- Author: Rachael Freeman Long
- Author: Daniel H Putnam
Alfalfa farmers are on their second hay cutting in California’s Central Valley. Lush green fields are swathed with new generation rotary disk mowers that are nearly twice as fast as the conventional sickle mowers, cutting about 150 acres of alfalfa a day. Alfalfa hay fields are cut from four to ten times a season, averaging about seven tons per acre per year. It’s a profitable crop these days, with prices for high quality hay frequently reaching $250/ton.
But in addition to its over $1 billion value to the state of California, alfalfa provides a host of environmental benefits that are frequently overlooked. What are these benefits?
Benefits to the soil. In addition to being an important cash...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Many parts of the Sierra Nevada have not burned in more than 100 years, a significant departure from a natural fire cycle that would characterize a healthy forest, according to Susie Kocher, UC Cooperative Extension advisor in the Central Sierra office.
“The fire interval is completely out of whack compared to pre-settlement conditions,” Kocher said.
In a historical, natural and healthy fire regime, nearly half of Sierra forests would experience fire every 12 years and three-quarters would burn every 20 years. However, only 0.2 percent of Sierra forest land has burned repeatedly at least every 20 years in modern times, while 74 percent has not had a single...
- Contributor: Ann King Filmer
- Author: Robin DeRieux
Ocean waters are warming, sea level is rising, seawater is becoming more acidic, and shoreline erosion is intensifying. The world’s oceans are reacting to increased carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere.
“The physical and chemical environment of the ocean is changing with the climate,” said John Largier of the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory. “This affects ecosystems — like tidal marshes and coral reefs that protect us from storms and flooding.”
The ocean brings stability to the earth’s climate. It heats up and cools down more slowly than the land and the air. With climate...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Beneath your home, below lawns, under asphalt streets, farms and natural areas there is a complex blend of minerals and organic matter that varies widely in texture, color and structure. Producing food, maintaining landscapes and building structures all depend on this little understood, but critical outermost layer of the Earth’s crust - the soil.
Anyone can learn about the United States’ diversity of soils using SoilWeb, a nationwide database of soil variability first developed in 2004. SoilWeb reached a new milestone this year when it was integrated with Google Maps and designed to scale across any Web-enabled device – desktop computer, tablet...
- Author: Suanne Klahorst
The first thing I had to learn as writing staff at the John Muir Institute for the Environment, UC Davis, was the difference between "climate" and "weather." I compare it to reading a stock chart, there are jagged peaks and valleys daily, but it takes stock performance over years to reveal an unmistakable trend. The small ticks are similar to weather but the trend over decades is closer to climate. Nearly every stock chart has a huge valley at the year 2008, this is thought to be a once in a century event. That event is analogous to climate change, except climate trends are measured over millions of years, and climate is thought to be much slower to recover.
American opinions about global warming are as uncertain as the...