- Author: Katherine E. Kerlin
From California’s Ponderosa fire to Colorado’s record-breaking Waldo Canyon fire and other blazes burning across the West, the summer of 2012 -- like many recent summers -- has been marked by a long, intense wildfire season. It has claimed thousands of acres, hundreds of homes, and in some cases, lives.
Malcolm North, professor in the Department of Forest Ecology at UC Davis and U.S. Forest Service research scientist, studies the effects of fire on Sierra Nevada coniferous forests. In this video, North explains how climate change and a history of fuel suppression in the forest mean wildfires will burn hotter, faster, longer and more often --...
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
A report on climate change and its effects on California released on July 31 by the California Natural Resources Agency and the California Energy Commission features more than 30 reports by UC scientists. Experts from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Merced, UC Riverside, UC San Diego/Scripps Institution for Oceanography, UC Santa Cruz, UC Cooperative Extension and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory contributed to "Our Changing Climate."
The report, the third such assessment since 2006, provides new data to help Californians plan and adapt to climate change.
"Significant increases in wildfires, floods, severe storms, drought and heat waves are clear...
- Author: Katherine E. Kerlin
How wood is used after it is cleared from a forest and where that forest is located largely affects the amount of greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere, according to a new study by UC Davis.
The study, published this week in the advance online edition of the journal Nature Climate Change, provides a deeper understanding of the complex global impacts of deforestation on carbon storage and greenhouse gas emissions.
When trees are felled to create solid wood products, such as lumber for housing, that wood retains much of its carbon for decades, the researchers found. In contrast, when wood is used for...
- Author: Katherine E. Kerlin
Tree rings. Ice core records. Cave stalactites. All of these things tell the story of Earth’s history and climate. Now, a UC Davis researcher and others are expanding on that story from the ocean’s point of view. They just returned from scouring the seafloor — digging deep into layer upon layer of mud — to uncover centuries of climate data from beneath the ocean floor.
UC Davis geophysicist Gary Acton is one of 34 international scientists that set sail from the Azores Islands on Nov. 17 aboard the drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution. They finished their Mediterranean voyage on Jan. 17, docking in Lisbon, Portugal.
“The climate change...
- Posted By: John Stumbos
- Written by: Andy Fell, UC Davis
Warming streams could spell the end of spring-run Chinook salmon in California by the end of the century, according to a study by scientists at UC Davis, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
There are options for managing water resources to protect the salmon runs, although they would impact hydroelectric power generation, said UC Cooperative Extension associate specialist Lisa Thompson, director of the Center for Aquatic Biology and Aquaculture at UC Davis. A paper describing the study was published online recently in the