- (Focus Area) Environment
- Author: Grace Nguyen-Sovan Dean
When looking to improve a region's wildfire resiliency, considering the impact of neighborhood level action cannot be understated. By tapping into existing community ties, the Tahoe RCD's Network of Fire Adapted Communities (Tahoe Network) program is helping increase the number of Tahoe Basin homeowners taking proactive, educated steps toward wildfire preparedness. The Tahoe Network's multi-pronged approach utilizes information distribution and community organizing to support neighborhoods who are taking steps, both small and large, towards preparedness. “It's a team thing, for projects of this nature,” Jason Brand, Tahoe RCD FAC director notes. “Communities as a whole need to take action.”
When neighborhoods connect with Brand and his team to become a Tahoe Network ‘Fire Adapted Community Neighborhood', they join a supportive network of preparedness-minded homeowners and professionals. With Tahoe RCD assistance, Fire Adapted Community neighborhoods encourage individuals to take preparedness action through hosting events like defensible space and home hardening workdays. The RCD also facilitates neighborhood information sharing through a combination of online and in person communication, so that neighborhoods are kept up to date on actionable items, regional prescribed fire and fuel reduction projects, and more.
Since wildfire preparedness is an ongoing process, an energized base of homeowners is essential to the Tahoe Network's efforts. “You could be done with a defensible space project, then a storm comes through and blows pine needles onto your roof,” Brand illustrates. “It's a process, but we try to keep everyone excited.”
One way the Tahoe Network maintains community interest is through their program's group of Neighborhood Leaders. Neighborhood Leaders disseminate educational resources, host defensible space workdays, and help maintain momentum around wildfire awareness. Any resident interested in spearheading neighborhood preparedness projects is encouraged to become a Neighborhood Leader, with Brand noting how “some have already done their defensible space work and want to reach more of the community, and some are just getting introduced to these concepts because they got a call from their insurance agency.” When looking to increase their knowledge base or get ideas for community events, Neighborhood Leaders can turn to the Tahoe Living with Fire website, which hosts a resource library specifically to support Neighborhood Leader activities. The Living With Fire site itself is a collaborative effort, run by University of Nevada, Reno Extension yet utilized as an information hub by many other organizations. This website is also where Brand points anyone curious about wildfire preparedness, as it houses a variety of booklets and fact sheets that guide beginners into becoming ‘ember aware'.
Though the ongoing work may seem daunting, Brand shares there has been a marked increase in neighborhoods seeking to improve their wildfire readiness within the Basin. There are now 72 Fire Adapted Community neighborhoods, and over the past two years the region's number of nationally recognized Firewise communities jumped from 12 to 34, with 6 more seeking recognition. This is a tangible indicator to Brand that more neighborhoods are serious about organizing local preparedness efforts: “There's a lot of steps that communities need to take to become Firewise. You have to keep people talking, learning, and taking action.”
Making learning approachable is something Brand sees as key to ensuring more residents can make informed, confident choices to protect their home. “Just having a citizenship educated on the pressures our ecosystem is experiencing has a direct effect on the forest,” Brand states. “When people start protecting their home, there is inherently less pressure on our forests.”
Forest landowners and community members in El Dorado, Nevada, and Placer counties interested in learning more about forest management are encouraged to register for the next UC ANR Forest Stewardship workshop series. The Tahoe Basin Forest Stewardship workshop will cover forest management planning, forest and fire ecology, and forest health, and more. Sign up here. Registration is $60, and scholarship funding for registration fee is available. For questions, please contact kcingram@ucanr.edu.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Give them a 21-insect net salute.
That's what occurred at a recent retirement celebration honoring the legacy of UC Davis distinguished professor emerita Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology for 34 years.
Kimsey, who joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology (now the Department of Entomology and Nematology) in 1989, became the director of the Bohart Museum in 1990.
Noted entomologist Richard "Doc" Bohart (1913-2007) founded the insect museum in 1946. UC Davis Chancellor James Meyer (1922-2002) dedicated the facility in 1986 as "the Bohart Museum of Entomology" at a ceremony in Briggs Hall. A highlight: Faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and others saluted him with a 21-insect net salute. They lined up, formed an archway with their nets, and Professor Bohart walked under the archway.
Kimsey, who was Bohart's last graduate student, recalled that event "as one of the funniest memories" of her career when she delivered a speech last November at the Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CA&ES) event honoring recipients of its excellence awards. Kimsey received the Exceptional Faculty Award.
Kimsey retired on Feb. 1, 2024 (but she's still doing research and continues to be the executive director of the Bohart Museum Society and the writer-editor-publisher of the quarterly Bohart newsletter.)
Then came the retirement celebration on April 6. Her colleagues, collaborators, faculty, staff and students gathered in a Mathematics Building classroom on Crocker Lane for speeches, and then headed over to the nearby Bohart Museum for the 21-insect net salute, a buffet and more tributes.
As Kimsey walked beneath the archway of the 21-insect net salute leading into the Bohart Museum, a chorus of cheers and applause greeted her.
She always remember that.
Just as she remembers the first insect net she received at age 5.
“I've always been interested in insects," Kimsey said. "I got my first insect net at age 5.” A portrait of her holding that net graces the Bohart Museum.
Under Kimsey's direction, the Bohart Museum that "Doc" Bohart founded 78 years ago expanded from 400 specimens to some eight million insect specimens today. It is the seventh largest insect collection in North America.
A recognized authority on biodiversity, systematics and biogeography of parasitic wasps, urban entomology, civil forensic entomology, and arthropod-related industrial hygiene, Kimsey holds two entomology degrees from UC Davis: a bachelor's degree (1976) and a doctorate (1979). "I got to pursue my bug interests," she said. "I know it was kind of weird, but even as a little kid it was fun."
It still is, Kimsey told the crowd at her retirement celebration.
The new Bohart Museum director is arachnologist and Professor Jason Bond, the Evert and Marion Schlinger Endowed Chair in the Department of Entomology and Nematology and associate dean, College of Environmental Sciences (CA&ES).
Resources:
- Access the UC Davis Entomology and Nematology website for the retirement celebration story.
- Listen to Kimsey's speech recorded by Walter Leal, UC Davis distinguished professor of molecular and cell biology and former chair of the Department of Entomology. It is posted on X (formerly Twitter) at https://x.com/wsleal2014/status/1776732932901863666)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Assistant professor Laura "Melissa" Guzman of the University of Southern California (USC) will discuss "Using Occupancy Models to Infer Trends of Bee Biodiversity in North America" at the April 29th seminar hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
Her seminar begins at 4:10 p.m. in 122 Briggs Hall and also will be on Zoom. The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/9 5882849672
"Historical museum records provide potentially useful data for identifying drivers of temporal trends in species occupancy, however, because these records were not explicitly collected for this purpose, methodological developments are needed in order to enable robust inferences," Guzman writes in her abstract. "Occupancy-detection models, a relatively new and powerful suite of methods, are potentially useful here, because these models allow us to account for changes in collection effort through space and time. Applying such occupancy-detection models to historical museum records is not a straightforward process, as these models have strict data requirements that museum data usually do not meet."
"Here I will present a methodological road-map for using occupancy models to analyze historical museum records. I use simulated data-sets to identify how and when modeling decisions and patterns in data can bias inferences. I will focus primarily on the consequences of contrasting methodological approaches for dealing with species ranges and non-detections in both space and time. Finally, I will present an application of these methods to bees in North America and will present drivers of change for these species in the past 30 years."
Guzman says that the "overarching goal of my research is to develop statistical and computational methods to leverage large biodiversity datasets to learn about ecological processes. While we know that the distribution of some species is changing, it is actually very difficult to make reliable inferences as to which species are declining and by how much from the often messy and complex historical and spatial datasets that we have to work with — for example, historical museum records, where species occurrences are aggregated from studies with different sampling procedures."
"In order to address this gap," Guzman says, "my research focuses on determining if and how statistical models can be applied to historical records without yielding biased trends. In my research I also apply these statistical models to determine how the distribution of pollinators has changed through time, where museum records provide lots of information. I am also interested in determining which drivers (e.g. pesticide use, climate change, land use change, etc.) are causing the most decline of the most pollinator species."
"Another aspect of my research is to understand the processes that shape communities, for example, I have combined experiments and modelling to understand how the structure of body size in a community affects the stability of food webs. In more recent work, I used large-scale simulations and machine learning to identify the signal of metacommunity processes in ecological time series."
Guzman is a Gabilan assistant professor in USC's Department of Biological Sciences. She received two degrees from McGlll University: her bachelor's degree (2012) in biology and her master's degree (2013) in ecology and evolution. She obtained her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia.
She recently co-authored a piece in the journal Ecology titled "A Data Set for Pollinator Diversity and their Interactions with Plants in the Pacific Northwest," published in November 2022.
The abstract:
"Pollinator populations have declined substantially in recent years. The resulting loss in pollination services has both ecological and economic consequences, including reductions in plant diversity and crop production and lower food security. Data sets that identify pollinators and their plant hosts are of the utmost importance for the light can shed on the main causes of pollinator declines. Here we present a data set that contains 67,954 individual pollinator records. The data were collected across the Pacific Northwest, primarily focused in British Columbia (Canada), with 182 individual sites over 11 years, between 2005 and 2017. This data set comprises multiple studies that aimed to collect information on pollinator abundance, diversity, and their interactions with plants. Overall, the data set includes 937 morphospecies (of which 482 were identified to the species level) of pollinators across 105 families, including data for bees, wasps, butterflies, moths, and flies. We also present information on the interactions of these species, with 473 species of plants. The data set is being released for noncommercial use only. Credits should be given to this paper (i.e., proper citation)."
Guzman won the American Society of Naturalists Young Investigator Award, 2022-2023, and the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution Early Career Award, 2022-2023.
For any technical Zoom issues, contact seminar coordinator Brian Johnson at brnjohnson@ucdavis.edu. The full list of spring seminars is here.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
An image of a damselfly photographed in Hawaii, and images of a blowfly and a monarch photographed in California won the Photo Salon recently hosted by the Pacific Branch, Entomological Society of America (PBESA)
Photo Salon coordinator Joshua Milnes, an entomologist with the Plant Protection Division, Washington State Department of Agriculture, Yakima, announced the winners as:
- First, Robert Peck, entomologist with the University of Hawaii, for his image of a damselfly
- Second, Alexander Nguyen, a UC Davis entomology alumnus, for his image of a blowfly
- Third, Kathy Keatley Garvey of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, for her image of a monarch.
PBESA showcased the images at its annual meeting, held April 14-17, in Waikoloa Beach, Hawaii. The photo competition, themed “Pineapple Madness,” was open to all PBESA members. Membership covers 11 Western states, plus U.S. territories and parts of Canada and Mexico.
Winning entrants in this year's competition "not only received bragging rights," Milnes said, but also cash prizes. The first-place winner received $50, plus a printed photo; second place, $25, plus a printed photo, and third place, $25.
Robert Peck
“The damselfly in my photo is Megalagrion calliphya, with the common name, Beautiful Hawaiian Damselfly," said Peck, an entomologist with the Hawaii Cooperative Studies Unit, University of Hawaii, Hilo. “It can be found around standing pools of water in Hawaiian forests.” Peck captured the image in his backyard in Volcano, Hawaii. This was his first submission in the Photo Salon competition. His camera gear: a Canon EOS 7D Mark II with a Tokina 90 macro lens.
Alexander Nguyen
“I took this image (of a blowfly) while visiting my good friend, and fellow UC Davis entomology alumnus Joel Hernandez, in Woodland," Nguyen said. "I'm a long time user of Canon cameras and have no plans to switch. This was photographed using the newer R5 mirrorless model. I currently reside in Sonoma County serving that region in the Agricultural Commissioner's office.” This was his third win in an ESA-hosted competition. Nguyen's image of a hoverfly, photographed in the UC Davis Stebbens Cold Canyon Reserve, won an international competition and appeared in the ESA 2018 Insects of the World calendar. (See Bug Squad blog) In 2022, his photo of red imported fire ants placed second in the PBESA Photo Salon.
Kathy Keatley Garvey
Garvey, a communications specialist with the Department of Entomology and Nematology, captured her image of a monarch foraging on milkweed in a Vacaville garden. Her camera gear: a Nikon D500 with a 200mm macro lens. She earlier won several awards in ESA-hosted competitions. Her image of a golden dung fly, Scathophaga stercoraria, won the Entomological Society of America (ESA) medal for "Best Image by an ESA Member" in the 64th annual International Insect Salon competition, held in 2022. Her image of two Melissodes agilis bees buzzing over a sunflower, Tithonia rotundifola, won "Best Image by an ESA member" at the 63rd North Central Insect Photographic Salon, co-sponsored by the North Central Branch of ESA and the Photographic Society of America. Two other Garvey images also won acceptances in the North Central competition.
Entries are now being accepted through May 12 for the 2025 ESA World of Insects Calendar. "Photographers of all backgrounds, areas of expertise, career stage, and geographical location are invited to submit photos," according to the ESA website. "No entomological training or expertise is required, and you do not need to be an ESA member to enter." Submitted images may also be considered for ESA's weekly "Arthropod Photo of the Week" feature on social media, via the #arthropodPOTW hashtag on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Mastodon.
- Author: Lilyana Elola
Rangeland Stewardship: Grazing for Ecosystem Resilience
Principal Investigators Dr. Valerie Eviner and Dr. Mary Cadenasso of UC Davis's Department of Plant Sciences have collaborated with the Hopland Research and Extension Center (HREC) to design a study that investigates the impacts of grazing and prescribed burning on plant communities and ecosystem services in California's grasslands. Using both permanent plots and more flexible adaptive management studies, their project aims to understand how different management practices can enhance the “building blocks of resilience” in these systems– features such as the wildflower seedbank and increased water storage in soi,l which are critical for sustaining California grasslands in the face of environmental challenges such as invasive species, droughts, and wildfires.
Dr. Valerie Eviner collecting data at the Hopland Research and Extension Center
Hopland, CA
In an interview with HREC, Ecosystem and Restoration Ecology professor Dr. Eviner shared insights on emerging trends and technologies poised to shape ecological research in the coming decade. She highlighted how recent advancements in statistical tools have significantly transformed ecological research by allowing researchers to better understand the complex connections within ecosystems. She also underscored the significance of satellite and drone imagery in providing a broader perspective of plant ecology. Dr. Eviner also emphasized that recent state legislation is facilitating the widespread use of prescribed burning, which “presents a unique opportunity to explore the role of fire in grassland ecosystems through controlled experiments”. Additionally, she emphasized the growing importance of community-engaged research and working with diverse communities to foster responsible stewardship of natural resources. She concluded by emphasizing that “while data production is important, it lacks context without the wisdom cultivated through long-term observations on the land, often through thoughtful natural resource stewardship.”
A persistent challenge in developing research that is useful to land managers and policy makers is that many experiments are limited in size and duration. “Partnering with HREC allows us to conduct long-term research at the management scale, which is often not feasible at other research sites.” Dr. Eviner highlighted. According to Dr. Eviner, HREC has demonstrated a “commitment to adaptive management research” that allows her research team to gain valuable insights into what ecological management practices work and which don't– and how that may change over time.
In Dr. Eviner's opinion, the most pressing environmental challenge facing the world today is extreme events like wildfire and drought. She argues that in order for ecological research to be effective, “Science has to contribute to explaining and preparing communities for events they've never seen before.” The best path forward is for scientists to work in collaboration with land managers and policymakers to identify challenges and gaps in our understanding, and prioritize research that addresses future scenarios”. She highlights the critical role of science in identifying the foundations of ecosystem resilience, advocating for practices like retaining dead plant material to bolster soil health and water retention. Dr. Eviner also prompts a reassessment of traditional management goals in light of evolving environmental conditions, suggesting a shift towards promoting root production and carbon sequestration in grazed pastures. Furthermore, she underscores the importance of organizations such as the California Climate and Agriculture Network, in informing climate change policies and mitigation strategies at the state level.
Dr. Eviner envisions that the insights from her ecological research can extend beyond academia, effectively influencing positive change among various audiences. She emphasizes the importance of tailoring communication strategies to different groups. For instance, she notes that when engaging with land managers, there's no need to elaborate on the unprecedented environmental challenges; they are already acutely aware. Instead, discussions can focus on pragmatic approaches for adaptation and resilience.
Rangeland at the Hopland Research and Extension Center
Hopland, CA
When communicating with the general public, Dr. Eviner draws inspiration from experts like Katharine Hayhoe, renowned for her series "Global Weirding." She's observed a significant shift in public perception over the past two decades, with many individuals now having firsthand experiences of climate-related disruptions, such as living through wildfire smoke. “Younger generations, in particular, are increasingly aware of these issues” Dr. Eviner notes. Teaching at UC Davis, Dr. Eviner notices a growing enthusiasm among students for addressing environmental challenges, evidenced by the burgeoning interest in fields like restoration ecology and ecosystem management. She highlights a remarkable growth in class sizes and a prevalence of waiting lists for courses focused on these topics.This quantifiable interest in the topic of land/ecosystem management is indicative of a surge in passionate individuals dedicated to finding solutions.
Dr. Eviner's personal values and perspectives play a significant role in shaping her research priorities. She emphasizes the importance of land grant universities, which not only focus on theoretical science but also prioritize practical research that enhances California agriculture and environment. Reflecting on her own journey into ecology, Dr. Eviner recalls that during her graduate studies, it seemed like there was a tough choice between a focus on research or community engagement , but that has changed due to trail blazers such as her Ph.D. advisor, Dr. F Stuart Chapin III, whose dedication to both research and community involvement left a lasting impression on her work.
While she acknowledges the value of big data, Dr. Eviner ultimately believes that her research stands out due to its “emphasis on hands-on experience under changing conditions”. Much like land managers who adapt their perspectives based on real-time observations, conducting research in dynamic environments requires a keen awareness that different players in an ecosystem may be important under different conditions- so that we have to be flexible in what we're measuring. As an example, she highlights that when measuring seed survival after the 2018 Mendocino wildfire, on-the-ground observations made it apparent that ants played a large role in collecting viable seeds and concentrating them into “islands of recovery” of grasses. Dr. Eviner stresses the importance of collaborating with land managers and leveraging local wisdom, recognizing that even if individuals don't agree on the explanations of how a system works, they can often agree on the observations that led to those explanations, providing valuable context and wisdom.