary sea creature that takes on different forms in different cultures but has a basis in science.
At 9 p.m. EDT Sunday, audiences all over the world can watch Kim as she dives with great white sharks off the southern coast of New Zealand for the episode titled “Jaws vs Leviathan.”
Leviathan, a mythological sea monster, has been drawn in various forms throughout the ages, and referenced in such books as the Bible and “Moby Dick.” Most often, it is represented as a serpent or dragon, although some scientists and artists depicted leviathan as just an enormous whale.
In truth,... |
When the city of Fresno and the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District wanted specifics about the impacts of truck traffic on the health of some of the city's most vulnerable residents, officials turned to UC Merced's Community Labor Center (CLC) and public health Professor Sandie Ha.
Ha has extensive experience in conducting population-based studies on environmental impacts of health. She and a team of researchers crafted an assessment of environmental health for the greater Fresno community. The study, published in April, is the basis for a proposal to change trucking routes through town.
The state has identified a community in south Fresno as being disproportionately... |
Agriculture is in a time of daunting challenge: The world's population is growing and climate change is impacting every area of the food supply chain.
Researchers from across the country who are working to address that challenge met at UC Merced this week. They are part of the Internet of Things for Ag, a National Science Foundation-funded research center uniting the University of Pennsylvania, UC Merced, Purdue University and the University of Florida.
The internet of things is a swiftly evolving "smart" network of devices, sensors and other objects that communicate and share data. Research in this domain is inherently multidisciplinary; this is reflected by the broad range of expertise by researchers and students associated with the center.
Projects in... |
“Raise your hands if you want to know a secret,” acclaimed author and cartoonist Jorge Cham instructed a crowd of young children. Hundreds of tiny arms shot up in unison toward the cafeteria ceiling.
“Butterflies drink with a straw,” he said. Bustling with excitement, the students expressed their astonishment with “oohs” and “wows.”
Cham spoke to more than 500 elementary school students during two assemblies April 18 at Ada Givens Elementary School in Merced. The first gathering focused on his children’s TV series “Elinor Wonders Why,” about a curious rabbit that goes on adventures with her friends to gain knowledge by questioning and exploring. Cham co-writes and co-produces the PBS Kids series and accompanying books constructed to make... |
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.
Teams of five people or fewer had 48 hours to create their games. At the end of the weekend, eight teams submitted game entries. All teams submitted creative products, but one emerged as the winner.
The winning team (UC Merced students Sean Thomas Edison Grant, Richie Friedland, Serge LoBach and Damian Eaton), "Remediation," created a game with the same title.
In Remediation... |
Three UC Merced graduate students and two undergraduate alumni were recently offered fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).
UC Merced’s 2024 NSF GRFP recipients are:
Anthony Alfaro, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from UC Merced in 2022, is a second-year Ph.D. student at UC San Diego in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
Andrew DeMello is graduating from UC Merced with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry this May and will join the Chemistry and Biochemistry Graduate Group this fall.
Second-year Quantitative and Systems Biology Ph.D. student John Espinosa is investigating community college transfer students’ experiences in undergraduate... |
Three UC Merced graduate students and two undergraduate alumni were recently offered fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).
“I am delighted that our students continue to be recognized by the National Science Foundation as some of the nation’s most promising scientists and engineers,” Vice Provost and Graduate Dean Hrant Hratchian said. “Our GRFP awardees and those named as honorable mentions have demonstrated the potential for meaningful achievements in their fields.”
The five-year fellowship is awarded to senior undergraduates and first- and second-year graduate students in STEM and provides three years of financial support inclusive of an annual stipend of $37,000. This... |
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.
The Delta-Mendota Canal floating solar project is set to receive $15 million of this funding. The Bureau of Reclamation said the agency will collaborate with the San Luis and Delta-Mendota Water Authority and the University of California through a... |
The ninth installment of Hack Merced recently brought together 168 innovators focused on developing technology for the greater good. The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute at the University of California, Merced, sponsored the "Health for Social Good" track, highlighting the intersection of technology, health and nutrition.
Team Foood emerged victorious in the "Health for Social Good" track with its groundbreaking image segmentation model. This tool allows users to take a photo of a meal and obtain detailed nutritional insights.
Team Foood's members, Liam Stelly-Hawkes and Julian Balbuena, both third-year computer science and engineering majors, said they spent the first five... |
Even though the Merced Vernal Pools and Grassland Reserve (MVPGR) is adjacent to campus, it's an area that can be daunting to access.
Last year, more than 2,000 people visited the campus to learn about this unique habitat and the animals and plants that are protected there. Guided visitors included schoolchildren on tours and researchers. Once there, for much of the year, the weather can be windy, rainy or blisteringly hot and there are no facilities where people can take shelter, use the restroom or wash their hands.
“Researchers are used to working in a variety of field conditions, but the lack of facilities could be a real barrier for students and other visitors,” said paleoecology Professor... |
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.
Two UC Merced experts in civil and environmental engineering took part in a recent report by the Environmental Defense Fund examining the issue and potential solutions. Associate Professor of Extension Tapan Pathak and Professor Josué Medellín-Azuara co-authored the report, "Scarcity and Excess: Tackling Water-Related Risks to Agriculture in the United States," and wrote the section pertaining to California.
In addition to climate change, disruptive human interventions such as groundwater over-extraction, sprawling drainage networks and misaligned governance are... |
The 2024 Sierra Nevada Science Symposium, hosted March 5-6 at University of California, Merced, brought together National Park Service (NPS), U.S. Geological Survey, National Forest, state, local, and other resource managers and scientists with university researchers and non-governmental organizations to discuss how the latest in science and research, both within and outside protected lands, informs a wide range of complex and challenging Sierra Nevada resource management issues.
The conference was brought to UC Merced this year with the help of Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI) and UC Merced Natural Reserve System Yosemite and Sequoia Field Stations , in coordination with other planning... |
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.
California's San Joaquin Valley is home to some of the most fertile soil on Earth. Crops grown here are exported around the world. According to California Department of Food and Agriculture, more than 250 different crops, worth $30 billion per year, are grown in the larger Central Valley. The... |
Even though the Merced Vernal Pools and Grassland Reserve (MVPGR) is adjacent to campus, it's an area that can be daunting to access.
Last year, more than 2,000 people visited the reserve or campus lands adjacent to the reserve to learn about this unique habitat and the animals and plants that are protected there. Guided visitors included schoolchildren on tours and researchers. However, visiting requires finding parking on campus and walking out to the land, which is not easy for people with disabilities or those carrying a lot of equipment. Once there, for much of the year, the weather can be windy, rainy or blisteringly hot and there are no facilities where people can take shelter, use the restroom or... |
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.
This was the message behind "Roads to Removal," a symposium at UC Merced based on the report by the same name. The report was commissioned by the Department of Energy and produced by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in conjunction with scientists from more than a dozen institutions across the nation, including UC Merced.
Roughly 175 people from academia, science, agriculture and business attended the... |
What does the greater Merced community need to know about climate change? How might the Central Valley play a significant role in discussions and solutions about carbon dioxide removal? What new projects are on the horizon, and can they bring economic and community benefits to the region?
These questions and more are set to be addressed as part of “Roads to Removal,” a lecture and symposium set for Feb. 29 and March 1 in the Dr. Vikram and Priya Lakireddy Ballroom, located in the Conference Center at UC Merced. The symposium will examine the research and opportunities identified in the report “Roads to Removal: Options for Carbon Dioxide Removal in the United States,” a first-of-its-kind... |
The latest installment of North State Public Radio’s Blue Dot podcast focuses on the UC Natural Reserve System and the national parks and features a segment about the UC Merced ¿field curious? program.
Sponsored by the UC Merced Natural Reserve System (NRS), ¿field curious? introduces undergraduates to field research during a weekend stay at a UC Merced natural reserve. The program is designed to lower the barriers preventing many students, especially first-generation college attendees and those from minority backgrounds, from giving field research a try.
The full podcast covers many different aspects of the NRS, but UC Merced’s NRS Associate Director Jessica Malisch and undergraduate Carlos Martinez, who... |
The new film "California's Watershed Healing" documents the huge benefits that result from restoring forests to healthier densities. UC Merced's Sierra Nevada Research Institute partnered with the nonprofit Chronicles Group to tell the story of these efforts, the science behind them, and pathways that dedicated individuals and groups are pioneering to scale up these urgent climate solutions.
"California's forests are at a tipping point, owing to both climate stress and past unsustainable management practices that suppressed wildfires and prioritized timber harvesting," explained UC Merced Professor Roger Bales, who was involved in developing the film.
Covering over 30... |
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.
The study also shows the importance of spatially representative ground measurements of hydrologic variables, an effective, accurate way to forecast runoff and inform decision making. That's according to a study published in the Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies , which uses the American River Basin in California's central Sierra Nevada, a region historically prone to flooding, as the study area.
Using hydrologic modeling and widely accepted climate-warming scenarios, and with support from the California... |
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.
Using high-resolution maps developed from aircraft flights before and after the drought, the team determined the fate of more than 1 million conifer trees in the southern Sierra. They found that trees overshadowed by taller neighbors were less likely to suffer drought stress and die, mostly due to reduced sunlight and thus lower growth and water demand.
A forest with a similar number of trees, but of more-uniform height, whether large or small,... |
Environmental Systems Ph.D. candidate Marie Buhl has been invited to join the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate (CACC).
Buhl, who is from Germany, works in Professor Sam Markolf’s lab focusing on climate change adaption research in the field of civil engineering through resilient infrastructure. Their research includes improving engineering education on these topics, identifying challenges for practitioners and exploring concepts of climate-informed engineering.
“It is a crucial time to advance this work,” she said. “We support research to rewrite important national building standards and fundamentally reshape the civil
engineering... |
Environmental Systems Ph.D. candidate Marie Buhl has been invited to join the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate (CACC).
Buhl, who is from Germany, works in Professor Sam Markolf’s lab focusing on climate change adaption research in the field of civil engineering through resilient infrastructure. Their research includes improving engineering education on these topics, identifying challenges for practitioners and exploring concepts of climate-informed engineering.
“It is a crucial time to advance this work,” she said. “We support research to rewrite important national building standards and fundamentally reshape the civil
engineering profession.”
After completing her Ph.D., Buhl is planning to work as a consulting engineer.
“I hope to support... |
Rocks, from ponderous boulders to tiny grains of sand, are subject to the whims of moisture, weather and time as they tumble from surrounding slopes into rivers, pools and lakes.
UC Merced Professor Claire Lukens is getting more detailed data about these natural processes by using a larger range of samples than those of earlier studies — a novel analytical framework that could hold important implications for the field of geology. The goal is to trace the origin of rocks in these waters, or catchments, to better understand the effects of weathering and erosion.
Her research, recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface and selected for an editor's highlight in Eos, the... |
When Carlos Martinez was growing up in Southern California, his experience outdoors largely consisted of the irrigated lawns and tidy trees of his local park. Camping and hiking were not in his family’s recreational repertoire. Meanwhile, high school and work kept him too busy to focus on much else.
Martinez’s diligence paid off with an offer of admission to UC Merced. Like all undergraduate biological sciences majors, he completed more than a few laboratory classes involving pipettes and test tubes.
“I was not completely sure what I wanted to do after I graduated. I just knew that I did not want to sit behind a lab bench for the rest of my life,” Martinez said.
In search of an alternative path, Martinez went to an event sponsored by the campus’s... |
Distinguished Professor Martin Hagger from the Department of Psychological Sciences has been awarded one of this year’s Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher awards.
He is one of four researchers from UC Merced to receive the award, and the only one from the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts. The other recipients are climatology Professor John Abatzoglou and computer vision Professor Ming-Hsuan Yang, both from the School of Engineering, and adjunct Professor Tanja Woyke, a biologist with the School of Natural Sciences who is primarily affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
This is the fourth consecutive year Hagger has received this award. This is Yang's sixth award. He also ... |
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."
Naughton's lab designs sustainable and culturally sensitive food-energy-water systems through life cycle assessment, geographic information systems, integration of anthropology and engineering, and effective science policy.
She is best known pioneering a... |
Graduate student Samuel Leventini comes from a long line of educators, and the tribology researcher thinks he might want to follow in those footsteps.
Thanks to a new supplemental grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Leventini will get the opportunity to find out if teaching is really the path for his life.
“My father and paternal grandfather are teachers, and my maternal grandfather was a professor of English at CSU Stanislaus. With that lineage, education has always been important to me,” Leventini said. “I enjoyed my time as a teaching assistant, and this opportunity seemed like the perfect next step in growing myself as an educator.”
Leventini is in the third cohort of UC Merced’s CONDESA program.... |
As a result of climate change, the Golden State's farms are expected to face a surge in agricultural pests, which poses a threat to California's specialty crops industry.
Populations of three major insect pests – codling moth, peach twig borer and oriental fruit moth — are projected to increase mainly due to rising temperatures, according to a study recently published in the journal “Science of the Total Environment” by a team of researchers at UC Merced, University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources and the U.S. Department of Agriculture California Climate Hub.
“These three pests are notorious for infesting most of the walnut, almond and peach orchards of California, causing extensive damages... |
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) has named environmental systems Ph.D. student Kate DeMarsh a recipient of the 2023 Next Generation Fellowship.
The UCAR fellowship is awarded annually to three graduate students from North American universities who are looking to gain experience in scientific research, policy, or diversity, equity and inclusion.
DeMarsh’s research focuses on community-based air monitoring in Professor Xuan Zhang’s lab. She is working on a project with the San Joaquin Valley Center for Community Air Assessment and Injustice Reduction (SJV CC-AIR) at UC Merced to establish a network of citizen science monitors across the Valley to better characterize air pollution trends... |
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.
Also on Cobian-Iñiguez's team are professors Roger Bales and Stephen Hart of UC Merced and Tirtha Banerjee of UC Irvine. The award is housed UC Merced's Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI).
The team... |
How different species of animals respond to extreme weather events — which are increasing because of climate change — appears to be related to body size and habitat preference, a new study shows.
When extreme weather causes widespread flooding, smaller species and those living in low-elevation areas are most at risk. Being able to develop models that forecast the effects of natural disaster on terrestrial animals could help guide efforts to protect vulnerable species and habitats.
Department of Life and Environmental Sciences Professor Matthew Hutchinson and colleagues from Mozambique, Princeton University, the University of Idaho, British Columbia, and others analyzed data gathered during Cyclone Idai... |
Four UC Merced graduate students can focus fully on their research and academic studies this year thanks to a generous gift from the Northern California Chapter of the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) Foundation.
ARCS, a national organization established and operated entirely by women, is committed to the advancement of science in the United States by financially supporting distinguished graduate students in science, technology, engineering and medical research disciplines at its partner institutions.
UC Merced was named a partner university by the ARCS Foundation in 2022 and the 2023-2024 academic year is the campus’ second time awarding the fellowship.
“We are grateful for our partnership with the ARCS Northern California Chapter advancing science... |
One of the major challenges of this century is democratically engaging institutions and large numbers of people with strategies to mitigate global warming by minimizing greenhouse gas emissions.
A new study by sociology Professor Paul Almeida and colleagues in the Nature Portfolio’s journal npj Climate Action indicates labor unions and community-based groups have the best chance of getting people to act. They can also help overcome some impediments to action, such as misinformation, apathy, awareness, climate denialism among elected officials, lack of resources among vulnerable populations and and an over-emphasis on technology-based solutions without public input.
Former U.S. Speaker of the House... |
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.
Maibach, a distinguished university professor and director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, will discuss his research on the topic at CROSSTALK, an interdisciplinary talk series at UC Merced that is... |
Understanding and conserving biodiversity, or the variety of life in ecosystems, is key to sustaining life on Earth.
A research project funded by NASA that is launching this week in South Africa, co-led by UC Merced environmental engineering Professor Erin Hestir, is aimed at better understanding the biodiversity of the region and providing new mapping tools that could be used on a global scale.
BioSCape, a collaboration between the U.S. and South Africa, will run through 2024, with most of the data collected through the end of this year. Hestir is working with geography Professor Adam Wilson of the University of Buffalo and scientists at the University of Cape Town to lead the project.
"Planet Earth is special," Hestir... |
Water is the most valuable resource in the world. And it's a particularly important commodity in the Central Valley, historically a desert but also home to some of the richest agricultural soil on Earth.
The UC Merced Library and Secure Water Future co-hosted an event to discuss water policy in California, its history and what the future might look like.
Guest speaker Mark Arax, author of "The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California," painted a bleak picture. However the other speaker, Ellen Hanak, vice president and director of the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) Water Policy Center and a senior fellow at the PPIC, was a little more optimistic about the future of water and agriculture.
"We have grown... |
Compelling storytelling is vital to ensuring the action needed to secure a habitable planet for future generations, according to an increasing amount of research.
UC Merced is recruiting students now to become the next environmental storytellers.
Students who are interested in creatively conveying the urgency of environmental issues can make that mission the focus of their studies when the new environmental humanities (EH) major begins at UC Merced in fall 2024.
“What do students have to say about the environment and how can they contribute to the global conversation and the huge global crisis we're facing?” Assistant Teaching Professor Bristin Jones asked. “We need all players on board. It's not enough to just have the... |
UC Merced researchers will tackle climate changes in multiple ways through more than $4 million in grants recently awarded from within the university.
The Office of Research and Economic Development (ORED) issued nine awards totaling $4,096,197 for proposals that range from studying methane gas emissions to making electronic vehicles more accessible to people.
For the initial round of funding, ORED received 23 high-quality proposals that underwent two rounds of review, said Gillian Wilson, the university's vice chancellor for Research, Innovation and Economic Development.
Grant recipients said the funds will help advance their important and timely work.
Mechanical engineering Professor YangQuan Chen was awarded one of two $1... |
Three UC Merced researchers have recently received the prestigious Hellman Fellowship.
Computer science and engineering Professor Shijia Pan, economics Professor Briana Ballis and life and environmental sciences Professor Xuan Zhang have all been named Hellman Fellows.
The Hellman Fellows Program was launched at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley in 1995 by Warren and Chris Hellman to provide early career funding to faculty members who hadn't yet made tenure. They were inspired by their daughter Frances, a UC Berkeley physics professor who found that young faculty members faced challenges after initial funding options ran out and before other external support was available. The Hellmans pledged to fill that gap.
The program has been expanded to include all 10 UC campuses... |
Water is the most precious, and most debated, resource in the Central Valley. Secure Water Future (SWF) and the UC Merced Library are co-hosting a vital discussion Sept. 28 about the future of water and the role of history in shaping water policy.
Mark Arax, author of "The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California," and Ellen Hanak, vice president and director of the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) Water Policy Center, will lead the discussion in room 120 of the Arts and Computational Sciences Building. Arax will read from his acclaimed book, and Arax and Hanak will share a dialogue about the Central Valley, California policy, local stories, collective memory and more.
Doors open at 5 p.m. for the event, which... |
Professor Martha Conklin started her career at UC Merced at the Castle Research Facility, and it began with a frightening surprise.
“I had a baby rattlesnake in my office,” she said. “The whole building was snake-infested before UC Merced moved in. But it's a small thing — there were a lot of things to work out back then.”
Those were the early days, when the Castle facilities were the campus’s only facilities and were referred to as the “Wild West.” And like Annie Oakley before her, Conklin has been a trailblazer, both on campus and in the living laboratory that is the Sierra Nevada.
Of the initial eight non-administrative faculty members hired, Conklin was the first to arrive. She was the first female faculty... |
Four UC Merced researchers will share in the new California Climate Action Seed Grants and Matching Grants, which are the result of an historic partnership between the University of California and the state of California.
The University today announced it is awarding over $80 million in climate action grants to spur implementation of solutions that directly address state climate priorities.
UC Merced professors Emily Moran and Ricardo de Castro are the principal investigators on two projects out of 38 awarded. Professors Josué Medellin-Azuara and Rebecca Ryals will also share in the funds as collaborators on other projects.
De Castro will receive $1.1 million in seed money for a project... |
In an opinion piece published in today's Los Angeles Times, UC Merced researchers Brandi McKuin and Professor Roger Bales describe the work that led to the upcoming Project Nexus, a pilot project that will erect solar panels over canals in the Turlock Irrigation District.
Here is an excerpt:
In 2021, our team at UC Merced found that covering California's extensive network of irrigation canals with solar panels could make significant contributions to both clean energy and water conservation, serving two of the state's most pressing needs at once.
In addition to the added solar power, we found that shading all 4,000 miles of the state's canals and aqueducts could save as much as 63 billion gallons of water annually by... |
Being able to accurately predict how the climate will change in the future is one of the most important quests of our lifetimes. A key to better prediction is the fundamental understanding of how particles in the atmosphere are connected to climate and climate change. One way to do that is to better understand the interactions between desert dust particles and radiation — from the sun and the Earth's surface.
Life and Environmental Sciences Professor Adeyemi Adebiyi is studying those interactions, thanks in part to a new grant from the Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science. He is the only one from UC Merced, of the 24 researchers across the country, selected to receive part of the DOE’s $15.3 million for Atmospheric System Research projects... |
UC Merced students will present research conducted over the summer at the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Center (UROC) annual Undergraduate Research Symposium.
The research presentations mark the end of the Summer Undergraduate Research Institute (SURI), a nine-week program conducted and hosted by UROC. This summer, over 160 undergraduate students worked alongside UC Merced faculty and graduate students to conduct research in every discipline offered on campus.
"This is a milestone event to honor and celebrate our undergraduate researchers' hard work and their personal and academic development," said UROC Assistant Director Valerie Anderson.
The Undergraduate Research Symposium... |
UC Merced 's resident expert on the nightmarishly massive megalodon will play a role in Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, a celebration of the toothy creatures at the top of the oceanic food chain.
Professor Sora Kim will be featured in a show called “Jaws vs. The Meg,” in which she and other experts discuss and compare two of the largest predators to ever roam the oceans.
Megalodon appeared about 23 million years ago and reigned the seas for 21 million years, going extinct about 2.5 million years ago. In 400 million years of shark evolution, megalodon is the biggest shark species that ever lived, growing to 50-60 feet long, or three times the size of the largest of today’s great whites.
Paleoecologist Kim has been researching megalodon... |
Professor Michael Findlater has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), a U.K.-based learning society that began in 1841 with the formation of the Chemical Society of London.
In 1980, the four major British chemistry societies — the RSC, the Society for Analytical Chemistry, the Royal Institute of Chemistry and the Faraday Society — merged to form The Royal Society of Chemistry, which was granted a new Royal Charter.
Fellows are nominated by other members because of their distinguished research careers, impact on scientific advancement and benefit to the application of chemical science through public service, outreach, policy development and change, and through connecting or leading the chemical science community to provide... |
Incoming Bobcat Benji Thier already knows what he wants to do with his college degree: Save the planet.
“I am planning to study Environmental Systems Science because I did some environmental work in high school and I think it is a very important and relevant field,” he said. “I believe we need more people in this field because we need to save our planet.”
Thier, a Tiburon native and graduate of Redwood High School, visited the campus on Bobcat Day and was impressed with how much environmentally related research is being conducted.
“I have been thinking about environmentally friendly ways I can help the planet while using my degree,” Thier said.
One of the opportunities he could choose... |
A new feature by the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS) highlights the impressive contributions made by UC Merced civil and environmental engineering Professor Colleen Naughton.
Naughton, a CITRIS principal investigator and development engineer, blends traditional research techniques with improvements in technology and analytical methods to design healthier and more sustainable food, energy and water systems, author Karen Vo says in the article, posted in mid-June.
According to its website, CITRIS was launched to leverage the research strengths of the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Merced and Santa Cruz, and operate within the... |
Merced, California, and Kyoto, Japan, are nearly 5,500 miles apart, but their research universities' shared goals to improve society is bringing them together. A new agreement between institutions of higher education in both cities will foster collaboration among researchers and an exchange of students.
Kyoto University, in the 10th largest city in Japan and routinely ranked among the world's top 100 universities, has strengths in addressing global-scale problems through research and education. UC Merced and Merced College separately signed memoranda of understanding with Kyoto University this spring. UC Merced's agreement is between the university's Graduate Division and School of Engineering... |
Megalodon was the biggest shark in the world — 50 feet long or more — and one of the largest fish ever to exist. It roamed most of the world’s oceans from 23 million to 3.6 million years ago.
A new study by paleoecology Professor Sora Kim and colleagues shows the shark’s body temperature was considerably higher than previously thought and provides clues to the species’ demise.
Kim, professors Michael Griffiths and Martin Becker from William Paterson University in New Jersey, Kenshu Shimada, a paleobiologist at DePaul University in Chicago, Rob Eagle from UCLA and others used fossil teeth to determine megalodon was endothermic. The high metabolic cost of maintaining that endothermy as... |
The USDA-funded Secure Water Future (SWF) team at UC Merced believes that to fully understand water, you must do more than just study this vital resource. You must immerse yourself in it - sometimes, literally.
A recent trip to Utah that culminated in rafting The Gates of Lodore on the Green River allowed student participants to both learn about and experience water, in all its forms. This was the second year for this trip, and thanks to this winter's heavy and lengthy snowfall, students got to see the solid form of water, as well.
"We were able to both snowshoe and raft, giving us a really interesting perspective," said Sarah Naumes, managing director of SWF.
Students, who came from UC Merced, UC Davis, UC Berkeley, Utah State University and New Mexico... |
New students or those who have not yet chosen their majors will have an array of options before them.
Five new majors and several new emphases, ranging across all three schools, are all coming online in 2024 and are recruiting students now.
New bachelor’s of science degrees:
chemical engineering
data science and computing
public health
New bachelor’s of arts degrees:
data science and analytics
environmental humanities
New emphases:
In the mechanical engineering major:
aerospace engineering
In the political science major:
American politics
comparative politics
international relations
law and policy
In the sociology major:
community studies
health, medicine and society
justice, law and society
race and racial justice
Students who enroll in the... |
UC Merced students Brianna Aguilar-Solis, Diane-Marie Brache-Smith, Sierra Lema and Sarif Morningstar, and alumni Diana Cruz Garcia and Anna Maria Calderon were awarded fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).
The five-year fellowship provides three years of financial support inclusive of an annual stipend of $37,000, as well as access to opportunities for professional development.
Cruz Garcia, who earned her bachelor’s degree in bioengineering from UC Merced, is pursuing a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, and Calderon, who received her bachelor’s degree in life sciences, is pursuing graduate studies at Pennsylvania State University.
Aguilar-Solis, who is from Bakersfield, received her bachelor’s... |
Chemistry Professor Aurora Pribram-Jones is looking for undergrads to help her get the lead out — out of drinking-water pipes.
She and a colleague at Harvey Mudd College (HMC) in Claremont are addressing a problem that plagues much of America — lead in the pipes that carry drinking water into people’s homes. Materials scientists have been trying to find brass alloy replacements that still have all the best qualities of leaded pipes. Lead in metals helps with machining, for example, so the new alloys will have to have some similar properties.
Using computational and experimental chemistry can help them see why, at the atomic level, certain properties or behaviors occur in the new metals.
Students who are interested in helping solve... |
UC Merced’s Graduate Division hosted its third National Labs Day on April 21. The goal of the day-long event is to connect graduate students and postdoctoral scholars with researchers from across the nation, including campus alumni.
Associate Graduate Dean and physics Professor Sayantani Ghosh said the Graduate Division was delighted to revive the event after a three-year hiatus due to the pandemic.
“This event offers a unique networking opportunity for our graduate students and postdocs, and this year we had the additional chance to welcome back four UC Merced alumni as part of this event,” she said.
|
Professor Sora Kim has received a CAREER award for her project that bridges concepts between modern and ancient marine ecosystems by integrating geochemical and modeling approaches with paleobiology.
Kim is the 34th researcher from UC Merced to earn a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
CAREER awards are among the NSF’s most prestigious awards. They are given through the Faculty Early Career Development Program to recognize untenured faculty members as teacher-scholars. Early-career faculty members are selected based on three factors: the strength of their research proposals; their potential to serve as academic role models in research and education; and their leadership in their fields and organizations.
Kim will... |
Teams of students from throughout California converged on UC Merced the weekend of April 21-23 to spend 48 hours tackling issues surrounding a precious resource: water.
The Water Hack Challenge, hosted by the USDA-funded Secure Water Future led by Professor Joshua Viers, featured teams competing by using data to work on projects centered on one of three areas: liquid (flood risk), solid (snowpack measurements) and gas (evapotranspiration). Organizers described the event as a "weekend-long innovative space for students to explore data-driven solutions to water issues."
According to the Water Hack Challenge agenda, the hacks are aimed at helping the state of California better manage its water by better balancing supply and demand through data-driven decision-... |
Aneelman Brar wants to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The Chemistry and Chemical Biology Ph.D. student’s three-minute talk entitled “From Pollutant to Fuel and New Products: Recycling Carbon Dioxide” earned her bragging rights as UC Merced's Grad Slam champion and a $5,000 prize, plus the opportunity to represent the campus at the UC systemwide finals on May 5.
“It’s really a great moment. I have been waiting for such a competition where I could represent myself and my research group and now, I get a chance to represent my university, so that makes me proud,” said Brar, who is from India.
Second place and $2,000 was awarded to Quantitative and Systems Biology graduate student Ambarish Varadan and third place and $1,000 went... |
UC Merced continues to be recognized nationally, with some programs leaping forward, according to U.S. News & World Report’s 2023-2024 edition of Best Graduate Schools released on April 25.
Designed for prospective students looking to further their education beyond college, the Best Graduate Schools rankings evaluate programs in a variety of disciplines, including business, education, engineering, law, medicine and nursing annually, while other disciplines and specialties in the sciences, social sciences, humanities and other areas are ranked periodically.
“Overall, 10 of UC Merced’s graduate programs were ranked by U.S. News & World Report this year, and four of those placed in the nation’s top 100,” Vice Provost and Dean... |
The new UC Merced Farms Food Future innovation initiative is investing in 10 graduate researchers to solve climate and community challenges. Their work is the start of a concerted focus in climate-smart agriculture for the campus.
The $850,000 in funding comes from the U.S. Economic Development Administration's Build Back Better Regional Challenge grant to build new innovation centers. UC Merced does a different kind of agriculture, emphasizing cutting-edge ag-tech research. The campus is one of the leaders of the largest grant awarded among all the coalitions participating: F3 received $65.1 million to jump-start the agritech revolution in the San Joaquin Valley.
Graduate students begin work in the fall. Their creative proposals... |
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipment donated by Texas-based start-up SeekOps Inc will support UC Merced's research efforts in environmental monitoring and conservation.
The gift includes multiple state-of-the-art UAVs, as well as the necessary software and hardware to operate and maintain the equipment.
"We are incredibly grateful to SeekOps Inc for this generous gift, said Dean of Engineering Rakesh Goel. "The equipment will greatly enhance our research capabilities in environmental monitoring and conservation and will enable our faculty and student researchers to better understand and address the challenges facing our planet."
SeekOps Inc specializes in applied methane detection and... |
Solar films developed by a graduate student in the Department of Physics at UC Merced while on an internship at NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC) not only survived 10 months in space with minimal degradation, but the little damage they did incur was more than 90 percent reversible.
UC Merced researchers have published the surprising results of the first long-term study of perovskite solar samples in space — work done in collaboration with NASA GRC and the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) — in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.
Professor Sayantani Ghosh and her lab work with perovskites — hybrid organic-inorganic crystals used as the light-harvesting active layer in solar... |
Ten graduate UC Merced students will take the stage on April 10 to compete in the Graduate Division’s Grad Slam finals.
Grad Slam is an annual University of California competition that aims to make research accessible to all by providing emerging scientists and scholars with the skills to engage the public in their work. Nearly 30 UC Merced graduate students competed in the qualifying round in March and the top 10 are advancing to the campus’s finals.
Each finalist receives a $250 award. The first-place winner of the campus’s Grad Slam final round will receive $5,000. The second-place winner receives $2,000 and third place will receive $1,000.
Finalists in alphabetical order:
Aneelman Brar, fifth-year Ph.D. student in Chemistry and Chemical... |
While UC Merced's Experimental Smart Farm is focused on technology and automation, it's also about machine-human collaboration.
That was among the messages UC Merced's representatives shared in a panel discussion at the "What's the Future of Agriculture in California?" symposium, held Thursday, March 30, at California State University, Fresno.
UC Merced's panel introduced the university's smart farm, which will serve as a hub for data gathering as well as projects researchers can try out before scaling to larger properties. And though much at the farm will be working toward automating some tasks, the goal is also to create better, more highly skilled jobs for the farm labor force... |
A UC Merced researcher has a prominent role at a worldwide conference on water taking place at the United Nations this week.
Erin Hestir, a professor in environmental engineering and associate director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), is attending the UN Water Conference March 22-24.
"The goal of the conference is to advance the UN's Water Action Agenda to unite the world for water and ensure access to water and sanitation for all," Hestir said.
Water is a critical issue that affects everyone. More than 800,000 people die each year from diseases directly attributed to unsafe water, inadequate sanitation, and poor hygiene practices, according to the conference... |
When three buses rolled onto campus on one chilly winter morning, UC Merced gave the occupants a warm Bobcat welcome.
More than 100 undergraduate students and faculty members from Universidad Autónoma Chapingo — an agricultural institution in Texcoco, Mexico — visited the UC Merced campus on March 1 to learn about research programs and graduate studies.
Last year, Chancellor Juan Sánchez Muñoz and other campus representatives traveled to Mexico to help launch a climate change initiative and create a pipeline for students in California and Mexico.
During their trip, they visited several universities and met with leaders from Universidad Autónoma Chapingo and discussed opportunities for further research collaborations between UC Merced and the... |
UC Merced researchers will discuss the campus's Experimental Smart Farm, as well as pressing agricultural issues, at a one-day summit later this month at California State University, Fresno.
The summit, What is the Future of Agriculture in California, is free to attend either in person or virtually March 30 from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Sponsored by The Maddy Institute, in partnership with UC Merced, Livermore Lab Foundation, Fresno State, CSU Bakersfield, CSU Stanislaus and Climate Now, the summit will address the current and future climate reality for the greater San Joaquin Valley as well as the opportunities and challenges ahead.
The Maddy Institute, named for longtime California legislator Kenneth L. Maddy, is a nonprofit collaboration between... |
As more renewable energy projects take hold in California, there is more need for effective ways to store that energy.
A paper published by a UC Merced research team examines how the need for storage can vary for different combinations of renewable resources.
Zabir Mahmud and his team published the paper in iScience, an open access journal that provides a platform for original research in the life, physical, earth and health sciences, according to its website.
The paper compared the merits of solar-only and solar-and-wind power generation grids.
"Energy storage is a must for this type of (renewables-driven) grid," Mahmud said. "So, we wanted to determine how this need of storage... |
At UC Merced, mercury is a regional challenge that student and faculty researchers have been tackling for several years. Mercury was used to extract gold during the Gold Rush in California, and the element was also mined at the New Almaden site, at one time the second-largest mercury mine in the world near today’s Silicon Valley.
Through the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Environmental Management’s Minority Serving Institution Partnership Program, or MSIPP, UC Merced students and Professor Peggy O’Day are working with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), to test mercury remediation technology consisting of activated carbon coated with manganese oxide. The technology seeks to discourage the transformation of... |
Fourth year Environmental Systems Ph.D. student Elena Bischak has been named a research fellow by the American Farmland Trust (AFT).
The AFT Research Fellows Program aims to “empower the next generation of university-trained leaders to create meaningful positive change toward a new conventional agriculture: one that is climate-smart, diverse, soil health promoting, equitable and environmentally, economically and socially sustainable.”
Bischak, who is from Alexandria, Va., is in Professor Rebecca Ryals’ Agroecology Lab. Her research is focused on resource recovery from sanitation systems for reuse in agriculture, with a specific focus on urine fertilization. She is also interested in the many uses for biochar, from nutrient... |
Professor Rebecca Ryals has made campus history by being named UC Merced’s inaugural Presidential Chair in Climate Change. The appointment was recommended by her peers and Dean Betsy Dumont from the School of Natural Sciences in recognition of Ryals’ outstanding research, teaching and service.
The chair is one of two being established by a $1 million gift to the university in support of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) professorships for research focused on climate change. Additionally, funding provided through the University of California Office of the President’s Presidential Matching Chair initiative will double the impact of the philanthropic contribution.... |
It's time for the campus and the community to celebrate UC Merced’s high-level research during Research Week, March 6 through 10.
The annual research showcase, hosted by the Office of Research and Economic Development, kicks off with a Health Sciences Research Institute (HSRI) event titled “Climate, Environment and Health: Impacting the San Joaquin Valley and Beyond.”
Featured speakers include professors Asa Bradman, Sandie Ha, Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook and Katrina Hoyer exploring health research that affects the Valley, the nation and the world, followed by a discussion of the future of health sciences research at UC Merced.
The event takes place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday, March 6, in Room 105 of the campus’s Conference... |
Soil biogeochemistry Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe — who is on leave from UC Merced while she serves as federal director of the Office of Science for the Department of Energy — has been elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).
Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature" and to "the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing... |
As agriculture, California's most important industry, becomes increasingly technical, the workforce needed to sustain it will have to have different skills than those of a generation ago.
A UC Merced researcher has been awarded a grant aimed at sparking interest and knowledge among disadvantaged young students who could grow up to take those jobs as the current workforce ages out.
Mechanical engineering Professor Reza Ehsani leads a team awarded a $999,983 grant from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA-HSI program) to fund "Integrated Education Programs to Train Students for a Future in the Agricultural and Food Industry."
The program will be developed at two sites: UC Merced and... |
A new landmark study by the UC Merced Community and Labor Center shows farmworkers across California are facing serious health challenges on a daily basis.
The goal of the Farmworker Health Study was to examine agricultural worker health and well-being, in addition to health care access, local and state policies, and health and training needs.
More than 1,200 California farmworkers were surveyed between August 2021 and January 2022. They were asked about their working conditions, physical health, women's and reproductive health, COVID-19, use of preventive health services, health insurance and access, and health behaviors.
Major findings include the following:
Health Care Insurance... |
In the wake of record-breaking rain and snow this winter, experts have cautioned that despite the deluge, California remains in a drought.
The United States Drought Monitor shows much of California still experiencing "moderate drought," and in some places "severe drought." That is a big improvement from last month, when much of the state was in "severe drought" with 7 percent of California in what was considered "exceptional drought" conditions.
The past three years have been the driest stretch since records have been kept. Recovering from that would take two wet years in California and a decade or more of wet years for the Colorado River Basin, said Roger Bales, a professor of engineering at UC Merced who specializes in water and climate research. The... |
A company started by UC Merced founding faculty member Roland Winston - and staffed by alumni - is looking for partners for some exciting solar projects. And the government could cover the costs.
Winston Cone Optics seeks to develop pilot projects that use solar energy to heat water, evaporate waste and remove salt from wastewater.
"Solar energy isn't a new concept, but what makes our solar thermal collectors unique is the use of nonimaging optics to concentrate sunlight year-round from a stationary position," said Winston. "The result is less maintenance, fewer components, and better efficiency and reliability."
Professor Aldo Steinfeld of ETH Zurich university was asked by his campus’s president to present an... |
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas that is contributing to irreversible climate change. Scientists know how to capture CO2, and they know how to transform it into useful molecules and materials.
But that transformation is neither energy nor cost-effective.
Through a prestigious grant from the Department of Energy (DOE), a diverse group of scientists, including a chemist from UC Merced, plan to address that problem by coupling two chemistries which are known to work independently, but don't work well together.
Led by a professor at UC Irvine, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Professor Michael Findlater is part of the group that has formed a new DOE Energy Frontier Research Center (... |
For the first time, UC Merced faculty members from each of the campus’s three schools have been chosen as principal investigators on some of the 21 exciting new projects that are being funded through UC’s Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI).
In addition, UC Merced researchers are collaborating on 10 of the other projects.
“Our faculty researchers are leading the world in the discovery and creation of knowledge,” Chancellor Juan Sánchez Muñoz said. “It is particularly noteworthy that their expertise is being recognized in the pursuit of research responses to regional challenges.”
The UC announced today that psychology Professor Anna Epperson from the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and... |
2022 was a banner year for UC Merced marked with growth, innovation and prestige. As we boldly move forward toward 2023, here's a look back at the stories that stood out this year.
Solar-paneled Canals Getting a Test Run in San Joaquin Valley
February 8, 2022
A research paper published by graduate student Brandy McKuin is close to becoming a reality. McKuin’s findings showed that covering California’s 4,000 miles of water canals could reduce evaporation by as much as 82%, saving about 63 billion gallons of water a year. Covering the state water canals with solar installations would also generate 13 gigawatts of renewable power, equaling roughly 1/6th of the state’s current installed capacity. A state-funded pilot program in partnership with the Turlock Irrigation District called “... |
Graduate Division’s Competitive Edge Summer Bridge program for incoming Ph.D. students was identified as a Program to Watch by Excelencia in Education, a national effort to identify evidence-based programs that improve Latino student success in higher education.
“We are thrilled to receive this recognition from Excelencia in Education,” Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Hrant Hratchian said. “Since the Competitive Edge Summer Bridge program began in 2016, it has supported 110 incoming graduate students in making smooth transitions to their doctoral programs and helped cultivate a diverse community that will enhance the diversity of the professoriate in the years ahead.”
This year, Excelencia in Education... |
Mariela Colombo, a Fullbright Scholar and Environmental Systems master's student won second place at the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition at the World Fuel Cell Conference in Irvine. She presenteed her research titled “Can electrolysis give $1/kg?"
|
Although climate change is still a very real challenge, the past decades of efforts to reduce the effects of human activities on the atmosphere have been potent enough to have thrown off the models scientists use to understand and forecast the atmosphere’s chemical composition and cleansing capacity.
But a new study by UC Merced Life and Environmental Sciences Professor Xuan Zhang and colleagues reveals a way to more reliably predict what's going on in the atmosphere. She and her colleagues discovered a new mechanism by which isoprene — the hydrocarbon emitted by plants — is photochemically oxidized, producing ozone and fine particulate matter (PM2.5), two essential ingredients in smoggy air pollution.
People who live in the San Joaquin... |
Life and Environmental Sciences Professor Emily Moran and collaborators at several other universities are set to conduct a continental-scale analysis of climate change effects on tree reproduction.
In addition to monitoring seed production, thanks to a new grant from the National Science Foundation the researchers will also be able to assess the establishment of young trees and the correlation of seed and seedling production with the activity of animals. Because animals can both disperse seed and feed on seeds and seedlings, they likely play an important role in whether trees are able to reproduce and thrive.
“The sustainability of North American forests depends on seed production... |
Longtime UC Merced supporter and institutional partner the David and Lucile Packard Foundation has made a significant gift to the campus that will catalyze research efforts and scientific investigations focused on climate change and developing sustainable solutions that ensure the planet’s health.
The Packard Foundation’s $1 million grant will support the creation of UC Merced’s Institute for Climate Research and Equity. The institute will house the new centers for Climate and Social Justice and Wildfire Resilience and Adaptation, with additional units expected to be established as the institute further develops.
Among the funding priorities to be supported by the grant are interdisciplinary research... |
When planting crops, farmers confront numerous questions. Among them: Will it get too hot? Is it likely frost will stunt growing? When is the best time to plant? What kind of pests could impact the harvest?
UC Cooperative Extension climate adaptation specialist at UC Merced Tapan Pathak has helped develop an online tool to swiftly answer these questions and help farmers make decisions in real time. Pathak worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, California Climate Hub, UC Cooperative Extension and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources' Informatics and Geographic Information Systems (or UC ANR IGIS) to launch CalAgroClimate, a free resource for farmers.
“Our hope is to make CalAgroClimate a one-stop shop for farmers... |
Fire scientists typically respond to agency opportunities and conduct research in response to past wildfires. But it is time they take more proactive, integrative, predictive approaches toward mitigating and adapting to this potentially devastating consequence of climate change, a group of scientists advocates.
Mechanical engineering Professor Jeanette Cobian-Iñiguez and more than 80 other American researchers from universities, national laboratories and agencies such as NASA and the Department of Fish and Wildlife combined their expertise to develop a paper entitled “ Reimagine Fire Science for the Anthropocene,” published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Science Nexus.
“We're basically... |
Adding even a small amount of biochar — a charcoal-like material produced by burning organic matter — to a dairy’s manure-composting process reduces methane emissions by 84%, a recent study by UC Merced researchers shows.
The dairy industry is one of the main sources of methane in California, making up 50% of the state’s methane emissions. Reducing these emissions is a critical part of state and federal efforts to address climate change.
“This is a wonderful example of an untapped climate solution,” said Life and Environmental Sciences Professor Rebecca Ryals . “Biochar reduces pollutant emissions from open burning of biomass and methane emissions from decaying biomass.”
Though... |
Land has been tilled at UC Merced’s smart farm, the first physical step in developing the state-of-the-art project.
“Even though it’s just a blank field, we have overcome some pretty big obstacles to be where we are today,” said Danny Royer, Experimental Smart Farm coordinator for the university. He spoke Nov. 16, at the farm, describing the work done so far and what’s next.
Plans call for the farm to grow oats, grain, tomatoes and squash. But the primary crop for the 45-acre property roughly a half-mile south of campus will be data.
Conditions will be monitored, and a dashboard will be created that student researchers can access.
“We can look at different pest control strategies, different watering strategies, knowing that the... |
Losses to California’s ag industry have continued to mount as the state’s drought stretched into a third straight year, according to a report released Tuesday by researchers from the School of Engineering and the Public Policy Institute of California.
The report, led by Professor Josue Medellín-Azuara, estimates direct economic impacts on farm activity of $1.2 billion this year, up from $810 million in 2021 — representing a 4.9% and 3.4% impact on crop value added, respectively. “Value added” is the contribution from a sector to the region’s gross domestic product. It includes profits, compensation and taxes.
Beyond direct farm effects, impacts on food... |
UCs Merced and Santa Cruz became the newest campuses in the system to be named an agricultural experiment stations (AES), UC President Michael Drake announced at today’s Regents’ meeting.
They are the first campuses in more than 50 years to earn the designation.
“With the AES designation, Santa Cruz and Merced have the potential additional funding from the University’s budget for (agricultural) research, and they will be able to make a stronger case for competitive grants in the larger research area,” Drake said. “Congratulations to these two new campuses on this wonderful milestone.”
An AES is a place-based scientific research center at a land-grant university that explores challenges and develops... |
It wasn’t exactly “Racers, start your engines.” More like, “Racers, remove
your covers.”
But the solar car challenge put on by CalTeach and the Solar Energy
Association at UC Merced Saturday, Nov. 5, was still an action-packed day
of racing.
Several dozen middle school students, their teachers and parents gathered
on campus to test out the cars they built over the last few weeks.
The Educational Employees Federal Credit Union supplied funding for materials.
Teams of students received solar kits, which include a solar panel, motor,
wheels, axles and other small components. It was up to them to determine
how to construct their cars.
“Teams will have to think about a lot of... |
Molecular and Cellular Biology Professor Michele “Nish” Nishiguchi has been inducted as a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and was recently named president-elect for the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB).
She is one of 11 distinguished scientists inducted at the California Academy of Sciences’ Annual Fellows Gathering this year.
“I am delighted that the California Academy of Sciences is acknowledging the quality and impact of Professor Nishiguchi’s research program,” School of Natural Sciences Dean Betsy Dumont said. “Her leadership in science as well as her mentorship of fellow faculty and students have had a significant, positive impact on... |
The 2022 report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change warns that global health is at the mercy of fossil fuels. An accompanying policy brief states that an estimated 32,000 people in the U.S. died due to air pollution in 2020 alone; 37% of those deaths were directly related to fossil fuels.
Health psychology Professor Linda Cameron, a member of the Health Sciences Research Institute (HSRI) and director of the HSRI Translational Research Center, is one of dozens of researchers who contributed to and reviewed the annual report, which was made public on Tuesday. Other members include experts from a long list of institutions, including the World Health Organization and the... |
Chancellor Muñoz joined federal, state and local leaders for a press conference, tour and roundtable discussion about landmark grants awarded including $65.1 million to the Fresno-Merced Future of Food Innovation (F3) coalition of which UC Merced is a partner. Among the attendees were Assistant Secretary of Commerce Alejandra Castillo, Senator Alex Padilla, Senator Anna Caballero, Congressman Jim Costa, Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula, Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer and other distinguished guests. The press conference was held in Downtown Fresno in front of the historic Bank of Italy building, which is envisioned as the future home of the iCREATE technology hub. (... |
In the 2022 Sustainable Campus Index, UC Merced placed Top 10 in several categories including a tie for the No.1 spot in research. The annual report published by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) recognizes top-performing colleges and universities overall and in 17 sustainability impact areas.
Using the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Ratings System (STARS), AASHE measures green efforts of over 570 institutions in 20 countries. The STARS framework helps institutions track, report and strengthen their contributions to global sustainability and is the most widely recognized report card in the world for documenting long-term sustainability goals for high-achieving institutions.
Among the distinctions, UC... |
Lillie Pennington has been awarded a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine for the 2022-2023 academic year. She is one of 38 students nationally who each receive $28,000 in funding for one year to write and defend their dissertations.
“I'm honored to have been chosen for such a prestigious fellowship. The Ford Foundation offers its fellows a lot of professional development and networking opportunities, and I'm excited to participate in those,” the environmental systems Ph.D. candidate said. “Being awarded the fellowship for my final year means that I have been given the gift of time: time to finish up my projects, write papers and start looking for post-... |
The world’s first ever carbon-neutral vehicle was on display at UC Merced. Students, staff and the public were invited to get an up-close look at the prototype, called ZEM, which was built by TU/Ecomotive, a student-led team from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. ZEM, which is made out of 3D printed parts and plant-based materials, has solar panels embedded in the body as well as filters that actually capture CO2 as it is being driven. The vehicle is currently on a nation-wide tour that aims to revolutionize the way we think about automotive sustainability. (Click photo to scroll)
|
UC Merced has received a $12.5 million grant funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop the Biology Integration Institute (BII): INSITE — the INstitute for Symbiotic Interactions, Training and Education — a research collaborative that aims to expand the fundamental knowledge of symbioses and inform immediate and long-term conservation strategies in the face of climate change.
A multi-disciplinary team from UC Merced, Michigan State University (MSU) and Resilient Oceans will look at how climate change will impact ecosystems through a symbiotic lens.
“There's a lot of funding directed toward climate change, but everyone is looking at what you can see. We wanted to... |
Like many other researchers, environmental engineering professors Erin Hestir and Joshua Viers are trying to quantify water use in California’s Central Valley.
The difference is, they are doing it from the sky.
Through NASA's applied sciences program, their team will leverage the power of Earth-orbiting satellites and drones to gather data with high spatial and temporal resolution and then analyze it to help resource managers make better-informed decisions, particularly around water use in California’s San Joaquin Valley.
They’re collaborating with Point Blue Conservation Science, a nonprofit science team based in the Bay Area.
“Point Blue is a leader in finding nature-based ways to address climate change and biodiversity loss. We're really... |
UC Merced has awarded its second cohort of Chancellor’s Fellowship for Inclusive Excellence to four incoming Ph.D. students from the schools of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, Natural Sciences and Engineering. Their studies will contribute to the representation of Black scholars in academia and beyond.
UC Merced is committed to the recruitment, admission and retention of a high-quality and diverse graduate student population. The yearlong, $30,000 recruitment fellowship is the result of a partnership between the Office of the Chancellor and Graduate Division, in consultation with graduate group chairs, Graduate Council, Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and other stakeholders.... |
The White House announced today (Sept. 2) a $65.1 million award — the largest federal grant ever awarded to the Central Valley — to the Fresno-Merced Future of Food Innovation (F3) Coalition as part of its "Build Back Better" initiative to boost economic recovery after the pandemic. The funding will help launch a state-of-the-art agricultural technology hub that will serve and connect farmers across the San Joaquin Valley to industry and spark a new, more advanced era in agriculture-based technology in an effort to boost productivity, create jobs and build capacity for regional sustainability.
Composed of scholars and researchers from UC Merced and Fresno State, farmers, agricultural organizations, community... |
The White House announced today (Sept. 2) a $65.1 million award — the largest federal grant ever awarded to the Central Valley — to the Fresno-Merced Future of Food Innovation (F3) Coalition as part of its "Build Back Better" initiative to boost economic recovery after the pandemic. The funding will help launch a state-of-the-art agricultural technology hub that will serve and connect farmers across the San Joaquin Valley to industry and spark a new, more advanced era in agriculture-based technology in an effort to boost productivity, create jobs and build capacity for regional sustainability.
Composed of scholars and researchers from UC Merced and Fresno State, farmers, agricultural organizations,... |
The White House announced today (Sept. 2) a $65.1 million award — the largest federal grant ever awarded to the Central Valley — to the Fresno-Merced Future of Food Innovation (F3) Coalition as part of its "Build Back Better" initiative to boost economic recovery after the pandemic. The funding will help launch a state-of-the-art agricultural technology hub that will serve and connect farmers across the San Joaquin Valley to industry and spark a new, more advanced era in agriculture-based technology in an effort to boost productivity, create jobs and build capacity for regional sustainability.
Composed of scholars and researchers from UC Merced and Fresno State, farmers, agricultural organizations, community... |
Mechanical thinning of overstocked forests, prescribed burning and managed wildfire now being carried out to enhance fire protection of California's forests provide many benefits, or ecosystem services, that people depend on.
In a paper published in Restoration Ecology, researchers at UC Merced, UC ANR and UC Irvine reported that stakeholders perceived fire protection as central to forest restoration, with multiple other ecosystem services also depending on wildfire severity. Researcher Max Eriksson, lead author on the paper, noted that "forest restoration involves multiple fuels-reduction actions that were perceived as benefiting fire protection, with some also... |
UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow Hannah Palmer, Ph.D., was named as the 2022-23 Congressional Science Fellow by the Geological Society of America (GSA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and will spend a year in Washington, D.C., working for a member of Congress or a congressional committee beginning in September 2022.
This prestigious fellowship is awarded to one earth scientist per year and is designed to provide opportunities for outstanding scientists to learn first-hand about federal policymaking while using their knowledge and skills to address today’s most pressing societal challenges.
“In the face of intersectional challenges, including climate change and global pandemic, the... |
Green energy solutions are critical to meet current and future power demands, and while solar and wind power are great, they are also site-specific and intermittent.
That’s why researchers such as mechanical engineering Professor Po-Ya Abel Chuang and his Thermal and Electrochemical Energy Laboratory at UC Merced are focused on developing hydrogen-based energy solutions, which can deliver energy on demand for anything from agriculture and information and communication technologies to transportation.
Through a pair of projects and a trans-Pacific partnership, Chuang and his lab are conducting experimental and simulation research to efficiently generate hydrogen and convert it directly to... |
UC Merced is highlighting incoming first-year students for fall 2022 — a dynamic, diverse and accomplished cohort of new Bobcats.
When deciding on a university, Emanuel Armando Angel, known as Manny, knew he wanted to commit to an institution whose core value is to build a relationship with the education of its students while preparing them for a successful life.
“I chose UC Merced for my future, to avoid being viewed as a number but as a student with value,” Angel said. “I had many great options for universities I could study at, but I decided to stay home at UC Merced.”
The Merced native will be majoring in environmental engineering and said he is thrilled to join a campus that has proven its commitment to the environment.
“The campus is the most sustainable amongst the... |
Environmental Systems Ph.D. student Leila Wahab is one of 80 graduate students to receive the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) highly competitive Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) fellowship.
The goal of SCGSR is to prepare graduate students for science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) careers critically important to the DOE Office of Science mission, by providing graduate research opportunities through an extended residency at DOE national laboratories.
“Leila is an incredibly capable, resourceful, hard-working, dedicated and enthusiastic student. She has demonstrated that she has tremendous potential to independently develop novel and important research projects, work hard to achieve her... |
Distinguished Professor Roland Winston was among the first eight faculty members at UC Merced in 2003, two years before the campus opened. When he retires July 1, at age 86, he will be the first of those eight to leave — but his work on solar energy applications will continue.
It's not hyperbolic to say Winston is a really big deal in the worlds of physics and solar energy.
More than 50 years ago, as a junior faculty member in the University of Chicago Physics Department, he published a paper introducing a new field he called nonimaging optics. In it, he described a highly efficient device that collects and concentrates light and introduced nonimaging light collectors that by their design maximize the amount of light that can be... |
The biannual School of Engineering showcase event, Innovate to Grow (I2G), continued in-person and virtually this spring. The event highlighted innovative engineering design projects that were developed by undergraduates in partnership with 36 industry and nonprofit clients.
The event began with a poster and prototype session that included 66 teams and 330 students showcasing their projects in the Joseph E. Gallo Recreation & Wellness Center.
“This was the largest and most successful event we have ever hosted. The energy during the prototype session was incredible with so many cutting-edge projects from our students,” said former Engineering Service Learning Director Chris Butler.
After the poster competition,... |
The U.S. Senate today confirmed UC Merced Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe to be the new director of the Office of Science in the federal Department of Energy.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the lead federal agency supporting fundamental scientific research for energy, and the nation’s largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences.
President Joe Biden nominated Berhe last April. She is a renowned professor of soil biogeochemistry in the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences in the School of Natural Sciences; the Ted and Jan Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences and Geology; and the interim associate dean for Graduate Education.
“It is an incredible honor for me to be nominated, and now confirmed by... |
Undergraduates will have a new, one-of-a-kind class they can sign up for this fall — Climate Justice — a hybrid course that features lectures by faculty from all 10 UC campuses.
According to the UC Center for Climate Justice’s website, “climate justice recognizes the disproportionate impacts of climate change on low-income communities and communities of color around the world, the people and places least responsible for the problem. It seeks solutions that address the root causes of climate change and in doing so, simultaneously address a broad range of social, racial, and environmental injustices.”
Professor Tracey Osborne, the UC Presidential Chair in Management of Complex Systems and the founder of the UC Center for Climate Justice, based at UC Merced... |
Innovate to Grow (I2G), the biannual showcase of innovative engineering design projects developed in partnership with industry and nonprofit partners, continues in-person and virtually this spring 2022 semester.
“We are excited to have everyone back in person to share in this amazing event,” said Engineering Service Learning Director Chris Butler. “This will be our largest event ever. We have 66 teams and more than 300 students showcasing their projects.”
I2G is open to the public and everyone is invited to register online to attend.
The event, scheduled for May 13, begins with a poster and prototype session at 10 a.m. in the gym at the Joseph E. Gallo Recreation & Wellness Center, followed by technical presentations by each team starting at 12:30 p.m. An... |
Leopard shark (Triakis semifasciata) populations in the San Francisco Estuary (SFE) are experiencing extreme decline in recent years, causing concern for coastal ecosystems.
With funding from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) California Sea Grant Graduate Research Fellowship, Ph.D. student Jonathon Kuntz, in the Environmental Systems Graduate Group, hopes to figure out the cause of the decrease and to further add to the field of shark conservation.
California Sea Grant recently announced more than $1.5 million in federal funding to support 14 new research projects from 2022 to 2024. California Sea Grant prioritizes supporting the next generation of early career scientists focusing... |
The May 1 deadline is fast approaching for students to apply for the San Joaquin Valley Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics Tools and Science (FACTS) bridge program, a paid summer research program funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Hosted by the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute at UC Merced, FACTS is designed to give first-year and transfer students an opportunity for research experience in ag-food-tech.
The paid summer internship provides on-campus housing, stipends, travel to field sites and research experience with a lab group.
Interns could spend the summer building novel... |
School of Engineering Professor Colleen Naughton's wastewater-tracking dashboard is helping the U.S. and many other countires follow the clues found in the sewers that indicate where COVID is going to surge.
|
In recognition of her contributions to photovoltaic devices and systems reliability, Professor Sarah Kurtz has been elevated to a Fellow in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Fellow is the highest grade of membership in the IEEE, an international organization of engineers and scientists in electrical engineering, electronics and allied fields. The IEEE publishes the Journal of Photovoltaics (for which Kurtz is on the advisory board) and other journals.
Each year, the IEEE Fellow Committee follows a rigorous evaluation procedure and recommends fewer than 0.1% of its voting members for elevation to IEEE Fellow. Kurtz has been an IEEE member for about 30 years.
“I have... |
Now is the time to register to attend this year's Innovate to Grow (I2G) competition and see some of the 66 student engineering teams present their solutions to real-world engineering challenges.
And if you would like to be a judge, organizers want to hear from you as soon as possible. You do not need any formal preparation or an engineering degree. Judges are just asked to offer valuable feedback based on their life experiences and fill out their scorecards based on each presentation and its question-and-answer session. You can register and select the “judge” ticket.
I2G is the School of Engineering’s annual showcase of student creativity and training. The event began in 2012 as an expo to spotlight the achievements of graduating seniors who had... |
UC Merced’s Graduate Division will host its annual Grad Slam competition on April 8, with graduate scholars presenting their research on topics ranging from the effects of cannabidiol (CBD) on high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes to hydrogen storage for energy collection.
The systemwide competition showcases and awards the best three-minute research presentations by graduate students. This competition not only highlights the excellence, importance and relevance of graduate scholars and their research, but it is also designed to increase graduate students' communication skills and their capacity to effectively present their work with poise and confidence.
This year’s competition started in March with nearly 30 graduate students in the... |
Twelve of UC Merced’s graduate programs and one of its schools are among the best in the country in the U.S. News & World Report 2023 Best Graduate Schools rankings, according to results released March 29.
“It is exciting to see that our graduate programs continue to gain national recognition; it is a testament to the impact of our faculty in teaching and research,” interim Vice Provost and Graduate Dean Chris Kello said. “Our rankings progress shows our growing reputation for offering graduate students exceptional opportunities for disciplinary and interdisciplinary research training.”
Four graduate programs in the School of Natural Sciences rose in the rankings. The largest jump is biological sciences (part of the Quantitative and... |
Last year, UC Merced received the largest research grant in its history. The $10 million Secure Water Future (SWF) award, led by Professor Joshua Viers in cooperation with other UC campuses and other partners, is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and aims to improve agricultural and environmental water resilience.
Today (March 18), UC Merced researchers and the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) Secretary Karen Ross and representatives from local irrigation districts gathered at the campus to discuss ways to secure a climate-resilient water future for the San Joaquin Valley.
“UC Merced was created to serve our local communities, the State of California, the nation and the world... |
Research Week, the annual showcase of UC Merced’s important explorations into some of the world's most pressing challenges, kicks off Monday with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute’s symposium on climate.
SNRI researchers are at the forefront of innovative tools, technology and thinking about resilient and sustainable ecosystems, food systems and futures. Everyone is welcome to join the annual SNRI Research Symposium as members discuss new climate research and approaches for ag, energy, infrastructure and the environment.
Research Week runs Monday through Friday and is hosted by the Office of Research and Economic Development, along with the many institutes and centers at UC Merced.
“We are genuinely excited to highlight the... |
Graduate students who are passionate about their research, concerned about the environment and eager to reach across disciplinary boundaries are invited to apply for a three-week summer program in which they will team up with like-minded scientists and engineers to design solutions to environmental sensing challenges.
Applications are being accepted online through March 20 for the first Science and Engineering of Environmental Signatures (SEES) Convergence Research Incubator. The program, designed by physics Professor Michael Scheibner and environmental engineering Professor Tom Harmon, is being organized by the Convergence of Nano-... |
The 2021 drought directly cost the California agriculture sector about $1.1 billion and nearly 8,750 full- and part-time jobs, according to estimates in a new analysis led by UC Merced researchers.
Once the effects on other economic sectors are considered, total impacts are estimated at $1.7 billion and 14,634 full- and part-time jobs lost.
The Economic Impacts of the 2021 Drought on California Agriculture Preliminary Report, released today, analyzes the impacts of last year’s drought in the Central Valley, the Russian River Basin and northern intermountain valley areas. The researchers developed these preliminary estimates of economic impacts using surveys,... |
Founded by the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) in 1951, National Engineers Week is dedicated to ensuring a diverse and well-educated future engineering workforce by increasing understanding of and interest in engineering and technology careers.
This year, Engineers Week runs from Feb. 20-26, and to celebrate the students, faculty, alumni, programs and accomplishments, all nine UC campuses that have engineering schools or programs collaborated to present some of the most interesting stories from the past year.
The stories are collected on a website built by UC Davis and they follow this year's theme: Reimagining the Possible. Each day this week, stories from each campus will... |
Thanks to the warming climate, the potential for more severe nighttime wildfires is increasing, and warmer nights mean firefighters will not be able to rely on cooler temperatures to help them get a handle on fires, a new study shows.
Forty years ago, cool, moist nights regularly provided relief to firefighters, and “flammable nights” that facilitated fire activity were rare. Now, because of climate change and warmer overnight temperatures, there are 11 more flammable nights every year in the U.S. West — a 45 percent spike, the team found.
“Our evidence shows the candle literally burning at both ends in terms of extending the diurnal cycle of fire activity,” said UC Merced climatologist Professor John Abatzoglou, one of the co-authors of the study published... |
Environmental Systems Ph.D. student Zachary Malone was awarded the Ecological Society of America’s (ESA) Katherine S. McCarter Graduate Student Policy Award. This award provides graduate students with the opportunity to participate in virtual Congressional Visits Day and to learn about the legislative process and federal science funding.
Malone, from the Sacramento area, earned his bachelor’s degree from UC Merced in 2020 and is working on his doctoral degree with professors Rebecca Ryals and Asmeret Asefaw Berhe. His research focuses on the use of organic matter amendments — such as compost — on urban soils for carbon sequestration and soil health. He is starting a research project to look at how compost can reduce the... |
A research project conducted by a UC Merced graduate student is becoming a reality as the Turlock Irrigation District (TID) approved piloting the first-in-the-nation construction of solar panels over water canals.
The project is based on research commissioned by a company called Solar AquaGrid through the Sierra Nevada Research Institute and UC Water. Environmental engineering graduate alumna Brandi McKuin was one of the researchers who showed that covering the 4,000 miles of California’s water canals could reduce evaporation by as much as 82%, saving about 63 billion gallons of water a year. That’s comparable to the same amount needed to irrigate 50,000 acres of farmland or meet the residential water needs of more than 2 million... |
If tree growth and seed production can’t compensate for the impacts of climate change, California’s trees will face difficulty filling in gaps left by wildfire and reaching areas that are becoming climatically suitable, studies now show.
Western trees tend to produce more seed and seedlings in the northward parts of their geographic ranges, said UC Merced Professor Emily Moran, with the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences, but this doesn’t mean they will be fully able to keep pace with climate change.
“These northward shifts could mean a lack of replacement of older trees by younger ones in places such as Southern California. Also, we aren’t seeing the same increases... |
California is the largest and the most diverse agricultural economy in the nation with revenue exceeding $50 billion — larger than the combined agricultural economies of the other 10 western states.
But the state and its residents, especially the disadvantaged, are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
A $1.5 million grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) will enable a new project at UC Merced to create an integrated program to develop multi-faceted pathways to climate-smart agriculture solutions.
Cooperative Extension Specialist Tapan Pathak, with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is leading the effort. He... |
California’s Central Valley is on the front lines of climate change. The Fourth Regional Climate Change Assessment, by a team of UC Merced and affiliated researchers, illustrates the biggest problems — and possible solutions — facing California’s unique biomes and communities, from the coasts to the mountains and deserts.
“The San Joaquin is uniquely at the heart of California and this first-of-its-kind regional assessment of climate change impacts shows the unique challenges faced by the region, including access to safe drinking water and dependence on vulnerable water supply for agricultural production,” said report co-author and Associate Dean for Research Professor Joshua Viers. “It also demonstrates the capacity of UC Merced... |
Even the tiniest organisms have a surprisingly huge effect on life in the oceans, eating up the last bits of oxygen in certain areas, preventing larger marine life from surviving there, a new study shows.
Department of Life and Environmental Sciences Professor Michael Beman published “ Substantial Oxygen Consumption by Aerobic Nitrite Oxidation in Oceanic Oxygen Minimum Zones ” in the journal Nature Communications last week, detailing the work conducted during two research trips in the Pacific Ocean. The field and lab work involved collaborations with scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and UC San Diego, with assistance from several current and former UC Merced graduate... |
Finding creative solutions to lessen humans’ impact on the environment and reduce reliance on fossil fuels is a core tenet of the renewable energy field, something engineering Professor Sarah Kurtz specializes in.
In her most recent paper with co-author Nancy Haegel published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) Journal of Photovoltaics, Kurtz examines the growth of the renewable energy industry. The paper, titled “Global Progress Toward Renewable Electricity: Tracking the Role of Solar,” synthesizes findings from multiple sources to offer a unified look at the state of alternative energy sources. While the use of alternative energies is increasing rapidly, solar is growing faster than any... |
When people hear the word “solar,” many think of solar panels on a house, which generate electricity. But there is another way to use energy harnessed by the sun: heat.
Founding faculty member and Director of the University of California Advanced Solar Technologies Institute (UC Solar) Distinguished Professor Roland Winston has created several devices for solar thermal energy that have grabbed the California Energy Commission’s (CEC) attention.
Earlier this year the CEC awarded Winston’s company, Winston Cone Optics, $1.4 million to reduce emissions in the food processing industry. The company is working with Tyson Foods in San Lorenzo to find affordable ways to efficiently use solar thermal... |
Students at UC Merced and those who might someday become Bobcats are the focus of FARMERS, Professor Rudy M. Ortiz’s training program funded again for $1 million by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
FARMERS stands for Facilitating Agriculture-Related Mentoring for Emerging Research Scholars, and the goal is to train 15 undergraduate and 10 graduate students a year over the next four years to conduct in-depth research into agriculture-related subjects.
“Agriculture as a subject has many layers. It’s not all about being a farmer,” Ortiz said. “There are many opportunities for other kinds of research, including economics, engineering, math, sustainability and more. There will be opportunities that... |
An upside of the increase in forest fires in the West is that they reduce the amount of fuel available for other burns. That might provide a buffering effect on western fires for the next few decades, but the threat of climate-driven forest fires is not diminishing, a new study shows.
Without substantial changes in how people interact with wildfire in the western U.S., climate change will increasingly put people in harm’s way as fires become larger and more severe.
UC Merced professors John Abatzoglou and Crystal Kolden, with the School of Engineering, along with collaborators from the University of Washington, UCLA and the Cary Institute, recently published a paper in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment detailing their findings:... |
Just because there has been rain lately doesn’t mean California is drought-free.
A new $1.5 million research grant from the California Department of Food and Agriculture is supporting School of Engineering Professor Josué Medellín-Azuara, collaborating engineering professors Joshua Viers and John Abatzoglou and engineering and policy expert Alvar Escriva-Bou from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) in developing economic analysis and decision support tools for agriculture during droughts.
“In every drought in modern times, California has seized opportunities to build the institutional infrastructure and technical tools to be better prepared for the next drought,” Medellín-Azuara said... |
School of Engineering Professor Colleen Naughton has been selected to be part of a Center of Excellence, along with colleagues at UC Davis, funded by a National Institutes of Health grant.
Ceres Nanosciences, a private company that makes products to improve life science research and diagnostic testing, has established nine wastewater-based epidemiology centers of excellence, as part of the NIH’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADxSM) initiative.
Naughton and Professor Marc Beutel have been studying wastewater samples to track the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Wastewater-based epidemiology can help communities monitor infection dynamics for SARS-CoV-2 and can serve as an early-warning system for the virus in a... |
Lots of people look at clouds and think about flying, floating or the shapes they see. When atmospheric chemistry Professor Xuan Zhang looks at clouds, she thinks about tiny particles in the air.
With her first grant from the National Science Foundation, Zhang is studying how pine tree emissions produce particles that act as cloud condensation nuclei.
“Clouds have a mediating effect on the weather — it’s one way nature mediates climate change,” Zhang said. “We need to understand highly oxygenated multifunctional compounds (HOMs), which can seed clouds.”
As a new UC Merced faculty member in the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences, Zhang received $500,000 to look at HOMs, which have recently been found to play... |
Central Valley natives are accustomed to seeing plumes of smoke from burning tree piles after harvest. This is the traditional way farmers dispose of crop waste, such as trees, nut shells and pruned vines. But there may be a better way to get rid of residual orchard waste that is less harmful to the environment according to research conducted by Professor Catherine Keske.
The solution could be in a charcoal-like substance called biochar. Biochar is high in carbon and created by heating biomass, such as residual orchard waste, at moderate temperatures in a process called pyrolysis. The result is a black, chalky substance that has shown promise for reducing greenhouse gas emissions when applied to soil.
Keske and graduate student... |
Human waste isn’t a topic most people want to talk about.
But environmental systems Professor Rebecca Ryals embraces the subject, especially when it comes to mitigating climate change, improving public health and creating sustainable food systems.
In a recent publication in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, Ryals and a group of colleagues show that ecological sanitation systems can be used to capture human waste and use it to generate organic nutrients that increase crop yield to feed more people, assist soils in sequestering more carbon and provide cleaner sanitation systems.
“The organic matter we expel is often wasted, and it causes problems,” Ryals said. “We should think about not... |
California Natural Resources Sec. Wade Crowfoot joined UC Merced Chancellor Juan Sánchez Muñoz and local leaders today (Nov. 2) to discuss the university-led research on drought, fire and broader climate resilience.
“The programs that are happening at UC Merced are remarkable. What a lot of Californians do not know is that the state uses a lot of the research that comes from this institution,” said Crowfoot.
As a campus with all buildings LEED certified campus and the first public research university in the country to achieve carbon neutrality, Muñoz said, UC Merced is committed to transformative research in sustainability and stewardship of the planet.
“Our faculty have taken this region not... |
Graduate students and a convergence of physics, engineering and environmental science could result in not only the next generation of solutions to pressing environmental challenges, but a new group of diverse and globally competitive nano-engineers, as well.
A nearly $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will train about 200 graduate students over the next five years as they learn and work to develop nano-sensors to better manage resources.
“Right now, nano-sensors are underused because there’s a disconnect between users and creators,” said physics Professor Sayantani Ghosh, the principal investigator on the grant. “What we’re aiming for is to create user-driven technology that is cheap... |
UC Merced’s NSF-CREST Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Machines (CCBM) has been awarded an additional $5 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue its mission. In total, the NSF has invested $10 million in the center, an indicator of the importance of the Center’s work and its faculty, student and staff contributions.
The CCBM, which is funded as a Center of Research Excellence in Science and Technology, was established in 2016 at UC Merced, and brings together scientists and engineers from bioengineering, physics, chemistry, materials science, molecular cell biology and applied math.
"We are proud to be able to continue to serve as a focal point for biophysical science, biomaterials and biotechnology research... |
Every faculty member has to set up their lab when they join a new campus. But Professor Danielle Edwards literally built a key component of hers from the ground up.
The outdoor component of El Huevo — the Edwards Lab of Herpetology Uta Evolution Vivarium and Ovipositorium — is set on 1.2 acres adjacent to campus and the Merced Vernal Pools and Grassland Reserve. Edwards designed the facility and built 12 enclosures, with the help of students and local vendors, to house experimental populations of side-blotched lizards. The field site is partnered with a lab space for captive lizards.
She and her students released dozens of lizards into the enclosures in September and will study the color-polymorphic... |
A group of UC Merced researchers are working with the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to find out how much greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced just through land-management strategies.
Professors Stephen Hart and Martha Conklin and postdoctoral researcher Jian Lin are analyzing 1,445 peer-reviewed articles related to natural climate solutions, investigating possibilities for increasing how much carbon dioxide certain lands can sequester. They will synthesize data on carbon stock and flux outcomes of land-management activities that do or can occur on California’s natural and working lands.
“Although not an immediate goal of this information-gathering... |
Students will soon be able to apply for a unique opportunity to go to Morocco — when travel is safe again — to study the environmental and socioeconomic aspects of the production of argan oil.
The oil is commonly seen in cosmetics in the United States, but it is also edible and in high demand around the world. Moroccan women are the main producers and they undertake long hours of manual labor to extract the oil from the nuts of the indigenous argan trees that live in a UNESCO-protected biosphere.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is supporting a three-year project led by Professor Colleen Naughton and colleagues at the University of South Florida. The $118,000 project will allow a total of 18 undergraduate and... |
UC Merced’s largest research grant in its 16-year history aims to improve agricultural and environmental water resilience. The new $10 million collaborative focuses on water banking, trading and improvements in data-driven management practices to arrive at a climate-resilient future in water-scarce regions of the United States.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it is funding the the wide-ranging effort from multiple institutions across three states through its National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative on Sustainable Agricultural Systems. The coalition of researchers is led by UC Merced, joined by experts from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC... |
UC Merced undergraduates interested in pursuing field research and mentorship opportunities at one of the University of California Natural Reserve System (NRS) sites will now have access to vital scholarship support, thanks to a generous gift from Professor Marilyn L. Fogel and Christopher W. Swarth.
Inspired by their time on the UC Merced campus, Fogel, who served as professor and chair of the School of Natural Sciences’ Life and Environmental Sciences Department from 2013 to 2016, and Swarth, a former NRS project scientist and Merced Vernal Pools and Grassland Reserve director, have established the Swarth Fogel NRS Undergraduate Research Scholarship to help encourage and... |
UC Merced's Health Sciences Research Institute (HSRI) has been awarded a $1.2 million grant to study the effects of vehicle emissions on public health and the environment. This award is part of a $10 million program by the California Department of Justice to support research on the effects of vehicle emissions on human health.
HSRI, in partnership with the Stockton nonprofit organization Little Manila Rising, received the award to address the health impacts in the San Joaquin Valley. Specifically, the funds from the Automobile Emissions Research and Technology Fund grant will be used to launch a mobile air quality laboratory and health assessment clinic; deploy community air quality... |
As the number of cases of COVID-19 surge again globally as a result of the delta variant, world leaders are searching for ways to make more informed decisions on how to contain the pandemic. Researchers at UC Merced and Michigan State University (MSU) know what can provide early signs of the virus and help with critical decisions — sewage.
Professor Colleen Naughton and colleagues at MSU are developing the Wastewater SARS Public Health Environmental Response, or W-SPHERE, a global center for data and public health use cases on SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater. Other collaborators include KWR Water Research Institute and Venthic Technologies. W-SPHERE is being developed as part of a larger wastewater surveillance project led by PATH, a... |
Shortly before the fall semester kicked off in person, 11 students were wrapping up their first summer on campus as part of the FACTS summer bridge program.
FACTS stands for San Joaquin Valley Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics Tools and Science. The six-week summer course, funded by the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture, introduces students to the world of research in agricultural science and technology.
Through the FACTS bridge program, first-year and transfer students get a head start on research and much more. The internship was led by Professor Colleen Naughton and included visits to local farms and industries, giving students exposure... |
While the campus remained quieter than usual this summer, a group of new graduate students began their UC Merced journey earlier than the rest of their cohort.
On July 6, 19 incoming grad students began the six-week Competitive Edge Summer Bridge program to get a head start in acclimating to graduate studies at UC Merced. The students, who are first-generation college-goers or from backgrounds underrepresented in higher education, were each nominated by a faculty member or graduate group chair to participate in the program.
“This is our fifth year doing the Competitive Edge Summer Bridge program, and it was one of the first in-person instructional activities to be held on campus since the pandemic began. We are thrilled that everything went so well,” interim Graduate Dean... |
It has been 186 years since Charles Darwin collected the samples of the Galapagos Islands species that led to his explanation of how the diversity of life on Earth has evolved and forever changed the way we understand the world.
During his five-week stay on the islands, Darwin collected dozens of samples, including one small, light brownish-grey snake on Floreana Island. That sample, now at the Natural History Museum in London, was the basis for describing a new species, the Galapagos (Floreana) racer.
The species disappeared from Floreana but can still be found on two satellite islands. Now, UC Merced’s evolutionary biology and conservation genetics Professor Danielle Edwards and her research group are the first scientists to propose genetically... |
The University of California Office of the President awarded three out of only seven UC-Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Initiative grants to UC Merced faculty members.
The initiative has fostered faculty partnerships with HBCUs to support enhanced diversity and representation of Black scholarship in graduate education and the professoriate since 2017.
“The fact that UC Merced faculty were so successful in securing three UC-HBCU grants for the first time is a testament to the caliber of work they propose and the momentum our campus is building toward a more inclusive and representative research community,” Chancellor Juan Sánchez Muñoz said. “These grants — totaling more than $450,000 — will help fund students from... |
Quantitative Systems Biology Graduate Program alumni Kinsey Brock and Robert Boria were awarded Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology (PRFB) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Boria and Brock — both former members of paleoecology Professor Jessica Blois’ research group — graduated in May with doctoral degrees and are headed to top universities to continue their important research.
“Rob and Kinsey were both leaders in my lab and stellar scholars. They each published several nice papers stemming from their dissertation chapters along the way and they both secured other prestigious fellowships to support their work at UC Merced,” said Blois, who earned an NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award in 2018.
The PRFB... |
With a new $20 million federal grant, UC Merced becomes part of a multi-institutional research collaborative to develop artificial intelligence — or AI — solutions to tackle some of agriculture’s biggest challenges related to water management, climate change and integration of new technology into farming.
The new institute is one of 11 launched this year by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and among two funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture-National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The newly announced AgAID Institute is shorthand for the collaborative USDA-NIFA Institute for Agricultural AI for Transforming Workforce and Decision Support.
The AgAID Institute features four core... |
While many are preparing to head off to college after an unprecedented year, a handful of students are already on UC Merced’s campus and working away in research labs. They’re part of the inaugural FACTS Bridge Program, a way for first-year and transfer students to get a head start on research and more.
The FACTS Bridge Program is designed to immerse students in agricultural science and research. It stands for San Joaquin Valley Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics Tools and Science. The six-week summer program, funded by the United States Department of Agriculture, allows students to work with faculty mentors in a focused environment, introducing students to the world of research in agricultural science and technology.
“The... |
California is known for its beautiful coastline, where the Pacific Ocean meets sandy beaches and rugged cliffs. While many scientists have studied the land or the ocean independently, less is known about the nexus of the two.
Now with the help of a $750,000 award from NASA, civil and environmental engineering Professor Erin Hestir (below) and her postdoctoral scholar Dulcinea Avouris will be studying this over the next three years along with civil and environmental engineering Professor Tom Harmon.
The project, titled “Wildfire Impacts on Watershed Transport of Carbon to Coasts,” will examine how wildfires alter changes in carbon and sediment along California’s... |
Today is National Cow Appreciation Day, a “holiday” invented by a fast-food chain that sells a lot of "chikn." But it’s still a good opportunity to celebrate our neighbors to the northeast — even if being surrounded by cows wasn’t necessarily how you imagined your college experience.
The cows might be an unusual sight to some, but they play an integral part in the healthy management of the approximately 6,500-acre Merced Vernal Pools and Grassland Reserve.
That expanse of open rangeland adjacent to campus is a constant reminder of UC Merced’s commitment to offsetting its environmental impact. The land will remain undeveloped forever, as agreed to before campus was built. Now an official part of the UC’s... |
COVID-19 upended life as we know it, especially among the science community. While some scientists rushed to develop a vaccine, others sought a better understanding of the virus, hoping to predict where the next outbreak might be in order to better contain it. At UC Merced, this included testing the campus’s wastewater.
UC Merced’s campus has many buildings, but just one pipe through which wastewater leaves the campus. This turned out to be helpful to discern whether there would be forthcoming positive COVID-19 test results.
Individuals with COVID-19 shed the virus particles in their stool meaning scientists can reverse engineer where a COVID-positive person was, even... |
Chemistry and Chemical Biology graduate student Ali Abou Taka is one of 12 students to receive the inaugural Merck Research Award for Underrepresented Chemists of Color.
Abou Taka, a Ph.D. student in Professor Hrant Hratchian’s lab, studies the transition of metal complexes that play a critical role in chemical catalysis and the production of green energy. In 2018, Abou Taka succeeded in explaining experimental results on the hydrolysis of titania — an inexpensive, extensively studied and environmentally benign semiconducting material with widespread photovoltaic applications. Titania is important for the clean energy sector, pollution management, chemical sensing and heterogeneous catalysis.
Another recent area of his research... |
Third-year Enviromental Systems Ph.D. student Brittany Lopez Barreto has been named a NASA Future Investigator in Earth Space Science and Technology, known as the NASA FINESST program. Her proposal on wildfire and water supply was selected from 835 highly competitive proposals, 351 of which were in Earth Science. The program provides three-year research grants to graduate students who design and perform projects relevant to NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lopez Barreto is a first-generation Latina studying under Professor Erin Hestir in the Earth Observation and Remote Sensing Lab.
|
With COVID-19 protections lifting, many people are eager to travel again. Among them is graduate student Elena Bischak, who is planning multiple trips to Haiti in the coming months to study improving sanitation and human waste processing in the Caribbean country.
Bischak is a third-year Environmental Systems graduate student studying resource recovery for sanitation systems in Professor Rebecca Ryals ’s lab and was recently named the 2021 District Scholar by Rotary International District 5220, which includes the San Joaquin Valley region.
Bischak connected with Ryals prior to enrolling at UC Merced, realizing her interests and experience aligned with Ryal’s agroecology lab. Ryals has published several papers with fellow... |
Half a world away from California’s Central Valley is a place with similar climate but an unparalleled diversity of plants, marine animals and ecosystems. From deserts to shrubland to montane forests, the diversity of life in South Africa’s Greater Cape Floristic Region (GCFR) is the subject of NASA’s first biodiversity campaign led by UC Merced Professor Erin Hestir.
The program is a collaboration with Professor Adam Wilson at State University of New York at Buffalo and local partners in South Africa such as the South African Ecological Observation Network and the South African Space Agency.
Hestir describes why the “Cape” is such an important place for biodiversity studies.
“The Cape contains two global... |
The Western U.S. appears headed for another dangerous fire season, and a new study shows that even high mountain areas once considered too wet to burn are at increasing risk as the climate warms.
Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. West is in severe to exceptional drought right now, including large parts of the Rocky Mountains, Cascades and Sierra Nevada. The situation is so severe that the Colorado River basin is on the verge of its first official water shortage declaration, and forecasts suggest another hot, dry summer is on the way.
Warm and dry conditions like these are a recipe for wildfire disaster.
In a new study published May 24, 2021, in Proceedings of the National Academy of... |
Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are human-made chemicals that for decades have been used in a variety of products, including food packaging materials, nonstick cookware, furniture, carpets and firefighting foams. However, research has shown that these substances can contaminate the environment and affect people's health.
A new report provides recommendations of standardized methods for sampling, extracting and analyzing PFAS in air, soil and dust with the goal of protecting public health in California.
Public health Professor Asa Bradman was the lead researcher on the study, which was sponsored by the California Air Resources Board. According to the report, substitute PFASs are... |
Scientists often study the relationship of global warming and topsoil because soil is an important mediator of climate change. A newly released study indicates it’s critical to consider subsoil in climate-change research, too.
A new paper in the prestigious journal Nature Communications by Professor Stephen Hart, his former graduate student Nicholas Dove and colleagues at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory details why as it reveals the findings of a 4 ½-year study of both top and subsoils.
“There have been several previous field studies that have warmed soils experimentally at the ground surface and measured changes in soil microbial communities and carbon and nutrient pools in... |
You can’t avoid seeing grazing cattle in California’s Central Valley, where UC Merced has its own pastured cows on campus. Now imagine if those cows were kept secluded without the use of a fence, or at least not one visible to the eye.
This is just one of the experimental projects teams of undergraduate students are working on and will demonstrate during Innovate to Grow (I2G), a biannual experiential learning program which culminates in a presentation expo. Students showcase solutions they’ve engineered to problems posed by real-world companies, organizations and agencies. This year’s projects offer solutions for issues in a range of industries, including agriculture, transportation, pest control,... |
Applied Mathematics graduate student Shayna Bennett won first place at the University of California’s Grad Slam finals today (May 7).
Bennett presented her dissertation research, “A New Tool to Fight Invasive Species,” in just three minutes and won $7,000 and the systemwide trophy — known as the Slammy — the campus’s first time winning the top prize.
Bennett represented UC Merced along with finalists from the nine other UC campuses. All competitors presented their research in three minutes, using only three slides. Second place was awarded to An-Chieh Feng of UCLA, third place was awarded to Adélaïde Bernard of UC Berkeley, and people’s choice went to Logan Kozal of UC Santa Barbara.
For the campus’s Grad Slam final round in April, Bennett earned... |
After the COVID-19 pandemic struck, scientists across the globe realized they could track the virus by testing sewage water. School of Engineering Professor Colleen Naughton pioneered a dashboard to host the global findings.
One way Naughton finds who and where wastewater research is being performed? Twitter.
Naughton created the comical Twitter handle CovidPoops19, where she and her team of researchers tweet findings on COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2, the scientific name of the virus that causes COVID-19. Cities and universities across the globe began testing wastewater and posting the results once scientists realized it could be an indicator of future COVID-19 outbreaks. Naughton’s lab finds the latest... |
Predicting the effects of forest fuel treatments is difficult and uncertain — it is unclear whether the treatments are more helpful to forest health or streamflow. According to new research by disturbance ecohydrologist Ryan Bart and his colleagues at the Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI), the answer is both, though not at the same time.
Fuel treatments for forest management include prescribed burns, tree thinning and pruning, for example, each of which are done to reduce fire risk and severity. Bart recently conducted two studies to examine the effect of these fuel treatments in the Sierra Nevada on both the streamflow in rivers and overall forest health of the trees.
“The... |
President Joe Biden has nominated UC Merced Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe to be the new director of the Office of Science in the federal Department of Energy.
In honor of Earth Day, the White House today announced nominations for a variety of federal posts in the departments of Energy, Transportation, State, Interior and Commerce, as well as for NASA. The Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the lead federal agency supporting fundamental scientific research for energy, and the nation’s largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences.
Like all the nominees, Berhe will have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate and would serve for as long as Biden is president.
Berhe is a professor of soil biogeochemistry in the... |
A major international conference looking at the relationships between William Shakespeare's works and the current climate crisis will soon get underway. UC Merced is co-hosting the virtual event with the world-famous Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London on April 23 and 24 to mark both Earth Day and the playwright's birthday.
During "Globe 4 Globe: Shakespeare and the Climate Emergency," scholars will explore ecological collapse and renewal in Shakespeare's texts; environmental experts will map out ways in which Shakespearean theaters and festivals can achieve sustainable and ethical futures; and theater professionals will reflect on the capacity of live theater to change audience perception... |
The University of California is launching a new center just in time for Earth Day: the Center for Climate Justice.
Led by Management of Complex Systems Professor and UC Presidential Chair Tracey Osborne , the Center for Climate Justice is a system-wide initiative to address climate change as a social justice and equity issue. The center’s mission is “to leverage and harness the power of the university to support, strengthen and build an emergent climate justice ecosystem and social movement that solves the climate crisis through science, systems thinking and social-ecological justice. It does this through innovative broader-impact research, transformative education and public engagement.”
The UC Center for Climate Justice... |
Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Josué Medellín-Azuara is part of an international team of researchers who conducted a systems analysis on water security in Jordan the findings of which were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The paper, titled “A Coupled Human-Natural System Analysis of Freshwater Security Under Climate and Population Change” examines Jordan’s water crisis due to increased water use, population growth, climate change and other factors. The study finds that in the absence of demand management and supply interventions, and major reforms in the water sector, nearly 90 percent of the lower income population... |
Many students don’t think about internships until later in college, but at UC Merced undergraduate students can take advantage of hands-on training with faculty before even starting regular classes. Through the FACTS Bridge Program, first-year and transfer students get a head start on research and much more.
The FACTS Bridge Program is a new internship designed to immerse students in agricultural science and research. It stands for San Joaquin Valley Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics Tools and Science (FACTS). The six-week summer course, funded by the United States Department of Agriculture and National Institute of Food and Agriculture, introduces students to the world of... |
The campus community and its partners can learn more about the importance of renewable energy at this year’s Energize Merced conference, an annual event hosted by UC Merced’s Solar Energy Association (SEA).
The association is a student-led group, overseen by Professor Sarah Kurtz, that puts together an annual consortium on the topic of renewable energy. Going virtual this year due to COVID-19, the aim of Energize Merced is to bring together students and professionals to collaborate and form new partnerships, develop professionally, and learn about developments in renewable energy. The event focuses on the research and developments on renewable and sustainable energy. Students also have the... |
For the first time, UC Merced’s Political Science and History graduate groups made national rankings.
US News & World Report’s annual rankings, released today, also highlighted the campus’s growing School of Engineering, as most of its programs climbed the charts.
“UC Merced continues to demonstrate a rapid rise in rankings by U.S. News & World Report, with new programs added to the rankings each year and a growing number identified by experts as among the top 100 programs nationwide,” interim Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development Marjorie Zatz said. “I am especially pleased to see our strength in environmental systems and... |
For the first time, UC Merced’s Political Science and Interdisciplinary Humanities (history discipline) graduate groups made national rankings.
US News & World Report’s annual rankings, released today, also highlighted the campus’s growing School of Engineering, as most of its programs climbed the charts.
“UC Merced continues to demonstrate a rapid rise in rankings by U.S. News & World Report, with new programs added to the rankings each year and a growing number identified by experts as among the top 100 programs nationwide,” interim Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development Marjorie Zatz said. “I am especially pleased to... |
Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Marie-Odile Fortier’s plan to make more accurate assessments of renewable energy systems’ carbon footprints has made her the fifth UC Merced recipient of the prestigious CAREER award this year.
The award comes from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which gives the grants to encourage early-career researchers.
Fortier is the 28th UC Merced researcher to earn the grant, and the second from the School of Engineering this year. CAREER awards are given through the Faculty Early Career Development Program to recognize untenured faculty members as teacher-scholars. Early-career faculty members are selected based on three factors: the strength of their research proposals; their... |
Covering the 4,000 miles of California’s water canals could save billions of gallons of water and generate renewable power for the state every year, according to a new study.
The study was published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Professors Roger Bales, Joshua Viers and Tapan Pathak authored the paper with researchers Andrew Zumkehr, Jenny Ta and Elliot Campbell in collaboration with UC Water and Professor Brandi McKuin of UC Santa Cruz, an alumna of UC Merced.
The research explores the interconnected nature and costs of moving water across the state. It tested the thesis that by erecting a modular system of solar shading panels over California’s exposed aqueducts, the state can reduce evaporative water... |
UC Merced master’s student Selina Brinkmann has been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship for study at Oxford University — a first for the campus.
“A Rhodes Scholarship being awarded to one of our UC Merced engineering students is an amazing first,” School of Engineering Dean Mark Matsumoto said. “This first showcases our growing stature as a research university and what I love about UC Merced. Selina’s hard work and desire to excel, which is seen in many of our students, has led to this prestigious distinction.”
Brinkmann, who is from Germany, earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Siegen where she focused on successfully reducing noise pollution of wind turbines. She started... |
Professor Marc Beutel and his graduate student Mark Seelos have been recognized for papers and a presentation on toxic mercury mitigation by the North American Lake Management Society.
Beutel, an environmental engineer, co-wrote two of a group of three papers named Best Paper of the Year at the 2020 North American Lake Management Society annual conference.
In the winning paper, entitled “Hypolimnetic Oxygenation 2: Oxygen Dynamics in a Large Reservoir with Submerged Down-flow Contact Oxygenation (Speece cone),” Beutel and his former Ph.D. advisor, UC Berkeley Professor Alex Horne, detailed what happened when an engineered oxygenation cone using pure oxygen gas was installed in the bottoms of very... |
Two faculty members and three graduate students who are working on food systems, food security and food sustainability research have received small grants through the UC Global Food Initiative (GFI) to bolster their projects.
“COVID-19 has really dampened research, so we wanted to find ways to nurture and enhance innovative work during the pandemic,” said Professor Denise Payán, co-lead of the Global Food Initiative UC Merced Campus Collaborative.
She and co-lead UC Cooperative Extension Specialist Karina Díaz Rios, both in the Department of Public Health in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts (SSHA), along with Campus Collaborative Research Specialist Neha Zahid, selected the recipients from more than a dozen proposals,... |
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.
Over the past decade, fire scientists have made major progress in understanding climate-fire relationships at large scales, such as... |
Black History Month may feel different this February, after a year of the coronavirus and historic protests for social justice. While coming together couldn’t be more important, under current conditions few are able to gather to celebrate Black History Month and the many contributions Black people have made to society.
To honor those who have come before us, let’s take a look at the history being made here at UC Merced. From research to awards and even iconic images, below is a host of stories from our archive by and about our faculty of color, as well as important areas of study on the Black experience. While celebrating as a group might be difficult, we can still honor the Black community by sharing people’s successes. Read on for inspiration.
|
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.
If a researcher like paleoecology Professor Sora Kim wants to “read” those records to learn about major global changes that took place about 50 million years ago, she must decode the information stored within what remains of ancient sharks — their teeth.
Teeth from the long-extinct sand tiger shark are providing new information about massive global climate change and the movement of tectonic plates, which Kim and colleagues have detailed in a recent paper in the journal... |
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.
Each scholar is selected based on their research, educational background, publishing record, teaching record, competitiveness and uniqueness of field of study. Each leader has demonstrated perseverance, tenacity and has made a broad impact on the academy, the magazine said.
“Even as a junior scholar, Sora has made tremendous contributions in our department and on our campus,” said Professor Teamrat Ghezzehei, chair of the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences. “It was a pleasure to be able to nominate her for this honor,... |
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.
Both are funded through the University of California’s prestigious Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) Awards. In addition to these two projects, six UC Merced faculty members are co-primary investigators on projects led by other UC campuses and about a dozen more UC Merced faculty members are participating in the eight MRPI-supported projects.
Awarded every two years, the highly competitive MRPI program seeks to leverage the world-renowned research capabilities of the UC system to... |
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.
Two or three medals are given each year to “exceptional mid-career scientists who have made transformative scientific advances or breakthroughs in the Earth and space sciences, demonstrated strong leadership, and provided outstanding service to science and society,” the AGU said.
Berhe was nominated for this honor by a group of colleagues led by Professor Kate Maher from Stanford University. She was pleasantly surprised and said she was speechless upon receiving the phone call notifying her that she won.
“This means the world to me,” she said. “... |
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.
Computer Science and Engineering Chair Professor Stefano Carpin, Environmental Engineering Professor Joshua Viers and professors Konstantinos Karydis and Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury at UC Riverside recently... |
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.
Residents of the Sierra Nevada foothills community spent the weekend of Sept. 12-13 preparing to evacuate. And, if the fire reached the town, Eldredge reasoned, “it’s only five more miles up canyon before we get to headquarters.
“That’s when everybody started looking at... |
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:
"As California contends with its worst wildfire season in history, it’s more evident than ever that land management practices in the state’s forested mountains need major changes. Many of California’s 33 million acres of forests face widespread threats stemming from past management choices. Today the U.S. Forest Service estimates that of the 20 million acres it manages in California, 6-9 million acres need to be restored. Forest restoration basically... |
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).
UC Merced Professor Stephen Hart, Professor Emma Aronson from UC Riverside and colleagues from Riverside, UC Berkeley, Idaho State University and the universities of Arizona, Kansas and New Hampshire, are leading a cluster, thanks to a new NSF grant that will total $3.7 million over five years.
Their... |
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.
Recording devices called AudioMoths have been placed across bird habitat in Sonoma County. During two-week periods, the device wakes up every 10 minutes and records one minute of sound. Department of Computer Science and Engineering Professor Shawn Newsam and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science graduate student Shrishail “Shree” Baligar are using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect bird calls in the recordings.
Their model can detect 45... |
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.
Sierra magazine, the national publication of the Sierra Club, released its 14th annual “Cool Schools” ranking of the greenest colleges and universities on Monday, scoring UC Merced fifth out of more than 300 institutions. The placement is up from the university’s No. 6 finish last year.
The university was commended for efforts to integrate sustainability into campus programs and operations and engaging students in the process. Sierra also... |
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 Sierra Nevada provides more than 60 percent of California’s water supply and sustains a globally important agricultural region. Quantifying the water-related benefits can be critical in showing the true value and cost-benefit of forest management. But until now, there hasn’t been enough locally relevant data to incentivize restoration projects.
New research from UC Merced’s Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI) fills this data gap and provides a... |
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.”
Osborne, who joined the Department of Management of Complex Systems in the Ernest and Julio Gallo Management Program in January, brings that kind of broad perspective to her emerging areas... |
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.
“These arguments and ideas are starting to emerge from all the work,” Professor Crystal Kolden said. “Humans are driving this change and will continue to drive it unless we drastically change our fossil-fuel use.... |
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.
Consumers rely on a steady supply of energy, but renewable energy solutions are variable. Solar power is great, but what happens on overcast days? Or at night? Wind generates energy, too, but what happens when the wind isn’t blowing?
“Optimizing costly storage enables us to overcome the barriers of long-term wind and solar shortages,” Kurtz said. “Short-term storage helps as the sun... |
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.
But every time there’s a big rain, the rainforest soil emits a significant burst of that CO2, according to a new study by UC Merced Professor Tom Harmon, director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, and postdoctoral researcher and UC Merced alum Angel S. Fernandez-Bou.
What they found suggests CO2 in rainforest soil will increase as the climate warms, and precipitation patterns will become more important in defining the intensity of these emission bursts.
“There’s a lot of carbon in the soil... |
Wildfire seasons are intensifying because of climate change. That means reforestation efforts will increase, making it important for scientists and resource managers to understand how to make sure restorations will thrive in the future.
Because changes in climate challenge forests’ stability and productivity, forest ecology and genetics Professor Emily Moran and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service Research Geneticist Jessica Wright, with the Pacific Southwest Research Station, are studying how organisms have adapted to their past environments so they can find the best sources for seeds to replant.
They want to know whether specific genetic variations associated with different home climates, or... |
When people think of engineering in nature, they tend to think of species such as beavers — the tree-felling, dam-building rodents whose machinations can shape the landscape by creating lakes and changing the path of rivers.
But beavers are far from the only organisms to reshape their environment. A squirrel that inadvertently plants oak trees is also an “ecosystem engineer.” Roughly speaking, any organism whose impact on the environment outlasts its own lifetime is an environmental engineer.
Ecology Professor Justin Yeakel wanted to understand the direct and indirect dependencies between living organisms — biota — and the non-living chemical and physical parts of the environment that... |
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.
A new study shows that trees and rocks are important drivers of the microbial communities in the soil beneath them. A new paper published in Ecology and Evolution by ecology Professor Stephen Hart and a team of researchers he assembled details how giant sequoia influence the microbiota of the soil where they grow.
“With my background in forest ecology and soils and being a native Californian, I always was amazed by giant sequoia trees and knew that very little work had... |
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.
A new study shows that trees and rocks are important drivers of the microbial communities in the soil beneath them. A new paper published in Ecology and Evolution by ecology Professor Stephen Hart and a team of researchers he assembled details how giant sequoia influence the microbiota of the soil where they grow.
“With my background in forest ecology and soils and being a native Californian, I always was amazed by giant sequoia trees and knew that very little work... |
By 2050, the U.S. population is estimated to grow to 400 million, and the world population to 9.1 billion, requiring a 70 percent increase in global food production.
UC Merced is one of four campuses across the country uniting to meet that challenge by harnessing the power of innovation and technology to develop precision agriculture for a sustainable future.
Led by the University of Pennsylvania, UC Merced, Purdue University and the University of Florida received a new, $26 million, five-year National Science Foundation Engineering Research Centers (ERC) grant to form the NSF Engineering Research Center for the Internet of Things for Precision Agriculture (IoT4Ag). ERC are NSF’s flagship engineering programs for convergent... |
University of California President Janet Napolitano has selected UC Merced student organization RadioBio as one of two recipients for the 2020 President’s Award for Outstanding Student Leadership.
RadioBio, a science podcast that discusses topics ranging from molecules to ecosystems, was created in 2016 by graduate students to increase access to research in the sciences.
Napolitano and the selection committee were impressed with how RadioBio makes scientific research more accessible to the broader community through the production of podcasts and events that highlight the role of science in a variety of fields, including climate change, carbon neutrality, food waste and natural resources management, among... |
University of California President Janet Napolitano has selected UC Merced student organization RadioBio as one of two recipients for the 2020 President’s Award for Outstanding Student Leadership.
RadioBio, a science podcast that discusses topics ranging from molecules to ecosystems, was created in 2016 by graduate students to increase access to research in the sciences.
Napolitano and the selection committee were impressed with how RadioBio makes scientific research more accessible to the broader community through the production of podcasts and events that highlight the role of science in a variety of fields, including climate change, carbon neutrality, food waste and natural resources management,... |
Forest-management actions such as mechanical thinning and prescribed burns don’t just reduce the risk of severe wildfire and promote forest health — these practices can also contribute to significant increases in downstream water availability.
New research from UC Merced’s Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI) provides the tools to help estimate and verify those changes.
The study titled “Evapotranspiration Mapping for Forest Management in California's Sierra Nevada” was recently published in the journal Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. The researchers aim was to assess change in evapotranspiration, or water mainly used by vegetation, after wildfires. Looking specifically at the... |
Change is everywhere at UC Merced this year, from hiring a new chancellor to the completion of a major campus expansion. The Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI), an early hallmark of research excellence at UC Merced, is also making a change: After a 13-year tenure, Faculty Director Professor Roger Bales has stepped down and Professor Tom Harmon is taking the reins.
Both Harmon and Bales are founding faculty members who joined UC Merced in 2003, just as the campus was being built. They both research a variety of topics related to hydrology, climate change and sustainability. Harmon has spent much of his time working in and around soils, groundwater wells and rivers, while Bales focuses on the Sierra Nevada headwaters, forest management and water resources.
Former Vice Chancellor for... |
Superficial media coverage of California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) could discourage democratic engagement on resource-management issues by having focused on relatively few stakeholders, a new study from UC Merced shows.
Because water is essential to everyone, all have a stake in how groundwater is managed. Media reports published from January 2014 to April 2019 about the SGMA, however, tended to be simplistic, presenting only one stakeholder instead of considering holistic management, the study’s authors said.
Media coverage portrayed stakeholders as limited to major economic interests, such as agriculture, the study found. And while SGMA legislation requires disadvantaged... |
On a hot June evening, UC Merced Professor Josh Viers joined farm advocate and small farmer Tom Willey on his front porch near Fresno to talk about California’s water, disadvantaged communities, agricultural production and the future as part of the new “Down on the Farm” podcast that’s now available for all to hear.
Willey is an organic grower and soil scientist, and Viers, the director of UC Merced’s branch of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute, is a watershed expert whose research focuses on balancing agricultural productivity with California’s increasingly water-limited future.
“I think an infusion of technology can minimize some of the harder... |
Every Fourth of July, the Carnegie Corporation of New York honors the legacy of its founder Andrew Carnegie, by recognizing an extraordinary group of immigrants, who are now naturalized American citizens, and who have made notable contributions to the progress of American society.
This year, soil biogeochemistry Professor, and Ted and Jan Falasco Endowed Chair in Earth Sciences and Geology, Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is among them. “I was very surprised when I got the news, and humbled to be included in the distinguished list of folks they have recognized for this honor,” Berhe said. “I was born in Eritrea, but spent pretty much my entire adult life in the U.S. Leaving home,... |
Every Fourth of July, the Carnegie Corporation of New York honors the legacy of its founder Andrew Carnegie, by recognizing an extraordinary group of immigrants, who are now naturalized American citizens, and who have made notable contributions to the progress of American society.
This year, soil biogeochemistry Professor, and Ted and Jan Falasco Endowed Chair in Earth Sciences and Geology, Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is among them. “I was very surprised when I got the news, and humbled to be included in the distinguished list of folks they have recognized for this honor,” Berhe said. “I was born in Eritrea, but spent pretty much my entire adult life in the U.S. Leaving home... |
Mechanical systems, such as car engines and manufacturing equipment, use petroleum-based lubricants and solvents that are considered hazardous. After use, those compounds mostly end up in the earth.
Environmentally friendly alternatives — room-temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) — that don’t need solvents and can perform better haven’t been widely used because of a lack of basic understanding about how they work.
But mechanical engineering Professor Ashlie Martini is starting on a new National Science Foundation-supported project to evaluate these liquids in machine components and develop commercialization plans.
The Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) program funds research that... |
Summertime means fun in the water, but as temperatures increase, algal blooms can grow in freshwater and marine ecosystems.
Some algae are natural and life-giving, while others are the result of life out of balance and can have harmful effects. Consisting of bacteria and tiny plankton, they arise quickly and alter the ecosystem by consuming available oxygen, killing fish.
They also pose a health risk as some algal blooms emit toxins — including neurotoxins deadly to pets and harmful to people. Detecting algal blooms from space using satellites is one way to prevent exposure. Analyzing how people react to harmful blooms is another.
In an innovative and cross-disciplinary remote-sensing approach, engineering... |
Incoming first-year and transfer students will have a new resource for success and an introduction to research starting next summer, thanks to a four-year, $400,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Civil and environmental engineering Professor Colleen Naughton is heading up the USDA’s Research and Extension Experiential Learning for Undergraduates (REEU) program, which will provide a bridge for incoming students. The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Merced will host the program.
The six-week summer immersion program will connect five undergraduates and five transfer students each year with faculty mentors from all three schools to work on... |
About 4.5 billion people around the globe do not have access to adequate sanitation, and what they do have — typically pit latrines and lagoons — are responsible for widespread illnesses and a portion of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.
UC Merced Professor Rebecca Ryals and a group of colleagues have a solution that not only increases safety, sustainability and jobs, but reduces greenhouse gas emissions and waste-borne illnesses while producing an effective fertilizer for agriculture.
The answer? Composting.
A new study published today in Nature Climate Change reveals surprising results from several years of testing in Haiti, a country with notoriously poor sanitation and one of the... |
As the SPACEX Crew Dragon spacecraft left Earth today to ferry two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, many Bobcats were watching the live stream with keen anticipation.
It’s not just that the flight marks the first time a commercial aerospace company will carry humans — two NASA astronauts — into Earth's orbit. The collaborative project also has special meaning for UC Merced.
Maybe that’s because the campus’s education endeavors exemplify the spirit of SPACEX and NASA — boundless learning and exploration — or maybe it’s because of UC Merced’s direct connections to both Elon Musk’s company and the federal space agency.
“The School of Engineering is proud of our relationships with NASA through research and workforce development, as well as... |
Despite the challenges of making an in-person event into a remote one, students in this year’s Innovate to Grow spring showcase displayed the determination, passion and innovation Bobcats are known for.
Student teams highlighted more than 60 projects — from mobile applications that translate medical jargon into Hmong and Spanish, to stabilizers for unmanned aerial systems — each created for real partners in the region and as far away as Portugal and Australia who needed engineering challenges solved. The teams made videos to present their projects, then answered questions in real time over Zoom from the panels of judges tasked with evaluating them.
The showcase, the School of Engineering’s premier event, is divided into four sections. Three — the... |
UC Merced’s Graduate Division wrapped up its annual Grad Slam competition this week, announcing Physics doctoral candidate Boe Mendewala as its campus champion.
The judges awarded two runners-up, Shayna Bennett, a third-year Ph.D. student in Applied Mathematics, and Melinda Gonzales, a first-year Ph.D. student in Environmental Systems.
Mendewala impressed the judges with her talk, “The Solar Solution: Upgrading Energy Technology.” Her research with Professor Sayantani Ghosh studies the optical properties of hybrid perovskite materials for solar energy and lighting applications.
“I'm so grateful for this honor, especially considering the quality of presentations that all the finalists gave this year,” said Mendewala, who grew up in Fullerton after... |
The San Joaquin Valley — with all its agriculture and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that go with it — is one of the places most at risk because of changing snowmelt patterns, a new study shows.
California is the No. 1 producer of food in the nation, and agriculture in the state is a $50 billion-a-year industry. Valley crops provide more than a third of the country’s produce, including 95 percent of the fruit and nuts, and they depend on water coming from the Sierra Nevada snowpack. In fact, most of the Valley’s primary crops, including grapes and nuts, get a third or more of their irrigation from snowmelt.
A new study published in Nature Climate Change indicates that about 50 percent of current runoff comes directly from Sierra snowmelt, and the... |
The Center for Information Technology in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and UC Merced’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Graduate Group present an online talk for the golden anniversary of Earth Day.
Joel Kimmelshue, Ph.D., a founding partner and the principal soil and agriculture scientist at Land IQ in Sacramento, will offer a talk entitled “Agricultural Land Classification and Crop Water Use: The Importance of Ground Truthing for Calibration and Validation.”
In observance of the stay-at-home orders issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Frontiers in Technology discussion will be held via Zoom from noon to 1 p.m. Friday, April 24. Everyone who wants to take part can connect online.
Ever-increasing regulatory... |
U.S. News & World Report has ranked six of UC Merced’s engineering graduate programs in its 2021 Best Graduate Schools rankings released today, a sign that the university’s reputation is continuing to build.
“We’re particularly proud of this accomplishment given our campus is only 15 years old,” Vice Provost and Graduate Dean Marjorie Zatz said. “This is a reflection of the hard work of our students, faculty and staff, and it’s a testament to the outstanding quality of research and graduate training at UC Merced and our university’s rising trajectory.”
This year, U.S. News evaluated graduate programs across six major disciplines: business, education, engineering, law, medicine and nursing, and specialties within them. The rankings are based... |
Competitions, showcases, career success stories and more highlight the work of the School of Engineering and its students at UC Merced’s annual celebration of National Engineers Week, Feb. 18 to 21.
E-Week is an opportunity for engineering students to share the work they do with the campus, invite some friendly competition and introduce other students and younger school children to the field. Each day carries a specific theme, from Project Palooza (a showcase for engineering clubs and organizations) to Professional Day (career advice and alumni success stories).
Petia Gueorguieva, coordinator of the STEM Resource Center on campus, said the week and its activities are driven by engineering students.
“We want to make engineering... |
Professor Sarah Kurtz has become the first UC Merced faculty member to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in recognition of her contributions to the development of gallium indium phosphide/gallium arsenide photovoltaic cells and for her leadership in solar-cell reliability and quality.
“The membership is a special recognition that I deeply appreciate,” Kurtz said. “It is considered to be one of the highest honors that can be bestowed on an engineer. I expect there will be many more NAE members from UC Merced.”
Kurtz’s research involves understanding and improving photovoltaic systems; understanding trends in the growth of renewable energy use; and researching any impediments to that continued growth.
“This is a fabulous... |
Professor Sarah Kurtz has become the first UC Merced faculty member to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in recognition of her contributions to the development of gallium indium phosphide/gallium arsenide photovoltaic cells and for her leadership in solar-cell reliability and quality.
“The membership is a special recognition that I deeply appreciate,” Kurtz said. “It is considered to be one of the highest honors that can be bestowed on an engineer. I expect there will be many more NAE members from UC Merced.”
Kurtz’s research involves understanding and improving photovoltaic systems; understanding trends in the growth of renewable energy use; and researching any impediments to that continued growth.
“This is a... |
California’s Central Valley has some of the most productive agricultural land in the world, but the accumulation of salt from irrigation water is decreasing crop productivity and threatening the industry’s long-term sustainability.
A new project out of UC Merced — funded by a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation — seeks to address this problem by developing an innovative, environmentally friendly and economically feasible system to desalinate and reuse agricultural drainage water.
The project is being led by UC Merced professors Yanbao Ma, James Palko and YangQuan Chen, in collaboration with researchers from UC Santa Cruz, the University of Arizona, and the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service center... |
UC Merced researchers outline solutions to the severe wildfire problems in California’s mountain forests and closely linked water resource challenges in a documentary premiering on KVIE, the Sacramento affiliate of PBS, later this month.
The new film “Beyond the Brink: California’s Watershed” highlights the critical need to reverse a century of fire suppression in Sierra Nevada forests, which, together with a warming climate, has resulted in a crisis situation.
Excluding fire has resulted in unsustainably high forest densities, lower stream flows and reduced overall forest health, researchers say.
Professors Martha Conklin, Roger Bales and LeRoy Westerling discuss these challenges and highlight how solving... |
A thin layer of compost applied to grasslands could help fight climate change by capturing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil, recent research shows.
UC Merced Professor Rebecca Ryals and a team of researchers, ranchers and public agencies will demonstrate this practice for the first time in the East Bay. The project, which began Dec. 3, is funded by a California Department of Food and Agriculture Healthy Soils Demonstration grant.
The collaboration between Ryals, the Alameda County Resource Conservation District and StopWaste (the Alameda County Waste Management Authority) is an example of a partnership that is working to advance the scientific understanding and demonstrate success of ecosystem-based climate... |
UC Merced health experts will join other Central Valley medical leaders on Friday, Nov. 22, for the Rural Poverty and Health Equity Summit in Delano.
Professor Nancy Burke, chair of the Department of Public Health at UC Merced, is a featured speaker and will be part of the event’s opening panel discussion on building strong partnerships.
Public health Professor Sandie Ha will join a panel discussing the impact of air quality on health; health psychology Professor Anna Song, director of UC Merced’s Nicotine and Cannabis Policy Center, will join a discussion on substance use; and Dr. Thelma Hurd, UC Merced’s new director of medical education, will be on a panel looking at the impact and implications of rural health.
“... |
UC Merced Professor Peggy O’Day hopes to improve water quality in the California Delta by studying local wetlands.
O’Day is leading a new three-year study of Merced County wetlands that drain into the San Joaquin River and eventually the Delta.
“The Delta is sort of the heart and lungs of Northern California,” said O’Day, a geochemistry professor, founding faculty member and former chair of the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences in the School of Natural Sciences.
By looking at how to manage levels of salt, mercury and nutrients heading into the San Joaquin River, researchers are aiming to boost water quality and reduce impacts on fish and other aquatic life in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The Delta forms... |
Even a little forest management significantly increases water runoff in the Central Sierra Nevada and other semi-arid regions, while drier forests need more extensive treatments, according to a new study published recently in the journal Ecohydrology.
“The result is more runoff to downstream water users,” said UC Merced Professor Martha Conklin , who led the study.
Founding faculty and School of Engineering professors Conklin and Roger Bales, recent Ph.D. graduate Philip Saksa, now the director of research at Blue Forest Conservation, and collaborators conducted the study. They looked at the fuel-treatment strategies — such as prescribed burns and thinning — applied across overstocked forests in California to reduce the... |
UC Merced has been named one of the best schools for environmental sustainability and quality of campus life, placing 20th on The Princeton Review’s list of top 50 “green colleges.”
Nearly 700 schools with strong commitments to green practices and programs were evaluated for the list, published Oct. 22. Criteria included how well each prepares students for green careers; whether a school’s policies are environmentally responsible; and whether the quality of student life on campus is healthy and sustainable. Among California campuses, UC Merced ranked third, following Stanford (No. 10) and UC Berkeley (No. 14).
“We are pleased the campus has received this recognition for its demonstrated leadership in sustainability efforts,... |
Soil biogeochemistry Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe has been named the Ted and Jan Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences and Geology.
“The Falasco family is engaged in construction and development, so they have an intimate connection with and an understanding of the earth beneath our feet,” Berhe said. “Not only are they generous with their hard-earned resources, they are investing in a worthy cause for the Valley. They appreciate how invested we all should be in the land and the Earth.”
In her Soil Biogeochemistry Lab, Berhe and the six graduate students, two postdoctoral researchers, an international visiting student and undergraduates she mentors study the ways soil regulates the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere by... |
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas with a global warming potential 104 times greater than carbon dioxide. But what if the methane could be turned into energy?
The topic of using waste for power is a hot one, both literally and figuratively, for the San Joaquin Valley. Biogas — the gases naturally produced from the decomposition of organic waste — can be a useful byproduct. If harnessed correctly, greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced and dairies and wastewater managers could capture added value by creating, using and selling natural gas.
UC Merced Professor Sarah Kurtz is leading a workshop that seeks to answer questions about how to convert biogas production sites that currently flare the biogas into ones that can take... |
Archaeology Professor Mark Aldenderfer ventured to the Austrian Alps recently to deliver a keynote address at the International Mountain Conference in Innsbruck.
Aldenderfer’s presentation, “ The Deep Prehistory of the Human Presence in the World’s Highest Mountains and Plateaus,” traced the expansion of our hominid ancestors into high-elevation environments some 1 million years ago to the settlement of humans in mountainous terrain within the past 40,000 years.
To successfully thrive at elevations beyond 3,000 meters required behavioral as well as genetic adaptations, he said. Things we take for granted — fire and clothing — were critical... |
Audio has become a top form of entertainment over the past several years, in large part due to the rising popularity of podcasts. UC Merced graduate students are seizing the opportunity to help improve science literacy.
A group of Quantitative and Systems Biology (QSB) graduate students started RadioBio, a science podcast that discusses biology topics, in 2016. The podcast sparked from a discussion between the students and Professor Fred Wolf during a graduate professional skills development course.
“We wanted to develop as people who can communicate science to people outside of our fields by breaking down what we do and helping others understand why it’s important,” founding member and former president of RadioBio Kinsey Brock said. “We also wanted to get... |
Bacteria and starfish have more in common than people might think.
A new study published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences shows that both single-celled (microbes) and multi-celled organisms (every other living thing) in marine lakes share similar reactions to changes in their environment.
“Significant transitions in environmental factors such as oxygen concentration and salinity drive large-scale change in the communities of most, if not all, marine organisms,” lead author Giovanni Rapacciuolo said.
Rapacciuolo worked with UC Merced professors Michael Dawson and Michael Beman when he was a postdoc in Dawson’s lab. They wanted to understand... |
UC Merced is offering the opportunity for Valley residents to learn what clinicians and researchers know about Valley fever, an airborne fungal infection that can have serious, even fatal, consequences for people across California and the Southwest.
A multi-campus Valley fever summit in the California Room at UC Merced on Oct. 25 is free and open to all who reserve seats online by 5 p.m. Oct. 15.
In addition to a talk by a Valley fever patient, UC clinicians and researchers from Merced, Davis, UCLA, UCSF, UCSF Fresno, Berkeley and Irvine will share their understanding about Valley fever.
Documented cases of Valley fever rose 11 percent in 2018 — a preliminary total of 7,886 cases compared to 7,090 cases for the same period in 2017, according to the California... |
Lauren Schiebelhut credits the support and opportunities afforded to her at UC Merced with opening the door to her research career.
Schiebelhut — a first-generation transfer student from Fresno — earned a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from UC Merced in May 2009 but was uncertain about her future.
The last semester of her senior year, she took an evolution course with Professor Mike Dawson and her standout performance prompted him to offer her a lab manager position. She was involved in a California rocky shore project that played a pivotal role in jumpstarting her passion for research.
“I was able to participate in that project and I just fell in love with trying to solve the mysteries in marine systems,” she said. “It... |
Soil is one of the foundations of life on Earth and could be an important part of the solution to climate change, if only we can stop treating it like dirt.
That’s the message Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe shared with a global audience when she became the only current UC Merced researcher to give a TED Talk at this year’s annual TED conference. The video of her discussion “What’s Soil Got to do with Climate Change?” is available today (click the link to see the video).
TED — which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design — is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks. Each year’s conference features a dazzling array of experts, which puts UC Merced’s Berhe in the company of global... |
California’s drought was hard not to notice — the dry lawns, fallowed fields and hot temperatures were evident across the state. To better understand how the drought affected the natural ecosystem in which we live, biology Professor Jason Sexton and his graduate students conducted a study on a California plant known only from the Sierra Nevada — the cut-leaf monkey flower.
Sexton, a botanist by trade, studies plant adaptation affected by major ecological changes. To study the influence of the most recent drought that lasted roughly from 2011-2017, Sexton drew upon his seed collection, which he started during his graduate work at UC Davis. Among his gatherings were seeds from the cut-leaf monkey flower plant, which he started collecting in 2005.... |
The American media lends too much weight to people who dismiss climate change, giving them legitimacy they haven’t earned, posing serious danger to efforts aimed at raising public awareness and motivating rapid action, a new study shows.
While it is not uncommon for media outlets to interview climate change scientists and climate change deniers in the same interviews, the effort to offer a 360-degree view is creating a false balance between trained climate scientists and those who lack scientific training, such as politicians.
“It’s not just false balance; the numbers show that the media are ‘balancing’ experts — who represent the overwhelming majority of reputable scientists — with the views of a relative handful of non-experts,” UC... |
Since his undergraduate days in Environmental Studies at Humboldt State University, Ivan Soto has aspired to produce research with a positive impact on the public — not just to benefit the academic community.
As a doctoral student in the Interdisciplinary Humanities at UC Merced, Soto is doing just that by producing humanities data that could influence and inform future water board decision-makers to understand the need for systemic change in California’s water monitoring for human health. His research examines the power dynamics of infrastructure and water politics through an environmental history of southernmost California’s Imperial Valley along the U.S.-Mexico... |
Leigh Bernacchi, Ph.D., has officially joined UC Merced’s Center for Information Technology in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and Banatao Institute as the program director.
“Leigh has worked at the intersection of ag and water for several years and will provide valuable support for CITRIS in growing in the ag-food-tech space,” CITRIS Director Professor Joshua Viers said.
As one of four campus branches, Merced’s version of CITRIS is focused on agriculture, computer science and the San Joaquin Valley, and growing programs that focus on agriculture, computing and women in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.
Before joining UC Merced in 2015, Bernacchi coordinated web and education components... |
Durable, reliable, affordable solar power is the future of energy, and UC Merced computational physicist Professor David Strubbe is diving into a new area of science to answer the call.
Strubbe’s new project aims to understand why two organic materials — that are cheaper and easier to produce than the prevalent silicon-based products — don’t last as long, and explore how to improve them.
He developed a new computational method to apply a physics approach to what is really an organic materials chemistry problem — searching for answers at the atomic level to understand why buckyballs in organic solar cells and perovskites degrade in sunlight.
His project, entitled “Theory of Light-induced Structural Changes in... |
Sixteen Tulare County high school students have completed the inaugural internship program through UC Merced’s partnership with the Tulare County Office of Education (TCOE). Late last year, the university partnered with TCOE to establish the UC Merced/SCICON Field Station in the Sierra Nevada foothills, with the goal of exposing students to higher education opportunities while studying the land for research on environmental issues.
The students began the process of mapping Circle J-Norris Ranch, the site of the new field station last week. Led by Circle J lead teacher Nancy Bruce and faculty and staff and faculty from UC Merced — including Professor Jessica Blois, faculty director of UC Merced’s nature reserves —... |
The most extreme drought event in hundreds of years caused a catastrophic die-off of the Sierra Nevada’s mature trees in 2015-2016.
A study published today in Nature Geoscience details how UC Merced Professor Roger Bales and his colleague Professor Michael Goulden from UC Irvine tracked the progress of the devastation caused by years of dry conditions combined with abnormally warm temperatures.
The researchers warn that matters are expected to get worse as global mean temperatures increase.
“Parts of the Sierra Nevada reached a ‘tipping point’ in 2015, where annual precipitation plus stored subsurface water were not enough to meet the water demand of the forest,” Bales said.
The trees in California’s mixed-conifer mountain... |
The most extreme drought event in hundreds of years caused a catastrophic die-off of the Sierra Nevada’s mature trees in 2015-2016.
A study published today in Nature Geoscience details how UC Merced Professor Roger Bales and his colleague Professor Michael Goulden from UC Irvine tracked the progress of the devastation caused by years of dry conditions combined with abnormally warm temperatures.
The researchers warn that matters are expected to get worse as global mean temperatures increase.
“Parts of the Sierra Nevada reached a ‘tipping point’ in 2015, where annual precipitation plus stored subsurface water were not enough to meet the water demand of the forest,” Bales said.
The trees in California’s mixed-conifer mountain... |
Climate change is bad news for forests, and a new study by UC Merced Professor Emily Moran demonstrates one aspect of that news.
Higher summer temperatures hurt tree seedlings’ growth and survival.
But whether that is entirely bad depends on the degree of change in the number of young trees.
“One of the reasons we’re so concerned about forest fires is because of forest density,” she said. “If there are somewhat fewer seedlings and saplings, there’s less fuel for big destructive fires. On the other hand, if there are too few seedlings there won't be a next generation to replace adult trees when they die.”
Besides providing wood and habitat for wildlife, trees are extremely good at sequestering... |
At the northern tip of the UC Merced campus, an unremarkable aluminum gate leads into a field that extends, seemingly, into infinity. Perpendicular to the gate, the LeGrand Canal, drawn from Lake Yosemite, snakes around campus into the emerald pastures, through farm rows and almond orchards across the highway. It’s the rainy season and bulbous cumuli foreground the rippled line of the Sierra Nevada that slices across the open sky.
This is no ordinary field or pasture. The UC Merced Vernal Pools and Grassland Reserve, or MVPGR, is the 39th of the 41 reserves in the University of California Natural Reserve System. NRS reserves serve as living laboratories and outdoor classrooms for students and researchers at... |
Three big UC Solar projects are poised to be the next big breakthroughs in low-cost, accessible sustainable commercial and residential energy in California and far beyond.
Researchers are building working models of one project developed through a grant from the California Energy Commission for a solar unit that can provide electricity and heat to commercial and residential buildings.
“It would drive down the cost of solar for homes and other buildings because you’d only need one installation so you get both heat and power production for the same price,” said UC Merced Professor Roland Winston, director of UC Solar and member of the School of Engineering and the School of Natural... |
A nine-year experiment by a UC Merced Department of Life and Environmental Sciences professor and his colleagues is illuminating the importance of soil carbon in maintaining healthy and functioning ecosystems because of its influence on the microbial communities that live in soil.
These communities’ health can help researchers understand the effects of climate change.
Professor Stephen C. Hart and graduate student Nicholas Dove published a new paper entitled “ Carbon Control on Terrestrial Ecosystem Function across Contrasting Site Productivities: The Carbon Connection Revisited ” in the prestigious journal Ecology this week, showing that reducing the carbon plants input into... |
At UC Merced, research and education are inextricably intertwined – in the lab and in the classroom. Professors continually refine and advance their teaching methods and curriculum to convey knowledge, and to build the critical thinking skills that last throughout a lifetime.
Supporting these aims, the California Education Learning Lab has awarded a collaborative grant to UC Merced, CSU Bakersfield and Bakersfield College for “Improving Equity, Accessibility and Outcomes for STEM Gateway Courses.”
The grant, “California Challenges in STEM Energy Education,” will serve as a testbed for teaching strategies that reduce large educational equity gaps in STEM fields too often experienced by Hispanic and other... |
Most people wouldn’t think sharks can teach researchers about the planet’s distant past and its more immediate future.
UC Merced paleoecologist Professor Sora Kim isn’t most people.
There’s a connection between data in fossilized shark teeth and climate change, and thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation, she aims to use that information to better understand climate change.
The research route she’s navigating might seem as circuitous as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current — which is itself a key part of the links between fossils and the future, but follow along the journey:
Kim will examine stable isotopes in shark teeth to glean data about environmental and ecological changes to shark communities over time that... |
Conservation and leadership of the country’s national parks and natural resources is ingrained in the UC Merced’s DNA. To reinforce the concentrated efforts surrounding sustainability of the nation’s gems, the university recently hosted its prestigious National Parks Institute Executive Leadership Seminar.
The 10-day event brings park leaders and renowned experts from around the globe to discuss topics affecting the future of natural lands and cultural heritage. The National Parks Institute (NPI) is headquartered at UC Merced, but is the culmination of more than 15 years of collaboration between the campus, Yosemite National Park, and the National Park Service’s national office.
The seminar began last week at Cavallo... |
Graduate student Vicky Espinoza shared the plight of some San Joaquin Valley families with a wide audience this spring in her role as a Next Generation delegate to this year’s Chicago Council on Global Affairs Global Food Security Symposium, entitled “From Scarcity to Security: Managing Water for a Nutritious Food Future.”
The second-year Environmental Systems graduate student under Professor Joshua Viers was one of 22 chosen by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs from more than 600 applicants from all over the world to participate in the meeting in Washington, D.C.
“My research focuses on addressing water scarcity, food security and environmental inequity issues, and the San Joaquin Valley is in the heart of it,”... |
A rigorous, first-of-its-kind global study provides new insights into the natural history of soil biodiversity and shows that changes in soil pH during soil development is a major driver of most of that biodiversity.
Published recently in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, the paper “ Changes in Belowground Biodiversity During Ecosystem Development ” — co-authored by two UC Merced professors and UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow Fernanda Santos — details research performed by an international team.
The paper reveals new information about ecological patterns driving the changes in soil biodiversity over millions of years and how they might apply to a drier, hotter world.
Led by Manuel Delgado Baquerizo... |
UC Merced’s Graduate Division will host its Grad Slam competition on April 18 with graduate scholars presenting on topics ranging from Valley Fever immune response and antibiotic resistance to computer vision and mathematical methods for thermal collection. This year’s competition started in March with 30 graduate students in the qualifying round, from which the judges narrowed the field to the top 12.
The campus’s 2019 Grad Slam semi-finalists are:
Jourjina Alkhouri, Quantitative and Systems Biology, “Right Antibiotic, First Time, 3 hours”
Shayna Bennett, Applied Mathematics, “A New Look at Modeling Invasive Species”
Anh Diep, Quantitative and Systems Biology, “To Clear or Not to Clear: A Valley Fever Mystery”
Mohammadkazem Ebrahimpour, Electrical... |
Children who live near major roads are at higher risk for developmental delays because of traffic-related pollutants.
That’s the major finding of a new study authored by UC Merced environmental epidemiology Professor Sandie Ha and colleagues. The study appears in the journal Environmental Research and is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the UC Merced Senate Grant.
The researchers, including scientists from NIH, the New York State Department of Health and the University at Albany show that young children who live close to major roads are twice as likely to score lower on tests of communications skills, compared to those who live farther away.
Additionally, children born to women exposed to higher levels of... |
Two UC Merced Ph.D. students took to the State Capitol yesterday with representatives from the other UC campuses to advocate for the importance of the research being done across California.
Craig Ennis and Vicky Espinoza were accompanied by Vice Provost and Graduate Dean Marjorie Zatz to meet with state leaders during the UC’s 10th annual Graduate Research Advocacy Day. They met with assembly members Frank Bigelow (R-Madera) and Rudy Salas Jr. (D-Bakersfield) and Senator Andreas Borgeas (R-Fresno), as well as representatives from the offices of assembly members Heath Flora (R-Ripon), Joaquin Arambula (D-Delano) and Adam Gray (D-Merced) and senators Anna Caballero (D-Merced) and Melissa Hurtado (D-Sanger).
“It was exciting to share some of the great... |
Under the leadership of Professors Asmeret Berhe and Stephen Hart, three UC Merced Environmental Systems (ES) graduate students have been awarded fellowships from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to advance their doctoral theses.
The DOE’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program (SCGSR) provides students with thesis research opportunities at DOE national laboratories. The fellowships are designed to allow science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduate students to utilize the resources available at national laboratory sites, such as equipment and the expertise of DOE laboratory scientists. Most fellows remain at a site for three to 12 months. In order to... |
Under the leadership of Professors Asmeret Berhe and Stephen Hart, three UC Merced Environmental Systems (ES) graduate students have been awarded fellowships from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to advance their doctoral theses.
The DOE’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program (SCGSR) provides students with thesis research opportunities at DOE national laboratories. The fellowships are designed to allow science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduate students to utilize the resources available at national laboratory sites, such as equipment and the expertise of DOE laboratory scientists. Most fellows remain at a site for three to 12 months. In order to... |
Climate change is having a profound effect on the millions of migrating birds that rely on annual stops along the Pacific Flyway as they head from Alaska to Patagonia each year.
They are finding less food, saltier water and fewer places to breed and rest on their long journeys, according to a new paper in Nature’s Scientific Reports.
The culmination of more than two decades of work in the six-state Great Basin, the study is a collaboration between researchers from UC Merced, Oregon State University, the U.S. Geological Survey and The Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA).
Among the key findings:
climate change has significantly reduced the amount of water flowing into wetlands in the Great Basin, reducing breeding... |
UC Merced’s graduate programs in engineering had a strong showing in U.S. News & World Report’s 2020 edition of Best Graduate Schools, released today.
Overall, UC Merced’s School of Engineering is ranked No. 134 in the nation, after debuting at No. 140 in 2015.
“We are gratified by the growing national recognition for our engineering programs and the rapid progress we’ve made in our relatively brief campus history,” Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Education Marjorie S. Zatz said. “It’s exciting to see the growing strength of our interdisciplinary graduate education model, as witnessed by our rankings from national publications and organizations.
“The faculty of our three schools — Engineering, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences,... |
It’s estimated that a leaf-cutter ant colony can strip an average tree of its foliage in a day, and that more than 17 percent of leaf production by plants surrounding a colony goes straight into their giant, fungus-growing nests.
It’s no wonder these ants are considered the smallest recyclers on the planet and are referred to as "ecosystem engineers" by scientists because of the effects they have on the environment around them.
That’s why Professor Thomas Harmon, a founding faculty member with UC Merced’s School of Engineering and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Environmental Systems doctoral student Angel Fernandez-Bou are studying... |
Climate change and wildfire make a combustible mix with deadly and costly consequences.
Scientists have been trying to understand that link for many years, studying the effects of climate and wildfire interactions in the Sierra Nevada.
UC Merced Professor LeRoy Westerling and University of New Mexico Professor Matthew Hurteau and colleagues have analyzed data via simulations of Sierra wildfires, and what they found was surprising.
They hypothesized that previous wildfires’ influence on vegetation, coupled with the changing climate’s effects on vegetation recovery after fires, would restrict the size of future wildfires.
But their data analysis shows this “fuel limitation effect” doesn't... |
You can smell them a mile away; there’s no mistaking the smell of cows and their methane emissions.
The odor, of course, comes from tons of methane-spewing manure. Thanks to a multimillion-dollar grant from the California Strategic Growth Council’s competitive Climate Change Research Program, Professor Gerardo Diaz and his interdisciplinary team of UC Merced faculty will look to subdue that stench while also caring for the planet.
The Climate Change Research Program is part of California Climate Investments, a statewide initiative that puts billions of cap-and-trade dollars to work reducing greenhouse gas emissions, strengthening the economy and improving public health and the environment — particularly in... |
A $4.6 million grant to UCs Merced and Irvine will help researchers develop new tools and methods for better managing the state’s forests, shrub lands and grasslands.
The Innovation Center for Advancing Ecosystem Climate Solutions, a three-year program co-led by UC Merced Professor Roger Bales and UC Irvine Professor Michael Goulden, was selected through the Strategic Growth Council’s competitive Climate Change Research Program. This program is part of California Climate Investments, a statewide program that puts billions of cap-and-trade dollars to work reducing greenhouse gas emissions, strengthening the economy, and improving public health and the environment — particularly in disadvantaged communities.... |
Humans are not the only animals to build elaborate housing and grow crops—or to add carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere through their industry. A new study shows that the leaf-cutter ant Atta cephalotes is also a master builder and cultivator and a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Found in ecosystems throughout the New World, Atta species excavate massive, several-meter-deep underground nests that include complex tunnels and chambers, exits, and entrances. The ants drag vast quantities of vegetation into the nests to feed their main food source: a fungus called Leucoagaricus gongylophorus. To maintain the proper concentrations of CO2 and oxygen belowground, the nests also... |
The French Meadows Forest Restoration Project, an innovative collaboration approved this week, aligns the expertise of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at UC Merced, the U.S. Forest Service, the Nature Conservancy and other agencies and groups to focus on reducing wildfire risk in a critical municipal watershed.
The project covers 30,000 acres of public and private land west of Lake Tahoe and is a public-private partnership that can serve as a model for increasing the pace and scale of ecologically based forest management and fuels reduction throughout the Sierra Nevada.
The Sierra Nevada Research Institute is leading the project’s research on the link between healthy forested watersheds and water supply.
“UC Merced... |
UC Merced researchers have evidence that California’s forests are especially vulnerable to multi-year droughts because their health depends on water stored several feet below ground.
“Each year our forests, grasslands and shrublands depend on water stored underground to survive the dry summers, but during multi-year dry periods there is not enough precipitation in the wet winter season to replenish that supply,” said Joseph Rungee, UC Merced graduate student and lead author on a new paper published in the journal Hydrological Processes.
Trees typically need about the same amount of water every year — more in hotter years. During a drought, that subsurface store of water is gradually depleted, causing stress to... |
The Earth is changing, and humans face major challenges if they hope to adapt, survive and preserve any semblance of the world as it is now.
Humans will need to create sustainable food, water and energy supplies; curb climate change; eliminate pollution and waste; and design efficient, healthy and resilient cities. To support these efforts, they will also need to enhance society’s ability and will to make informed decisions and act; and develop leaders who are prepared to address a sustainable future.
The new “Environmental Engineering for the 21st Century: Addressing the Grand Challenges” report commissioned by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine features the work of nearly 20 of the country’s most prominent... |
A new book co-edited by Professor Kathleen Hull highlights nine studies exploring how Native people retained or reimagined their communities in California between 1769 and 1834.
“Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California” was published by the University of Arizona Press and co-edited by Hull and John Douglass, director of Research and Standards at Statistical Research, Inc. in Tucson. They chose contributions that examine settlement, marriage patterns, trade and other interactions in the inland, central and northern parts of what is now California in relation to colonialism, missions and lives lived beyond mission walls during a tumultuous period.
Hull, an anthropologist with the Department of... |
Forty million years after dinosaurs went extinct, one of the largest predators that ever prowled Earth’s oceans emerged, feeding the imaginations of modern scientists and the nightmares of modern movie audiences.
Megalodon — the name means ‘giant tooth’ — appeared some 23 million years ago and reigned the seas for about 21 million years. In 400 million years of shark evolution, megalodon is the most massive shark species that ever lived, growing to 60 feet long, or three times the size of the largest of today’s great whites.
But megalodon went extinct about 2.5 million years ago, and UC Merced paleoecology Professor Sora Kim wants to know why.
Through a three-year project funded by a $204,000 grant from... |
Civil and environmental engineering Professor Erin Hestir’s proposal for a unique system of mapping mercury in the waters of the San Francisco Delta has won her and her team of collaborators a $1.7 million grant from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW).
The CDFW is dividing up almost $28 million generated by Proposition 1 bond sales, the result of the Water Quality, Supply and Infrastructure Improvement Act voters approved in 2014. Hestir’s three-year project is one of 24 Restoration Grant programs approved for this year.
She and her colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park and the USGS California Water Science Center in Sacramento, are developing rapid, easy-to-use techniques to analyze the... |
California aims to lead the nation — and the globe — in climate change research, policy and action — in large part through climate-focused research conducted at University of California campuses and labs.
Some of that research, including from UC Merced, will be on display this week as climate-change scientists, policymakers and trailblazers from around the globe gather in San Francisco for the 2018 Global Climate Action Summit .
UC Merced School of Engineering professors Joshua Viers, LeRoy Westerling and Josué Medellín-Azuara and some of their graduate students will be there in support of the research they do, which is also recently highlighted in several prominent reports.
The professors and second-year... |
Just because a design works once doesn’t mean that the research and development is done.
That’s why, Professor Sarah Kurtz argues in a new commentary in the prestigious journal Nature Energy , it’s important to do the quality assurance science that shows why products sometimes don’t work.
“If people want to take their science to the next level, they need to think about the implications of what happens when their innovations go into production,” Kurtz said. “What comes off the manufacturing line isn’t always going to work the way it is meant to.”
She cited a high-profile example of the problems that arose when quality assurance failed the Samsung company and it had to recall Galaxy smartphones because the batteries... |
Paleoecology Professor Jessica Blois recently became the campus’s 19th recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award.
The NSF describes as the CAREER as its “most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their organizations.”
The award provides Blois with $782,449 over the next five years to pursue an agenda that includes research and outreach.
Blois will use the CAREER to study how species respond to climate change. Her ultimate goal is to develop models that allow scientists to predict how animals and the... |
UC Solar received a $1.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) to develop solar-thermal desalination technologies that reduce the cost of creating fresh water from otherwise unusable waters such as seawater, brackish water and polluted water.
UC Solar Director Professor Roland Winston will lead a team that includes professors Gerardo Diaz and James Palko, focused on developing low-cost, portable technologies that collect and store solar-thermal energy that can be used to power water-purification systems.
The project was one of 14 selected to receive SETO funding as part of an effort to reduce the cost of solar-thermal desalination and help the... |
Soils are carbon sinks, storing more planet-warming carbon than the atmosphere and all animal and plant life combined.
But they can also release massive amounts of stored carbon into the atmosphere. Given carbon’s central role in climate change, understanding the forces that govern how soils absorb and release carbon is crucial.
A new study shows that soil age and age-associated changes in mineral content may be the master regulators of carbon cycling in and out of soils and how soil responds to warming. The study was published in Nature Geoscience and is a collaboration between the research group of Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, a group of European scientists and... |
Soils are carbon sinks, storing more planet-warming carbon than the atmosphere and all animal and plant life combined.
But they can also release massive amounts of stored carbon into the atmosphere. Given carbon’s central role in climate change, understanding the forces that govern how soils absorb and release carbon is crucial.
A new study shows that soil age and age-associated changes in mineral content may be the master regulators of carbon cycling in and out of soils and how soil responds to warming. The study was published in Nature Geoscience and is a collaboration between the research group of Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, a group of European scientists and the U.S. Geological Survey.
Soil... |
In 2012, Environmental Systems graduate student Lauren Schiebelhut was collecting DNA from ochre sea stars living along the Northern California coast — part of an effort to study genetic diversity in various marine species that serve as indicators of habitat health. She had no idea that just one year later, most of the sea stars would be dead.
The culprit was sea star wasting disease (SSWD), a marine pandemic whose 2013 outbreak decimated sea star populations in waters up and down the west coast of North America.
The disease, which turns the sea star’s normally rigid body into a gooey blob, claimed 81 percent of ochre sea stars along the hundred-mile stretch of coast just north of San Francisco where... |
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) just announced that they’ve selected Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe to serve as an inaugural member of the Academies’ newest initiative — New Voices in Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (SEM).
Funded by a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, New Voices seeks to build a “national network of exceptional young leaders who have demonstrated a commitment to leadership and serving the SEM community through science policy, communication, education, outreach, international or interdisciplinary engagement, leadership development and other activities.”
Berhe was selected from a competitive field of several hundred candidates to... |
It reads like a mashup of Greek mythology and H.G. Wells. “The Odyssey of Doctor Moreau,” perhaps. Explorers find their way to a remote Aegean island and discover it’s inhabited by reptilian cannibals. They describe one encounter as follows:
“[I]t began to run away, with the dead lizard torso and head still in its mouth. The cannibal continuously ran along the top of a wall and paused intermittently to thrash the corpse against the cement.”
This grisly description isn’t from a horror story. Nor is it a macabre vignette from Greek mythology. It’s from a scientific paper authored by Kinsey Brock — Quantitative Systems Biology doctoral student and two-time Southern California Edison Fellowship recipient — and her undergraduate field... |
Local community members are invited to serve as citizen scientists at UC Merced’s next CALeDNA BioBlitz, scheduled for Sunday, May 20, from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. at the Merced Vernal Pools and Grassland Reserve. It’s an opportunity to get up close and personal with the local flora and fauna while contributing to cutting-edge science.
Ecology and genetics experts Professor Jason Sexton and postdoctoral researcher Dannise Ruiz Ramos will train and deputize citizen scientists, teaching attendees how to collect environmental DNA (eDNA) samples from soils on the reserve.
EDNA provides scientists with a molecular tool that reveals what the eye can’t see. Plants and animals constantly shed DNA-containing cells, leaving behind “molecular calling cards” everywhere they go. That DNA becomes part of... |
Three field trips this semester gave Professor Marc Beutel’s students an up-close understanding of biological wastewater processes used in treatment plants across the country.
Most recently, they toured the wastewater treatment plant in Oakland, operated by East Bay Municipal Utility District. The plant treats sewage for more than 685,000 people in the East Bay using a process called “activated sludge.” Bacteria convert organic waste to carbon dioxide and bacterial biomass (aka activated sludge), and once the bacteria settle out, the result is clean, clear water.
Students also got to see a process called co-digestion, in which that settled biomass is mixed with organic food waste from homes and treated in anaerobic digesters.... |
“April ... hath put a spirit of youth in everything,” Shakespeare wrote in Sonnet 98. He might as well have been writing about this year’s Shakespeare in Yosemite production.
With Friday’s premiere — attended by high school students from Mariposa and several children of park employees and El Portal residents and performed by a troupe of players ranging from those experienced and trained in Shakespeare to brand-new actors — the 420-year-old “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” seemed new again.
This is the second year Shakespeare in Yosemite has showcased UC Merced’s special relationship with the park and highlighted Earth Day and Shakespeare’s birthday with plays adapted for Yosemite and directed by... |
There are too many trees in Sierra Nevada forests, say experts from UC Merced, UC Irvine and the National Park Service working at the National Science Foundation Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory (NSF SSCZO).
This comes as a surprise to those of us who see dense, verdant forests as a sign of a healthy environment. After all, green is good, right? Not necessarily. When it comes to the number of trees in California forests, bigger isn’t always better.
That’s in part because more trees means less water. Not only do trees use lots of water to carry out basic biological tasks, they also act like forest steam stacks, raking up water stored in the ground and expelling it into the atmosphere as vapor, where it’s inaccessible to humans... |
April is Earth Month. It’s also when UC Water Academy — an intensive course aimed at training the next generation of California water experts — starts its second year.
To mark the occasion, UC Water released its second video for the UCTV Sustainable California channel. “Knowing Our Water — The UC Water Academy Journey” tells the Academy’s story from the perspective of students and faculty members who participated in the inaugural year, and gives viewers a glimpse into the inner workings of California’s water systems.
Launched in 2017, UC Water Academy is a 12-week course open to undergraduate and first-year graduate students at all UC campuses. The course is led by UC Merced Professor Joshua Viers and UC Berkeley... |
Desperate lovers, a fairy king and queen, a woman with a donkey’s head and a scamp with Cupid’s arrow in flower form are taking over Yosemite National Park on Earth Day weekend.
Highlighting UC Merced’s special partnership with Yosemite, Shakespeare in Yosemite enters its second year with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” adapted and directed by UC Merced Professor Katherine Steele Brokaw and Professor Paul Prescott from the University of Warwick in Coventry, U.K.
“We have both performed in outdoor Shakespeare productions and know not only how enjoyable they can be, but how Shakespeare festivals can have transformative effects on communities and the lives of individuals,” Prescott said... |
|
|
|
|
Los Cenzontles (The Mockingbirds), an award-winning band heavily influenced by Mexican folk music, is coming to UC Merced on March 14 for a free concert and a music workshop.
Both events are free and open to all. The workshop takes place at 2 p.m. in the Crescent Arch Room, and the concert begins at 7 p.m. in the Lakireddy Auditorium. To make sure there is space in the workshops for everyone, register online at bit.ly/Los_Cenzontles.
“It is a thrill to know that these soulful voices are bringing their music and spirit to UC Merced. Los Cenzontles have performed with well-known musicians from around the world, and now bring the world to our stage,” Sierra Nevada Research Institute Executive Director Armando Quintero said.
Los Cenzontles was founded in 1989 by Eugene Rodriguez as... |
UC Merced has a new Sustainability Strategic Plan to help the campus further advance its sustainability goals.
In 2016, the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Sustainability (CACS), and the Department of Sustainability (DOS) initiated a strategic planning process for the campus’ sustainability initiatives. The group participated in four workshops over the course of several months and was tasked with developing a consistent sustainability definition and identifying the committee’s charge, vision and mission.
“We took a comprehensive approach to engage as many stakeholders as we could through the process to build a dynamic, robust plan,” sustainability Director Colleen McCormick said.
From those workshops, the new Sustainability Strategic Plan... |
Scientists at UC Merced’s Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI), UC Irvine, UC Davis and the USDA Forest Service have enumerated the mechanisms that serve as master regulators of streamflow and drought intensity by studying California’s 2012-15 drought. Their findings are detailed in a new paper published in Scientific Reports.
Researchers used measurements from the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) in California’s Kings River Basin to pinpoint four distinct mechanisms responsible for regulating runoff levels during the recent drought. Runoff — water from precipitation, snowmelt and natural reservoirs that feeds into mountain streams and rivers — ultimately supplies much of the state’s water.
“Long-... |
A new study published online in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences finds that the giant sequoia, a fixture of California’s Sierra Nevada forests for the past 2.6 million years, might be in jeopardy from the effects of drought and climate change.
The iconic trees, which only grow in some 70 groves scattered over an area of about 55 square miles on the western slopes of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, were spared the widespread tree mortality that recently occurred in California forests, claiming 102 million trees over a period coinciding with the state’s 2011-2015 drought.
However, researchers from the Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI) at UC Merced, the U.S. National Park Service, the Chinese... |
UC Merced Professor Roland Winston will announce a proposed solar research partnership between the states of California and New York at the 2017 UC Solar Research Symposium, to be held Oct. 13 at the California Public Utilities Commission Auditorium in San Francisco.
“Achieving global sustainability is the defining challenge of our time,” said Winston, who serves as director of the University of California Advanced Solar Technologies Institute (UC Solar), headquartered at UC Merced. “The proposed California-New York Solar Research Partnership will bring together leading solar researchers in the two states most committed to developing and implementing solar and renewable energy.”
The partnership will promote... |
UC Merced’s sustainability office is seeking undergraduate students who are thinking about careers in energy to fill this fall’s Energize Colleges internships.
UC Merced is one of 12 college and university campuses across California that offer undergraduate students internships through Energize Colleges, a workforce development and training program led by nonprofit Strategic Energy Innovations.
Each intern will be required to work on special projects for about 8-10 hours per week and will earn $15 per hour. Positions will begin in late October.
This fall’s Energize Colleges internships are in the following sustainability-related career pathways: climate communication, biochar, gears for electric motor (GEM), green labs... |
The National Science Foundation recently awarded Professor Michael Dawson $900,000 to study some rather mysterious marine phenomena.
Dawson received $700,000 — part of a three-year, $1.2 million grant awarded to Dawson and collaborators at UC Santa Cruz, the University of Georgia and Cornell University — to investigate the repercussions of the 2013 outbreak of sea star wasting disease (SSWD), a marine pandemic that killed 90 percent of ochre sea stars along North America’s Pacific coast.
He received an additional $200,000 to collaborate with Professor Michael Beman to study the disappearance and enigmatic re-emergence of jellyfish in Palau’s Jellyfish Lake.
|
When Chigoziri Ibechem attended her first planning commission meeting in downtown Merced last November, she had no idea where it might lead.
After the meeting, the psychology major from Los Angeles was greeted by the city of Merced’s principal planner, who noticed her enthusiasm for the city’s Local Transportation project. He invited her to apply for an internship program UC Merced’s sustainability office launched earlier this year to give students education and applied learning opportunities in sustainability-related careers.
Energize Colleges is a workforce development and training program led by nonprofit Strategic Energy Innovations. UC Merced is one of 12 college and university campuses across California that offer undergraduate students... |
A full-length documentary highlighting the relationship between water, food security and, ultimately, global security, features UC Merced researchers and is scheduled to premiere Sept. 14 in downtown Merced.
“Beyond the Brink,” a new film from accomplished writer, producer and director Jim Thebaut, aims to show the interconnectedness of water and food scarcity, climate change and national security. In it, he interviews researchers from around the state and the University of California, including UC Merced School of Engineering professors and water experts Roger Bales, Martha Conklin and Joshua Viers.
“Who’s a more reliable source than the UC?” asked Thebaut, a graduate of UCLA and University of Washington, and the CEO of The... |
The University of California, Merced, was established in 2005 — or so the story goes. The main campus officially opened in September of that year, but that particular reading of history elides a more colorful backstory.
UC Merced didn’t spring into existence when developers broke ground on the main campus. Its founding was a tremendous undertaking that required extensive planning. Most of that planning occurred before the official groundbreaking, and much of it took place on a former Air Force base.
“Castle was the campus in every sense of the word,” said Vice Chancellor for Research & Economic Development Sam Traina, who joined the university in 2002 as founding director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute.
Located in Atwater, some 12 miles east of the main campus, the former Castle... |
A team of UC Merced researchers was recently awarded $100,000 from Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) to identify ways to improve drought resilience and reduce the risk of wildfire in Sierra Nevada forests.
Professor Roger Bales, who also serves as director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI), Professor Martha Conklin and SNRI Research Scientist Mohammad Safeeq will develop new approaches to accelerate the pace and scale of forest restoration in Calaveras County.
"Research supported by this PG&E grant will provide land managers with a much-needed understanding of the forest-water-fire nexus. It will also provide the tools needed to increase forest resiliency in the Sierra Nevada,” said Safeeq, who also served as... |
UC Merced is the only university with a research station in Yosemite National Park, and we have the Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI) to thank for that. Looking back, it’s hard to believe the campus’s signature research program got its kickoff in a UC Davis parking lot.
Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, then the University of California’s vice provost for Academic Initiatives, had the lead on what she called “the greatest initiative of them all” — the creation of UC’s 10th campus, to be built in Merced. Her vision was to establish the campus identity as a research university from the get-go. A modest grant from the state would help nail down a robust research theme. A future-thinking faculty group from across the UC campuses... |
Scientists from the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, UC Merced, UC Berkeley and the USDA Agricultural Research Service have designed the first ever wireless sensor network (WSN) capable of accurately monitoring the hydrology of large mountain river basins. The new system is detailed in two papers just published in the journal Water Resource Research.
Deployed and tested in the American River basin on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, the new WSN represents a significant improvement over existing systems. It allows for vastly improved predictions of mountain water supplies, which had long been based on very limited measurements of precipitation, snowpack and water stored as soil moisture.
“Existing... |
A new study published in the journal Science may have major implications for the future of water purification.
Professor Aleksandr Noy and his research team at Lawrence Livermore National Lab found that carbon nanotube porins (CNTPs) — hollow cylinders made of pure carbon that resemble microscopic drinking straws — can transport pure water across barriers while excluding impurities. The study also shows that CNTPs do this better than any material known to science.
Approximately 100,000 times thinner than a human hair, CNTPs are so narrow that liquid water has to rearrange itself into a single-file chain of water molecules in order to pass through. This helps CNTPs separate water from dissolved salts, even at salinities higher than seawater.... |
Subalpine meadows are among the Sierra Nevada’s most enchantingly picturesque landscapes. These sparsely wooded, grassy expanses are home to plants and animals found nowhere else, and they play an important role in regulating the flow of water from the Sierra snowpack to the rest of the state.
But these ecosystems may soon disappear.
A UC Merced study authored by former doctoral student Kaitlin Lubetkin, Professor Leroy Westerling and Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI) scientist Lara Kueppers found that these meadows are being increasingly overrun by forest as changing conditions allow the offspring of nearby trees to take hold in meadow environments that previously favored shrubs and grasses over saplings. For the many species that... |
What if nature were to become a polluter, discharging millions of tons of planet-warming carbon into the atmosphere in much the same way as diesel-fueled trucks or coal-fired power plants?
This nature-as-polluter scenario might seem far-fetched, but it’s well on its way to becoming reality, according to a recent study co-authored by UC Merced Professor LeRoy Westerling.
In a paper published recently in Scientific Reports — “Potential decline in carbon carrying capacity under projected climate-wildfire interactions in the Sierra Nevada” — Westerling and collaborators from the University of New Mexico and Penn State University used three climate models and data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to examine how rising... |
Water is a delicate balancing act in California. When the scales tip in the wrong direction, the consequences can have national effects. Nobody knows this better than UC Water Co-Director Joshua Viers.
“More than half of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables are grown in California’s San Joaquin Valley,” he said. “The problem is that the state has historically relied heavily on groundwater for agricultural irrigation, and we haven’t done a good job of recharging it.”
UC Water is a multicampus research initiative with the goal of using technology to create a comprehensive understanding of California’s complex water system. It’s also the subject of “Water in the Balance,” the first in a series of videos to be broadcast on UCTV’s newest... |
When scientists at UC Merced seek to better understand California’s biodiversity, they turn to cutting-edge genomics. They also turn to their neighbors.
On a sunny Saturday in April, scientists joined forces with members of the local community to take part in UC Merced’s inaugural eDNA BioBlitz.
Under the guidance of Professor Michael Dawson and a team of conservation biologists from UC Merced, UCLA, and Cal State Los Angeles, community members trained as citizen scientists and spent the day collecting and cataloging environmental DNA (eDNA) from the Merced Vernal Pools and Grassland Reserve.
“What is eDNA? It’s a really new science,” reserve director Mo Kolster explained to the nearly two dozen participants... |
Plant photosynthesis was stable for hundreds of years before the industrial revolution, but grew rapidly in the 20th century, according to new research published today in Nature.
“Virtually all life on our planet depends on photosynthesis,” said UC Merced Professor Elliott Campbell, who led the research. “Keeping tabs on global plant growth should be a central goal for the human race.”
Photosynthesis is the process through which plants use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide (CO2) into carbohydrates to fuel their growth and other activities.
Yet, researchers lack a clear picture of global trends in photosynthesis over the past few centuries. Some human activities might have stimulated plant growth, while others might have hampered photosynthesis. Conflicting... |
The rapid pace of global change has large impacts on nature, and on the work conservation biologists will have before them, too.
From here on out, experts say, the fossil record is going to be critical to guide nature into the future.
A new paper in the journal Science, co-authored by UC Merced paleoecology Professor Jessica Blois, contends that rather than holding ecosystems to an idealized past, preserving and maintaining vibrant ecosystems requires new approaches. That includes using Earth’s history to help understand how ecological resilience is maintained even in the face of change.
“Focusing our conservation efforts on preserving single species has served us well,” said Blois, with the School of Natural Sciences. “... |
Researchers at UC Solar have developed and tested an innovative solar thermal-powered process for turning the pomace, or byproduct, of vegetable and fruit processing into reusable products, potentially lowering food-processing plant costs and reducing their carbon footprints.
With collaborators at the U.S. Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS), UC Merced graduate student Jonathan Ferry and UC Solar Director Professor Roland Winston tested and optimized a solar-powered drum dryer for use in food-processing applications.
Drum dryers are widely used in paper and food production outside California. The dryers typically work by pumping steam to heat a... |
One of California’s greatest energy challenges is finding innovative ways to lower natural gas consumption to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.
To help meet that challenge, a new solar energy system that produces both heat and electricity might not be far away, thanks to researchers at UC Merced and the California Energy Commission.
Professor Roland Winston, director of the University of California Advanced Solar Technologies Institute (UC Solar), and co-Director Professor Gerardo Diaz received a nearly $1 million grant from the commission to develop a high-efficiency combined heat and power (CHP) system that produces electricity, hot water and space heating for homes and commercial buildings.
“The idea behind our... |
In recent publications, Professor Vincent Tung proves that inspiration for advancements in materials science can come from anywhere — even the merging of raindrops on a windshield or the sheeting of red wine down the inside of a glass.
Through those liquid movements, Tung discovered and optimized a new, low-cost, scalable and environmentally friendly way of using perovskite, an extremely thin and highly efficient material that is at the forefront of photovoltaic research.
Teaming up with physics Professor Sayantani Ghosh, Tung published three papers last year that earned the covers of materials, physics and chemistry journals. Their interdisciplinary collaboration demonstrates work that could change the way solar cells are produced.
The first paper... |
Kestrels are a fixture among the birds on the Merced Vernal Pools and Grassland Reserve adjacent to campus.
Though they are not endangered, the small falcons’ population has declined by 60 percent in California over the past half-century because of changes in land usage.
Nesting-box programs like the one on the reserve and others around the Central Valley are helping the kestrels reproduce safely. The boxes also help UC Merced researchers like Joy McDermot — the first at UC Merced to study the reserve’s birds and a recent master’s recipient — discover more about the little birds of prey and the lives they live.
“Kestrels used to be very common, so it’s alarming to see this population loss since the 1960s,” McDermot said. “We... |
By Dan Krotz, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Scientists expect subalpine trees to advance upslope as global temperatures increase, following their climate up the mountains.
But new research published Dec. 15 in the journal Global Change Biology suggests this might not hold true for two subalpine tree species of western North America.
A study led by project scientist Lara Kueppers, affiliated with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, shows Engelmann spruce might not move to higher elevations as temperatures rise. Its lower-elevation boundary could recede upslope, so its overall range could shrink. And the hardy limber pine could advance upward in a warmer climate, but likely at the same slow pace as in today’s climate.
Researchers at the... |
A nearly $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is helping University of California researchers refine collaborative robotic technology that could change the way crops are maintained worldwide, saving millions of gallons of water each year and taking precision agriculture to a whole new level.
The three-year Robot-Assisted Precision Irrigation and Diagnostics (RAPID) project is led by UC Merced robotics Professor Stefano Carpin, UC Berkeley Professor Ken Goldberg — director of the People and Robots Initiative at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute — and UC Davis biology and engineering Professor Stavros Vougioukas... |
A contribution from Yara North America will provide the University of California, Merced, with the potential to take agricultural research to a new level of innovation and improve crop yields, particularly in almonds.
Yara, known for its fertilizers, crop nutrition programs and technologies to increase yields, improve product quality and reduce the environmental impact of agricultural practices, has established the Yara North America Almond Scholarship and Fellowship Fund to help support a three-year graduate fellowship and scholarships to two undergraduate students each year for three years. Areas of research may include soil fertility, plant nutrition, and water- and nutrient-use efficiency across disciplines.
“This generous... |
UC Merced graduate student Lorenzo Booth’s research into more efficient use of water for agriculture has earned him accolades from the American Water Resources Association for not only producing information, but presenting solutions.
“If we can make the process of growing food more efficient and sustainable,” that’s a good thing,” Booth said.
At UC Merced, Booth discovered he’s a pretty good programmer, and used his skills to build a computer program that compares water usage for different crops in different locations.
He demonstrated his work at a recent conference with a poster titled “Improved Agricultural Water Use Accounting Through Water Footprinting.” The association named him the best student poster presenter... |
Stephen Ho’s experience at UC Merced helped him land an internship with E. & J. Gallo Winery in Livingston shortly after his graduation in 2012.
His engineering expertise, passion for the environment and innovative spirit — all cultivated on campus — helped him make an immediate impact on the company’s operations.
Charged with managing waste from the winery’s grape processes, Ho took things a step further — instead of grinding the waste down and selling it to farmers as cattle feed, he fed it to microbes in an anaerobic condition, generating biogas that can be harvested to create electricity. Gallo incorporated what it learned from Ho’s pilot project into its new Livingston Water Innovation and Energy facility.
“Since high... |
Fifty years ago this year, while a freshman faculty member in the University of Chicago Physics Department, Roland Winston published a paper introducing a new field he called nonimaging optics.
Professor Roland Winston and some of his team at UC Solar.
In it, he described the compound parabolic concentrator (CPC), a highly efficient device that collects and concentrates light, and introduced “Winston Cones,” non-imaging light collectors that by their design maximize the amount of light that can be focused from large areas into smaller photodetectors or photomultipliers.
Because of the publication, Winston is widely considered to be the father of nonimaging optics, a field concerned with the optimal... |
Fifty years ago this year, while a freshman faculty member in the University of Chicago Physics Department, Roland Winston published a paper introducing a new field he called nonimaging optics.
In it, he described the compound parabolic concentrator (CPC), a highly efficient device that collects and concentrates light, and introduced “Winston Cones,” non-imaging light collectors that by their design maximize the amount of light that can be focused from large areas into smaller photodetectors or photomultipliers.
Because of the publication, Winston is widely considered to be the father of nonimaging optics, a field concerned with the optimal transfer of light radiation between a source and a target.
Winston’s 1966 work for the department he... |
Most Americans have probably seen gorgeous photos of fog winding its way through California’s coastal redwoods. The trees are one of the state’s most prominent icons, drawing more than 2 million visitors a year.
But at a time when rising sea levels, melting polar ice, droughts and superstorms are the most visible indicators of climate change, people might not readily think about the fog.
A new National Science Foundation (NSF) grant supports a team of researchers from seven institutions — UC Merced, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, Stanford University, the Carnegie Institution for Science and Oregon State University — in forming an interdisciplinary “uber-university” to study the relationships between fog, climate change, redwoods and... |
The California drought has exacerbated some of the challenges farmers face.
For example, they have to spend more on water, and not just because there is less to go around. A warmer climate causes water to evaporate faster and can force plants to consume more for the same amount of growth.
But researchers at the University of California, Merced, are finding where crops would use water most efficiently so that the state can continue to grow food in the new climate and offering data that can be used any time.
Because of the immediate importance of this work, UC Merced environmental science graduate student Lorenzo Booth earned top honors at the American Water Resources Association meeting in July 2016... |
UC Merced Professor Roland Winston will deliver details on a groundbreaking hybrid solar collector he’s working on that simultaneously generates electricity and very-high-temperature heat at the annual 2016 UC Solar Research Symposium slated for Oct. 7 at UC Davis.
The University of California Advanced Solar Technologies Institute (UC Solar) — a multi-campus research collaborative headquartered at UC Merced — develops innovative technologies that make solar energy systems more efficient, more affordable and easier to integrate. In addition, UC solar educates and develops tomorrow’s solar energy leaders and entrepreneurs.
Winston, director of UC Solar, is just one of many notable speakers scheduled to appear at the symposium,... |
UC Merced Professor Gerardo Diaz is developing solar-powered water heating technology that could reduce the demand for natural gas in businesses and homes and lower the costs for business and homeowners.
Soon he’ll be putting that technology to the test in Southern California.
Through a nearly $1 million contract with the California Energy Commission, Diaz will build and install his technology in residential and commercial buildings near Aliso Canyon — where last fall’s enormous methane leak caused so many problems.
Aliso Canyon is an area with heavy energy demands and aging infrastructure, and Diaz — a researcher in UC Merced’s School of Engineering and the UC Advanced Solar Technologies Institute (UC... |
UC Merced Professor Gerardo Diaz is developing solar-powered water heating technology that could reduce the demand for natural gas in businesses and homes and lower the costs for business and homeowners.
Mini channel technology could help address some of the state's energy needs.
Soon he’ll be putting that technology to the test in Southern California.
Through a nearly $1 million contract with the California Energy Commission, Diaz will build and install his technology in residential and commercial buildings near Aliso Canyon — where last fall’s enormous methane leak caused so many problems.
Aliso Canyon is an area with heavy energy demands and aging... |
One of the most stunning sights in Yosemite National Park has nothing to do with granite. It’s the night sky, Milky Way and all.
But light pollution within the park can diminish that experience for visitors as well as change the circadian rhythms of flora and fauna.
UC Merced graduate student Melissa Ricketts has found an answer. And she’s turning one of her mentor’s inventions on its head to do it.
Ricketts is a member of Professor Roland Winston’s lab at UC Solar, a multicampus research institute headquartered at UC Merced. Winston is the inventor of nonimaging optics, and his compound parabolic concentrator (CPC) is a key piece of solar-collecting equipment in the emerging solar energy industry. But Ricketts is interested in... |
UC Merced Extension, a combination of professional development and personal enrichment courses that mark the campus’s first extension offerings, launches this summer with educational excursions to Yosemite National Park and fully online courses for working professionals in business, management, information technologies and engineering.
The excursions, “Yosemite and Water,” and “Yosemite and Fire,” take place July 23 and Aug. 5, respectively. Yosemite and Fire explores fire management in national parks through the lens of Yosemite’s role as a global fire policy leader. Yosemite and Water examines how national parks play a part in American water policy. UC Merced staff member Steve Shackelton will co-instruct both courses, along with... |
Don’t be surprised if, as the warmer weather kicks in, you continue to see green lawns at UC Merced.
Maintenance crews are not using more water to keep the quad lush. In fact, they are using less.
Facilities Management has adopted a hydrogel system, developed by a Fresno-based company, that allows turf to stay green despite a lack of water.
“It’s going to look like we are not observing the drought, but we are,” Sustainability Director Colleen McCormick said.
Tests show that the hydrogel system uses almost 50 percent less water because it increases soil’s moisture-retention capabilities. The hydrogel acts as a water and nutrient reservoir, allowing a slow release into the soil and roots.
It was chosen for its savings, but also because it is environmentally... |
From the forests of Tuscany, Italy, to the shores of a San Diego reservoir, Professor Marc Beutel is hunting mercury.
Beutel, one of the newest professors in the UC Merced School of Engineering, has two summer projects to keep him busy this year. The first involves spending a month working with Italian scientists and studying how to monitor mercury levels in the air surrounding an historic mercury mine using tree bark.
“Mercury is easily mined as an ore, and this is one of five historic mines in the world — the Etruscans mined there,” Beutel said. “But the process of transforming the mercury in solid rocks into a liquid results in mercury pollution in air and soils. We’re trying to figure out the best, least expensive... |
The number, size and duration of large mountain forest fires in the Western United States has increased dramatically in the past 40 years, according to research from UC Merced Professor LeRoy Westerling.
Warming temperatures and the earlier onset of spring and the spring snowmelt — the results of climate change — are the primary culprits.
That change has doubled the cost of fire suppression in the past 15 years from $1 billion in 2000 to $2 billion in 2015.
In “Increasing Western U.S. Wildfire Activity: Sensitivity to Changes in the Timing of Spring,” published this week in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B and in an op-ed in The Conversation, Westerling updates his research quantifying... |
The UC Merced campus is getting greener and earning gold as it does — gold ratings, that is.
UC Merced improved its rating through the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS), a rigorous review process that takes the better part of a year to complete, but makes the campus eligible for other popular sustainability ranking lists like the Princeton Review’s Green Colleges and Sierra Club’s Cool Schools.
“We improved from silver to gold, and we intend to meet the platinum rating by 2020,” campus Sustainability Director Colleen McCormick said. “We want to be the first UC campus to do so.”
So far, only one university in the country has met the platinum... |
Last fall, the Division of Student Affairs and the Office of Undergraduate Education launched an internship program with the goal of providing undergraduate students an opportunity to build experience and skills related to their career ambitions and to integrate them with their academic learning.
Diana Chavez, assistant director of professional development programs for the Center for Career and Professional Advancement, believes the newly created Student Success Internship (SSI) Program is filling a void.
“While many students find internships off campus, others are seeking on-campus internship opportunities that are different than student employment,” Chavez said. “Internship experience is key to their professional development... |
Besides attending Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) with 1,200 other college students from around the world, UC Merced student Hoaithi Dang helped his team win the weekend’s “Code for Impact” event in partnership with the Clinton Health Matters Initiative.
The ninth annual CGI U meeting brought student leaders together with experts, entrepreneurs and civically engaged celebrities to talk about issues of global concern and make “Commitments to Action” to address this generation’s most pressing challenges.
In the lead-up to the CGI U meeting, which took place March 31 and April 1, students had the opportunity to participate in a two-day coding event nicknamed the “Codeathon.” They were challenged to build original prototypes to promote emotional wellness on... |
Most people probably don’t think about food when considering how to celebrate Earth Day.
But the UC Merced Student Sustainability Council wants to help people understand how what we eat and where it comes from is connected to sustainable living. That’s why food is the theme of this year’s Earth Day celebration on campus.
“Food is a topic that touches every one of us,” said student sustainability leader Hoaithi Dang, a UC Global Food Initiative fellow. “It’s not just sustainability; food is cultural, and it relates to the community.”
This year’s Earth Day festivities — to which everyone is invited — will feature food in different ways.
Dining Services will offer cooking demonstrations to help students learn to make tasty, healthy and locally... |
If you want to understand how plant populations will respond as the climate changes, just examine the plants in different locations.
That’s one of the conclusions drawn by UC Merced School of Natural Sciences Professor Jason Sexton in a new paper that’s part of a special issue of the American Journal of Botany exploring the evolution of plants.
Written by Sexton and graduate student Erin Dickman, “What Can Local and Geographic Population Limits Tell Us about Distributions?” looks at different populations of monkey flowers in the Sierra Nevada and compares them with populations in different locations with different climates.
“If you have the same species in two climates, each will likely... |
If you want to understand how plant populations will respond as the climate changes, just examine the plants in different locations.
That’s one of the conclusions drawn by UC Merced School of Natural Sciences Professor Jason Sexton in a new paper that’s part of a special issue of the American Journal of Botany exploring the evolution of plants.
Written by Sexton and graduate student Erin Dickman, “What Can Local and Geographic Population Limits Tell Us about Distributions?” looks at different populations of monkey flowers in the Sierra Nevada and compares them with populations in different locations with different climates.
“If you have the same species in two climates, each will likely have adapted to its climate, and each will be quite... |
Professor Carolin Frank’s research into the nitrogen-fixing properties of bacteria inside the needles of some high-elevation pine trees is the topic of a new paper in the journal New Phytologist.
Frank, with the School of Natural Sciences, won a $1.6 million, four-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2014 for her work on foliar endophytes.
“Evidence for Foliar Endophytic Nitrogen Fixation in a Widely Distributed Subalpine Conifer” is the first publication to come from that research.
Some old-growth coniferous forests have more nitrogen in their soils and vegetation than can be explained by known sources, Frank and her colleagues explain in the paper. That limits researchers’ ability to... |
Professor Carolin Frank’s research into the nitrogen-fixing properties of bacteria inside the needles of some high-elevation pine trees is the topic of a new paper in the journal New Phytologist.
Frank, with the School of Natural Sciences, won a $1.6 million, four-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2014 for her work on foliar endophytes.
“Evidence for Foliar Endophytic Nitrogen Fixation in a Widely Distributed Subalpine Conifer” is the first publication to come from that research.
Some old-growth coniferous forests have more nitrogen in their soils and vegetation than can be explained by known sources, Frank and her colleagues explain in the paper. That limits researchers’ ability to understand and predict carbon and nitrogen... |
An increased gift from longtime campus partner Wells Fargo is allowing more engineering students at the University of California, Merced, to focus on solutions to problems related to water, energy and food.
Wells Fargo awarded its Clean Technology and Innovation Grant to the UC Merced School of Engineering’s senior Innovation Design Clinic (IDC). The $125,000 gift — $25,000 more than last year — supports IDC’s efforts to develop, design and create engineering solutions addressing the critical water, energy, food (WEF) nexus.
In total, Wells Fargo has awarded the School of Engineering $300,000 over the past three years through the grant program.
“Wells Fargo recognizes that the health of our environment is critical to fostering... |
Many studies have shown that raising cattle and pigs for food is hard on the environment, and fish has long been considered a better alternative.
But the work of UC Merced graduate student Brandi McKuin indicates that because of emissions, fishing for large fish like tuna warms the climate just as much as raising pork, pound for pound.
McKuin’s work suggests that despite a shift toward “cleaner” practices, the fishing industry is a far greater contributor to climate change than previously thought, and that shift could have its own negative consequences for the Earth.
McKuin, an environmental engineering student working toward her Ph.D. with Professor Elliott Campbell in the School of Engineering, recently published “Emissions and... |
Many studies have shown that raising cattle and pigs for food is hard on the environment, and fish has long been considered a better alternative.
But the work of UC Merced graduate student Brandi McKuin indicates that because of emissions, fishing for large fish like tuna warms the climate just as much as raising pork, pound for pound.
McKuin’s work suggests that despite a shift toward “cleaner” practices, the fishing industry is a far greater contributor to climate change than previously thought, and that shift could have its own negative consequences for the Earth.
McKuin, an environmental engineering student working toward her Ph.D. with Professor Elliott Campbell in the School of Engineering, recently... |
Even without all the industrial and technological growth that has accelerated climate change, humans can — and do — dramatically impact ecosystems.
A new paper in Nature Communications, co-authored by UC Merced Professor Marilyn Fogel, indicates early humans were responsible for the fairly rapid extinction of the 10-foot-tall flightless bird Genyornis newtoni in Australia about 47,000 years ago, simply through hunting and the interruption of reproduction.
In “Human Predation Contributed to the Extinction of the Australian Megafaunal Bird Genyornis newtoni,” Fogel and her colleagues — who have spent the past 20 years gathering a variety of data about the effects of humans on continental ecosystem changes... |
Biodiversity Professor Michael Dawson has been named UC Merced’s inaugural Faculty Climate Action Champion by the UC Office of the President (UCOP).
Dawson’s work and his plan, which formed a proposal for a project to engage the campus and community in sustainability, earned him the title and $25,000 to fund a research project in the 2015-16 academic year. UCOP recently announced its first Faculty Climate Action Champions, with one selection from each UC campus.
Through the award, Dawson, with the School of Natural Sciences, hopes to leverage people’s familiarity with “lines.”
“Lines are a fundamental part of the way people think,” he wrote in his proposal. “We recognize shorelines... |
Biodiversity Professor Michael Dawson has been named UC Merced’s inaugural Faculty Climate Action Champion by the UC Office of the President (UCOP).
Dawson’s work and his plan, which formed a proposal for a project to engage the campus and community in sustainability, earned him the title and $25,000 to fund a research project in the 2015-16 academic year. UCOP recently announced its first Faculty Climate Action Champions, with one selection from each UC campus.
Through the award, Dawson, with the School of Natural Sciences, hopes to leverage people’s familiarity with “lines.”
“Lines are a fundamental part of the way people think,” he wrote in his proposal. “We recognize shorelines, tree lines and skylines. Lines are boundaries and divisions — limits and things... |
Shakespeare might have been right when he wrote “what’s past is prologue,” but not when it comes to modeling climate change.
A new study shows that rising air temperatures could have a crippling effect on the likelihood of precipitation falling as snow.
That’s a huge problem for California, because the snowpack in the Sierra is the state’s natural reservoir, storing up snow in the winter for release through spring and summer melt.
Lead author Mohammad Safeeq, a research hydrologist with UC Merced, examined western U.S. precipitation and temperature data over the past century to answer two questions:
How likely is it that precipitation will fall as rain rather than snow, and where is that... |
The basic structure of Earth’s ecosystems lasted for 300 million years but changed about 6,000 years ago, and humans are the most likely reason.
A team of about 25 researchers from around the globe, including UC Merced Professor Jessica Blois, outline that discovery in a paper published today in the journal Nature.
“Over the past 10,000 years, we see rapid changes in natural communities,” said Blois, a professor in UC Merced’s School of Natural Sciences. “We really see the turning point happening about 6,000 years ago, and we think the changes were due to increasing human activity.”
There was a lot going on at that time, she said, including an increase in human populations around the world and the beginnings of agriculture. Many... |
After 10 weeks of competition — including a wild flurry of activity at the end — UC Merced placed second in the University of California’s first-ever Cool Campus Challenge.
With the University of California’s ambitious goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2025 just 10 years away, the Cool Campus Challenge was designed to get campus communities informed and engaged in the process early on, and to kick-start a cultural change around sustainability. UC Irvine won the competition, with UC Merced and UCLA rounding out the top three finishers.
UC Irvine was the early leader and remained there through most of the challenge, but an 11th-hour surge of pledges pushed UC Merced from near the bottom of the standings to the top. The campus even took... |
University of California President Janet Napolitano announced this week the 2016 recipients of the President’s Research Catalyst Awards, and professors from UC Merced are contributors to three of the four projects.
Professors Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, Michael Dawson, Teamrat Ghezzehei and Jason Sexton, with the Life and Environmental Sciences Unit in the School of Natural Sciences, and Professor Nicola Lercari, with the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, will collaborate with principal investigators at other UC campuses to advance knowledge about protecting biodiversity; enhancing agricultural resilience in times of drought; and preserving cultural heritage sites in the Middle East. The four winning projects were chosen from a pool of more... |
Many species of trees and plants have begun migrating as the climate changes, but some, like California’s giant coastal redwoods, can’t just pick up and move.
The proximity of the ocean, which has unique effects on temperature and climate, makes it challenging to predict what the redwoods’ habitat will look like in the future. By using California’s historical climate data, UC Merced researchers have developed near-term predictions about the coastal habitat for the archetypal redwoods.
The trees will need to move north to keep up with the shifting climate.
“This method gets us over a hump that has been challenging climate modelers for many years,” said Lara Kueppers, a researcher with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute and... |
Two overlapping research projects involving UC Merced professors could have big implications for the region’s economy and effects on renewable energy, water and wildfires.
Professor Gerardo Diaz, with the School of Engineering, received nearly $900,000 through two grants: one from the California Energy Commission for the analysis and optimization of a 1-megawatt biomass gasification plant in North Fork, and the other from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study a gasification byproduct for use in agriculture and air and water filtration.
Diaz and a group of industry experts are working on a new gasification plant in North Fork, a little town in the foothills between Merced and Fresno. It’s a $5 million project that aims to take... |
Four students from diverse disciplines have been named Dan David Solar Fellows through the University of California Advanced Solar Technologies Institute (UC Solar), headquartered at UC Merced.
The fellowship began in 2007 through a generous gift from Sarah R. Kurtz, principal scientist in the National Center for Photovoltaics at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL). Kurtz established the fellowship in the name of the Dan David Foundation, which awarded her and NREL colleague Jerry Olson that year’s prestigious Dan David Prize for their groundbreaking work in concentrating solar power systems using multi-junction solar cells.
The Dan David Solar Fellowship, which exists in perpetuity, supports undergraduate and graduate... |
The University of California aims to lead the way to a sustainable future in the face of global warming, and UC Merced professors have contributed to a report that offers practical steps to help get there.
“Bending the Curve: 10 Scalable Solutions for Carbon Neutrality and Climate Stability,” an intercampus report due out in the spring, presents paths for limiting climate warming to no more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit and preventing the consequences any further warming would cause.
An executive summary, released today during the inaugural UC Carbon and Climate Neutrality Summit at UC San Diego, broadly unveils the ideas that will be detailed in the full report.
More than 50 UC researchers and scholars — including Merced professors Teenie Matlock, Roger Bales... |
The University of California has selected its second class of Global Food Initiative (GFI) fellows — including three students from UC Merced — who will work on projects ranging from food access to policy to waste.
The 44 fellows, representing all 10 UC campuses plus UC Agriculture and Natural Resources and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will help advance the systemwide initiative, which aims to put UC, the state and the world on a pathway to sustainably and nutritiously feed themselves.
The $4,000 fellowships to undergraduate and graduate students, selected by the campuses, will fund student-generated research, projects or internships that support the initiative’s efforts to address food security, health and sustainability.... |
Four months into the reporting period for Gov. Jerry Brown’s water-reduction mandate, and UC Merced has so far exceeded the goal.
Now it needs the campus community's help.
The campus, which constructed all of its buildings to be 40 percent more efficient than state requirements, has so far been able to trim another 25 percent of its water consumption from the baseline year of 2013, despite the addition of two new buildings and 1,000 more students since then.
Like everyone with water meters, the campus must keep track of usage for the nine-month period between June and February. So far, UC Merced has saved slightly more than the required 25 percent, mainly through changes to landscaping.
The campus conserved a lot of water during the... |
The University of California, Merced, just became part of a massive, five-year, multi-million-dollar international research consortium that tackles water-related aspects of energy production and use.
The campus will receive $1.5 million of the $50 million grant that will form the Clean Energy Research Center for Water Energy Technologies (CERC-WET) consortium. Half of the $50 million comes from the U.S. Department of Energy and its partners, UC Irvine and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the other half from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology and its consortium partners.
UC Merced is joined in the consortium by UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UC Davis, UCLA, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Massachusetts-based... |
Applied mathematics Professor Noemi Petra develops algorithms and uses complicated computations to examine some of the world’s biggest problems — the ones that can’t be seen.
They are called inverse problems — using actual observations to infer the values of parts of the problem that can’t be directly observed, like calculating the density of the Earth from measurements of its gravity field.
For example, her most recent publication,“Scalable and Efficient Algorithms for the Propagation of Uncertainty from Data through Inference to Prediction for Large-scale Problems, with Application to Flow of the Antarctic Ice Sheet,” in the Journal of Computational Physics — written with collaborators at the University of Texas at Austin — shows a... |
Professor Roland Winston has been tracking the Sudbury Neutrino Experiment since it began in the 1980s, because he invented the light collectors the scientists built to detect solar neutrinos.
“I just wanted to make sure they worked,” he said.
Last week, Winston learned with the rest of the world that the collectors not only worked, but were critical to the experiment that shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics.
“It’s a very important experiment,” said Winston, director of UC Solar and a founding faculty member at UC Merced. “Neutrinos are one of the more mysterious components of matter.”
Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles that make up the universe, and are similar to electrons but don’t carry an electric charge. They... |
While many young women her age are thinking about their favorite shoes or who they’ll go with to the winter formal, Callie Nance, 15, is thinking about her favorite science organizations and her future as a physicist.
That’s why the Dinner with a Scientist event at UC Merced last week was so perfect for her.
“Seeing all of these women — it’s a big thing for us to get out and see that there is so much more for us than just what we experience in Mariposa,” Nance said.
Nance and 55 other ninth- through 12th-grade girls from the Mariposa County Unified School District toured the campus and visited labs led by female scientists before sitting down for dinner with 14 women — some... |
California Public Utilities Commission Commissioner Liane Randolph will offer the opening remarks at this year's UC Solar Research Symposium in San Francisco, scheduled for Oct. 16.
UC Solar, based at UC Merced, will present a variety of speakers and activities on solar-related innovations, policy, the political and economic climate, and more. Presentations will include:
“Advancing California's Energy Innovation Ecosystem,” by Erik Stokes, manager of Energy Deployment and Market Facilitation for the California Energy Commission;
“High-Temperature Coating for Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion,” by Renkun Chen, UC Solar co-director and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC San Diego;
“Sustainability at E. & J. Gallo Winery,” by Kim... |
University of California President Janet Napolitano learned about UC Merced’s outreach to local high school students and efforts to support the UC system’s Global Food and Carbon Neutrality initiatives during a visit to Merced on Oct. 1.
Napolitano spent the morning at Golden Valley High School, where she and UC Merced Chancellor Dorothy Leland met with a class of juniors and seniors who challenged her with questions on topics like affordability, accessibility and availability of majors. One student asked the likelihood of placing a cap on tuition.
“It would be nice,” Napolitano said. “If we keep tuition as low as possible and the state legislature put a lot more money into the university, we’d be able to do it.”
Then Napolitano attended a rally... |
Note: This story originally ran in the Fall 2015 issue of UC Merced Magazine.
By Joel Patenaude
California, long envied by the rest of the country for its climate, beauty and natural resources, is four years into a drought and in the midst of a water crisis a century in the making.
With Gov. Jerry Brown imposing mandatory water restrictions on residents, the state’s staggeringly complex water woes have taken the sheen off at least some of the California dream.
But researchers at UC Merced are trying to unravel the Gordian knot that is California water through a new inter-campus initiative.
The new UC Water Security and Sustainability Research initiative, known as UC... |
Open any newspaper — or news website — and you’re likely to see at least one article about California’s water crisis. From climate change to wildfires to groundwater to El Niño, there’s no shortage of water-related conversations.
There’s also no shortage of scientific research to be conducted on water, and UC Merced has a number of faculty members doing important work to address the state’s crisis. Starting this month, the Center for the Humanities at UC Merced is aiming to prove it has much to add to our understanding of water and all the issues that come with it.
The Center for the Humanities, created in 2008 and bolstered by an anonymous private donation of $2 million in 2012, has chosen water as a central theme for its next two years of... |
By Andy MurdockUniversity of California Newsroom
In the midst of California’s ongoing drought, researchers at the University of California Advanced Solar Technologies Institute (UC Solar) at UC Merced are turning to an unlikely ally to help solve the problem of water availability for California’s farmlands: the sun.
“Any adoption of solar technology will help with climate change in the long term, because it reduces our use of fossil fuels,” UC Solar Executive Director Ron Durbin said.
But UC Solar’s latest project, which will be presented at the upcoming 2015 UC Solar Research Symposium in San Francisco, aims to show that solar technology can be of short-term help as well, by making water desalination cheaper, more accessible... |
MERCED, Calif. — New farmland-mapping research published today shows that up to 90 percent of Americans could be fed entirely by food grown or raised within 100 miles of their homes.
Professor Elliott Campbell, with the University of California, Merced, School of Engineering, discusses the possibilities in a study entitled “The Large Potential of Local Croplands to Meet Food Demand in the United States.” The research results are the cover story of the newest edition of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, the flagship journal for the Ecological Society of America, which boasts a membership of 10,000 scientists.
“Elliott Campbell's research is making an important contribution to the national conversation... |
UC Merced Professor Joshua Viers has been named a member of the new Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) Water Policy Center, established to help meet the state's urgent need for timely information and innovative water management solutions.
Viers is an expert in water resources management with UC Merced’s School of Engineering, conducting research on issues related to the intersection of climate, water, energy, food and the environment using geospatial technologies and data mining. He is also the director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Merced.
His role with the new center will be to help generate new ideas in solving California’s water ... |
Several UC Merced faculty members will play important roles in a new UC systemwide effort to study the ecological effects of climate change across varied ecosystems.
Funded by a $1.9 million President's Research Catalyst Awards grant from UC President Janet Napolitano and led by UC Santa Cruz ecologist and evolutionary biologist Barry Sinervo, the Institute for the Study of Ecological and Evolutionary Climate Impacts (ISEECI) will serve as a hub for the knowledge being gathered and analyzed.
UC Merced researchers including Professors Elliott Campbell, Martha Conklin and LeRoy Westerling, with the School of Engineering, and Jessica Blois, with the School of Natural Sciences, will all affiliate with the nine-... |
MERCED, Calif. — Research into sustainable water supplies and viable solar energy solutions won the University of California, Merced, an anticipated $5 million in prestigious and competitive grants from the University of California.
UC Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) awards will go to Professors Roger Bales and Roland Winstonand colleagues, who will oversee two of only 18 projects to be funded throughout the UC system out of 186 proposals. The grants begin Jan. 1, and award details will be determined then.
“These awards recognize the leadership our faculty members bring to these important topics,” Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic... |
When people get near California’s giant sequoias, they usually look up.
But Professor Steve Hart looks down, and what he finds beneath the trees has intrigued him.
The trees, some of which could be more than 3,000 years old, appear to influence the soil, increasing the pH and the levels of nitrogen, calcium, magnesium and phosphorus, enhancing the soil’s fertility.
“Our hypothesis is that these trees, with their long lives and enormity, have a greater effect on the ecosystem” said Hart, an ecology professor with UC Merced’s School of Natural Sciences and a member of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. “We tend to think it’s only humans that have legacy effects... |
As the climate warms, sources of the water so critical to life everywhere on Earth are drying up.
By the end of this century, communities dependent on freshwater from mountain-fed rivers could see significantly less water, according to a new climate model recently released by University of California researchers.
For example, people who get freshwater from the Kings River could see a 26 percent decrease in river flow.
Why? Think of the environment to which humans are now accustomed as a huge jigsaw puzzle.
You can look at any one piece to see how it fills out the picture of climate change, but you cannot ignore the surrounding pieces and the chain reactions set off by the warming climate... |
California is deficit-spending its water and has been for a century, according to state data analyzed recently by researchers from the University of California.
UC Merced Professor Joshua Viers and postdoctoral researcher Ted Grantham, with UC Davis at the time, explored the state’s database of water-rights allocations, and found that allocations in California exceed the state's actual water supply by five times the average annual runoff and 100 times the actual surface-water supply for some river basins.
In a good year, the state has about 70 million acre feet of surface water available for use. Based on active water rights records, a total of 370 million acre feet have been allocated.
“We’re... |
UC Merced Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Tom Peterson and founding faculty member Professor Roger Bales have been named members of UC President Janet Napolitano’s new Global Climate Leadership Council.
The council has been convened to guide UC sustainability efforts, with the goal of bringing the university’s operations to carbon neutrality by 2025.
Sustainability is a part of the DNA of the UC Merced campus – it’s one of the greenest campuses in the nation, and the only one in the country to have all of its buildings LEED certified by the U.S. Green Building Council.
Nominated by Chancellor Dorothy Leland, Bales, a hydrologist, leads the Sierra Nevada Research Institute and... |
Spending a summer finding ways to make toilet water reusable and trying to extract urine from wastewater might not sound glamorous.
But the results of the work two UC Merced students are doing though a prestigious research partnership could be very important to a state facing a severe drought, as well as for the future of water security.
Rudy Maltos, 23, a senior from Bakersfield, and Maritza Flores-Marquez, 21, a senior from Tulare, both environmental engineering majors, were two of 16 students selected for Re-inventing the Nation's Urban Water Infrastructure (ReNUWIt).
ReNUWIt is a Research Experiences for Undergraduates partnership between UC Berkeley, the Colorado School of Mines, New Mexico State... |
ESA Annual Meeting, August 10-15th, Sacramento, CA
Many folks from UC Merced and the ES grad group will be presenting their research at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Sacramento this August. Below is a list of the UC Merced talks; only the first authors are listed, but click through to the abstracts to read more about each talk. Congratulations to all the UC Merced students, postdocs, and faculty for their fantastic research.
MONDAY, August 11
Talks
2:10 pm, COS 11: Microbial Ecology
Alyssa Carrell: Diversity and structure of endophytic bacterial communities in redwood trees
2:10 PM, COS 6: Ecosystem Management
Joy Baccei: Protecting and preserving mountain meadows: a look at... |
Other UC campuses have drone research programs, but UC Merced might be the only one with two certificates of authorization from the Federal Aviation Administration, allowing students to fly autonomous, unmanned systems at higher altitudes and, possibly, in locations they haven’t flown before.
As drones and the sensor packages they carry improve in price and performance, many campuses are considering conducting research on unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and their applications.
In UC Merced’s well-established program, faculty members and students are working on scientific data drones that can patrol wildfire perimeters, collect water samples, monitor pest situations in agricultural fields, check soil and crop conditions and much more.
“Each... |
The National Science Foundation is honoring UC Merced Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe with a Faculty Early Career Development Award to support her examination of how soil helps regulate the climate.
The awards are given to junior faculty members who “exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations,” the NSF said.
“We’d like to congratulate Professor Berhe for receiving this highly selective award,” School of Natural Sciences Dean Juan Meza said. “It also speaks volumes about our highly talented faculty that we’ve added another... |
The environment affects the way genetic populations move, and similar environments likely play a bigger role in how a species develops than does geographic distance.
Those are just two of the discoveries Professor Jason Sexton has made while studying the monkey flower, a California native that is practically in his back yard, now that he has joined UC Merced.
Monkey flowers, which come in a diverse array of populations of varying sizes, shapes and colors, grow wild in the Sierra Nevada, a place Sexton has studied even from his previous position in Australia. The chance to come to UC Merced, to work and live where the bulk of his research takes place, was too good to pass up, he said.
Sexton... |
Large, naturally occurring low-oxygen zones in the Pacific appear to be expanding, and there is a sharp change in the number of bacteria that produce and consume different forms of toxic sulfur, according to a UC Merced researcher’s latest paper in Nature Communications.
These expanding deoxygenated zones could also contribute to climate change, which, in turn, appears to contribute to their growth.
Professor Michael Beman, a marine microbial biologist with the School of Natural Sciences, spent a month on a research ship sampling water off the coast of Mexico, in the large Eastern Tropical Northern Pacific (ETNP), a deoxygenated zone that extends about halfway to Hawaii.
At... |
Adapting technology that has become the standard in the automotive, aerospace and air-conditioning industries, Professor Gerardo Diaz has designed and is testing the next generation of solar-collecting units at UC Merced.
”We’re getting about 10 percent increase in efficiency,” said Diaz, with the School of Engineering and co-director of UC Solar.
With funding from the California Energy Commission, Diaz and three undergraduates and one graduate student built a solar water heater.
Instead of having water flow through copper pipes attached to a flat plate with a collective coating applied to it, this solar water-heating system uses flat minichannels, or tubes, made of aluminum with the coating applied directly to the tubes... |
Climate change alters the way in which species interact with one another- and not just today or in the future, but also in the past, according to a review article by UC Merced Professor Jessica Blois and colleagues coming out tomorrow in the journal Science.
“We found that, at all time scales, climate change can alter biotic interactions in highly complex ways. So if we don’t incorporate them when we’re anticipating future changes, we’re missing a big piece of the puzzle,” Blois said.
A special issue of the prestigious research journal, entitled "Natural Systems in Changing Climates,” features the article and a podcast by Blois, one of UC Merced’s newest faculty members, and three colleagues from... |
Just because it’s summertime doesn’t mean research at UC Merced comes to a halt.
Just the opposite.
This summer, professors and students at all levels are conducting a variety of research projects on campus, off campus, in the oceans and forests and around the world.
Up in Yosemite National Park, for example, nine undergraduate students are getting a summer experience to last them a lifetime, conducting research with faculty researchers from UC Merced, scientists from the U.S. Geologic Survey and from the park.
Under the direction of Professors Stephen Hart and Michael Beman, the Research Experience for Undergraduates program takes nine students into the park for nine weeks to work with scientific mentors like Hart, Beman, Professor Elliott... |
From the microbes in the guts of living things to the idea of life elsewhere in the universe, Professor Marilyn Fogel is pondering some of life’s deepest questions.
When and how did life originate on Earth? What does the future hold for our planet? Are we alone in the universe?
“When you go back through time, there are bits and scraps of life everywhere,” Fogel said. “It’s ubiquitous.”
As a geobiologist, Fogel, who joined UC Merced in January, explores these questions and more using the stable isotopes found in carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur and nitrogen, the elements that form the building blocks of all living organisms. She is in the midst of setting up the campus’s first natural... |
As the Rim Fire continues to burn in and around Yosemite National Park, a former UC Merced student’s work related to the fire burned up the Internet this week.
Paul Doherty, the first Yosemite park ranger to complete at doctoral degree at UC Merced, graduated in the spring and now works as a public safety technology specialist for Esri, a company that provides GIS mapping for a variety of applications.
Doherty and his team created a layered map that shows up-to-the-minute details of the fire, including its size and range, hot spots, the fire’s progression, a history of fire in the national park and more.
They pulled together data from a wide range of agencies, including Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service,... |
UC Merced has made a name for itself by giving undergraduates the opportunity to engage in research early in their academic careers. Nothing showcases that commitment better than the campus’s collaborative summer research program, which culminated last week with a symposium where they presented on their research and exhibited posters of their work as well.
This summer, 41 students have been conducting research with world-class faculty, thanks to sponsorships from seven different programs. According to Jesus Cisneros, director for undergraduate research programs, these student scholars represent an investment in the future.
“We are coaching these students to present their research at competitive regional and national conferences, in addition to helping them to develop skills to... |
Working to map every square inch, UC Merced master’s student Andrew Zumkehr found there are 111 million acres of abandoned farmland in the United States.
That’s a lot of space for growing biofuels that could replace between 5 percent and 30 percent of the United States' primary energy or liquid fuel demands, he said.
Zumkehr and Professor Elliott Campbell with the School of Engineering wrote a paper based on the mapping, which was published recently in the top-cited journal Environmental Science & Technology.
It’s another example of how UC Merced researchers are contributing knowledge that will lead to more informed energy policies.
“We used satellite images, census data... |
From the microbes in the guts of living things to the idea of life elsewhere in the universe, Professor Marilyn Fogel is pondering some of life’s deepest questions.
When and how did life originate on Earth? What does the future hold for our planet? Are we alone in the universe?
“When you go back through time, there are bits and scraps of life everywhere,” Fogel said. “It’s ubiquitous.”
As a geobiologist, Fogel, who joined UC Merced in January, explores these questions and more using the stable isotopes found in carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur and nitrogen, the elements that form the building blocks of all living organisms. She is in the midst of setting up the campus... |
Many universities offer the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, but they don’t have what UC Merced has to offer.
“Yosemite really draws people in,” said Professor Stephen Hart, one of the REU program leaders. “Other REUs might take students into the field, but not into a national park.”
The National Science Foundation has awarded UC Merced a $318,000, three-year grant to take eight undergrads from around the country to live in the park for nine to 10 weeks each summer and gain invaluable experience working directly with faculty researchers on projects.
“Living and working in Yosemite was the best experience of my undergraduate career,” said Raymond... |
The theory that temperature limits how far up in the mountains trees can grow looks like it’s true, but not in the way researchers had expected.
Working with Professor Lara Kueppers, UC Merced postdoctoral researcher Andrew Moyes’ examination of how warmer temperatures affect alpine-area trees has been published in the international journal Oecologia.
Their work indicates some trees researchers thought wouldn’t grow at the highest elevations because of the cold don’t fare better when they are warmer, either.
A series of experiments in Colorado, in which seedlings were planted and then warmed under infrared radiation panels to simulate climate change, showed warmer temperatures also dried the... |
UC Merced School of Engineering Professor Elliott Campbell has co-authored a paper showing that mountaintop removal mining will dramatically accelerate the regional effects of global warming by turning natural carbon sinks into sources of carbon emissions, some within the next 15 years.
On top of the toxic side-effects of coal mining, the associated hazards and the biggest problem with coal – the greenhouse gas emissions that come from burning it – the switch from sink to source is an issue that could prompt policymakers to reconsider where they stand on mining.
This finding comes at a time when the federal government is at least partially... |
A UC Merced professor is one of five finalists in an international challenge that could win him a $50,000 research grant and free access to a record-setting, ocean-going robot.
Professor Michael Beman, with the School of Natural Sciences, entered the PacX Challenge, a competition designed to encourage scientists and students to make use of data gathered by autonomous wave glider that just completed a 9,000-nautical-mile journey across the Pacific Ocean.
The contestants will use data gathered by the glider, called the “Papa Mau,” which traveled autonomously from San Francisco to Australia over the past year. Papa Mau finished its year-long journey on Dec. 6 in Australia, setting a world record for the longest distance traveled by an autonomous... |
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.
“It’s a pretty new field,” Frank said. “Most people think of bacteria as causing disease, but they can be beneficial. When I look at a forest, I don’t see trees, I see all these fascinating microbes.”
Bacteria, she said, have been found to promote growth and protect plants from stress, and also to fix nitrogen, a critical component of plant health.
“Microbes are the only organisms that can take nitrogen from the air and make it available to plants,” she said. “Plants cannot do it themselves. People have long wondered... |
MERCED, Calif. — People talk about climate change all the time.
But researchers at the University of California, Merced, are working to find out exactly how it will affect the millions of people who depend on the San Joaquin River for their drinking water, irrigation and food growth, and energy.
Water experts with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute have received a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to synthesize data about the San Joaquin River and how climate change is affecting the timing and number of flows from the snowmelt at higher elevations.
Those changes, in turn, change the way reservoirs are operated and the way and time in which water is delivered to users,... |
There’s a reason the UC Merced plasma lab is isolated behind a locking fence near the entrance to campus.
There’s some serious heat being produced down there.
Engineering professors Gerardo Diaz, Wolfgang Rogge and Yihsu Chen and a group of students are spending their summer in the lab, generating plasma blasts of more than 3000 degrees Celsius as they work on turning biomass – organic leftovers such as coffee grounds, almond hulls and the leavings from wineries – into clean-burning energy.
The three-year project just received a $258,000 grant from the California Energy Commission and $50,000 in equipment from Foret Plasma Laboratories to examine how clean the gas produced through the... |
Graduate student Sharon Patris likes spending time at a lake in the middle of the forest on an uninhabited island in the western Pacific.
The marine lake named Ongiem’l Tketau and informally known as Jellyfish Lake, is home to the golden jellyfish, a species Patris studies as part of her work with UC Merced School of Natural Sciences Professor Michael Dawson in Palau.
Patris, who is working on her master’s degree, is just one example of the diverse and wide-ranging reach of UC Merced’s graduate programs. As a Palauan, she said she’s happy to have the chance to work in her homeland while earning her advanced degree from a UC campus.
Dawson and colleagues have been studying biodiversity in the western Pacific since... |
