- Author: UC Berkeley Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management
Land use change in agricultural frontiers can have far-reaching social and environmental implications, such as habitat loss, water contamination, or worker demographic shifts — particularly when it involves the rapid expansion of a new industry such as cannabis production. A recent study published in Landscape and Urban Planning offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the drivers of cannabis production in rural areas, using interviews with farmers and spatial modeling to uncover key factors.
Led by researchers from UC Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM) and the...
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
Several scientists affiliated with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources have received grants from the California Bureau of Cannabis Control. The BCC awarded on Nov. 13 a total of $29,950,494 in public university research grants across California for research projects related to the implementation and effect of Proposition 64.
Research proposals had to fall within one of the several specified categories, including public health, criminal justice and public safety, economics, environmental impacts and the cannabis...
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
The Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise and other wildfires that have devastated communities in recent years have convinced wildfire experts that Californians need to take more than one approach to coexist with fire.
To better protect new houses against wildfire, California has building codes, but where residential communities are built on the landscape and how they are designed are also very important to limit wildfire-related losses, according to University of California Cooperative Extension specialists Max Moritz and Van Butsic.
“Defensible space and vegetation management is important, but in the long term, where and how we build new...
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
California has legalized marijuana, but commercial cannabis growers have been slow to obtain the required state and local permits. To find out what deters them from complying with new laws, University of California scientists are asking cannabis growers to participate in a survey about their experiences with the regulated market.
“The majority of cannabis farmers are not joining the legal market and we want to know why,” said Van Butsic, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management at UC Berkeley. “The objective is to identify barriers to joining the legal market.”
The researchers plan...
- Author: Mackenzie Smith
Two UCANR Cooperative Extension specialists have recently launched CalLands, a powerful online tool that can help users understand how land ownership impacts California's croplands.
To build the CalLands' interactive website, Luke Macaulay and Van Butsic — both assistant UC Cooperative Extension specialists based in UC Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management — combined satellite-generated maps of land cover created by the U.S. Department of Agriculture with publicly...
