- Author: Brenda Dawson
The cooling shade of UC Davis' mature, leafy trees impressed Nurjannah Wiryadimejo enough to help the now-graduating senior choose to become an Aggie.
“When I first came to Davis, what struck me was how beautiful the cork oaks are. I'd never seen such beautiful tree-lined streets like the ones by the Memorial Union,” she said.
“But now I've realized that a lot of the trees on campus aren't well suited for the future climate, when there will be more heat and extreme weather events,” said the environmental science and management major.
In fact, a majority of the 20,000 trees on campus may be vulnerable to climate change and unsuitable to grow here by the end of the century — according...
- Author: Lorena Anderson
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...
- Author: Kat Kerlin
Study finds resilient, frequent-fire forests have far fewer trees
What does a “resilient” forest look like in California's Sierra Nevada? A lot fewer trees than we're used to, according to a study of frequent-fire forests from the University of California, Davis.
More than a century ago, Sierra Nevada forests faced almost no competition from neighboring trees for resources. The tree densities of the late 1800s would...
- Author: Kara Manke
Reposted from Berkeley News
For nearly half a century, lightning-sparked blazes in Yosemite's Illilouette Creek Basin have rippled across the landscape — closely monitored, but largely unchecked. Their flames might explode into plumes of heat that burn whole hillsides at once, or sit smoldering in the underbrush for months.
The result is approximately 60 square miles of forest that look remarkably different from other parts of the Sierra Nevada: Instead of dense, wall-to-wall tree cover — the outcome of more than a century of fire suppression — the landscape is broken up by patches...
