The Fourth Assessment is broken down into nine technical reports on the following topics:
Agriculture
Biodiversity and habitat
Energy
Forests and wildlife
Governance
Ocean and coast
Projects, datasets and tools
Public health
Water
The technical reports were distilled into nine regional reports and three community reports that support climate action by providing an overview of climate-related risks and adaptation strategies tailored to specific regions and themes.
The regional reports cover:
North Coast Region
Sacramento Valley Region
San Francisco Bay Area Region
Sierra Nevada Region
San Joaquin Valley Region
Central Coast Region
Los Angeles Region
Inland South Region
San Diego Region
The community reports focus on:
The ocean and coast
Tribal communities
Climate justice
All research contributing to the Fourth Assessment was peer-reviewed.
UC Cooperative Extension ecosystem sciences specialist Ted Grantham – who works in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley – is the lead author of the 80-page North Coast Region Report. Among the public events surrounding the release of the Fourth Assessment is the California Adaptation Forum, Aug. 27-29 in Sacramento. For more information, see http://www.californiaadaptationforum.org/. Grantham is a speaker at the forum.
Other UC ANR authors of the North Coast Region Report are:
Lenya Quinn-Davidson, UC Cooperative Extension area fire advisor for Humboldt, Siskiyou, Trinity and Mendocino counties
Glenn McGourty, UC Cooperative Extension viticulture and plant science advisor in Mendocino and Lake counties
Jeff Stackhouse, UC Cooperative Extension livestock and natural resources advisor for Humboldt and Del Norte counties
Yana Valachovic, UC Cooperative Extension forest advisor for Humboldt and Del Norte counties
UC Cooperative Extension fire specialist Max Moritz contributed to sections of the main report on Forest Health and Wildfire and to the San Francisco Bay Area Report.
UC ANR lead authors of technical reports were:
Economic and Environmental Implications of California Crop and Livestock Adaptations to Climate Change, Daniel Sumner, director of UC ANR's Agricultural Issues Center
Climate-wise Landscape Connectivity: Why, How and What Next, Adina Merenlander, UC Cooperative Extension specialist
Visualizing Climate-Related Risks to the Natural Gas System Using Cal-Adapt, Maggi Kelly, UC Cooperative Extension specialist
Dan Stark, staff research associate for Humboldt and Del Norte counties, contributed to the pest section of Fuel Treatment for Forest Resilience and Climate Mitigation: A Critical Review for Coniferous Forests of California.
Wrapping up a remarkable 37-year career with UC ANR, Richard B. Standiford IV, UC Cooperative Extension forest management specialist at UC Berkeley, will retire June 30.
In addition to being a highly regarded forestry expert, Standiford served as UC ANR's associate vice president from 2005 to 2009, and provided stability for the division as acting vice president during the 11-month transition from Reg Gomes stepping down to retire until Daniel Dooley succeeded him as vice president in 2008.
“There are a select few individuals who both excel at research, teaching, service and outreach and can lead and motivate others to try to do the same. Rick belongs to this rarest subspecies of academic,” said Keith Gilless, dean of the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley, who has worked with Standiford for 35 years.
In 1980, after working two years as a research and extension forester at Purdue University, Standiford joined UC Cooperative Extension at UC Berkeley. The New Jersey native developed a research and extension program focused on sound management of California's forests, rangelands and other natural resources.
Standiford “personifies all that is best about Cooperative Extension,” said Maggi Kelly, director of the UC ANR Statewide Informatics and Geographic Information Systems Program, professor and Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Environmental Sciences, Policy & Management at UC Berkeley.
“Part of his legacy has been the ways in which he navigates the Cooperative Extension mission - intuiting and understanding natural resource and environmental problems, reaching stakeholders, liaising with state officials, finding funding, conducting quality applied research, and leading practical,impactful extension activities,” Kelly said.
His legacy in Cooperative Extension continued to grow as associate vice president of ANR, says Peggy Mauk, former director for Central Coast and South Region.
“Rick empowered people, empowered regional directors and county directors to implement programs for the betterment of California,” Mauk said. “Rick had the ability to bridge the gap between administrative concepts and regional (county) implementation. He wanted to know how higher level decisions would impact ANR's county-based personnel and programs and then adjust for those impacts. Above all, Rick valued people and positions, and supported the ANR mission.”
He also has provided leadership for county Cooperative Extension advisors developing programs in forestry and conservation of oak woodlands.
“Rick has a tremendous ability to pull people together,” said Yana Valachovic, UCCE director and forest advisor for Humboldt and Del Norte counties, noting his leadership in getting people to work together to contain sudden oak death disease. “It takes passion, vision and an ability to communicate effectively.”
While tackling the emerging forest disease, Standiford also devoted time to mentoring young scientists.
“Early in 2000, Rick bounced into my office with the news that he had found emergency funds to study the disease, and had assembled a team of pathologists, ecologists, arborists, homeowners and forest managers to attack the problem,” said Kelly, a remote-sensing expert. “Rick asked if I would be able to use the money to fly to Marin County and develop critical baseline maps of the nascent disease. I was, and I did, and that generosity and foresight launched my applied research and extension program at Berkeley.”
“The disease was subsequently named Sudden Oak Death, and in 2015 ANR was been given a nationwide award in extension for its timely, quality, impactful multidisciplinary approach to the disease,” Kelly said, “and it all started with Rick.”
In addition to academics, he has worked with professional foresters and natural resource managers,forestandrangeland owners and managers, timber operators, government agencies, forestry organizations, policymakers and others interested in natural resource management.
Standiford said working with people was the part of his career he enjoyed most. He recalled driving with UCCE colleagues to Mariposa County to deliver a workshop on managing oaks.
“The sun was setting, it's pretty dark, pretty desolate and we're wondering, ‘Is anybody going to be at the workshop?'” Standiford said. “At the grange hall in Catheys Valley, there's a ton of pickup trucks and cars. Inside, everybody is excited that the university has shown up to help figure out how to manage their trees. That's what my job has been about. It was always a lot of fun.”
An early adopter of technology, Standiford has used webinars to teach oak woodland management from a distance. While acknowledging the convenience of virtual meetings, he said, “I hope we don't lose sight of the value of personal contact.”
From 1985 to 1987, Standiford served as ANR program director for natural resources, leading efforts in forestry, wood products, wildlife and range management.
From 1988 to 1999, Standiford led collaboration among UC, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, and the California Department of Fish and Game for the ANR statewide Integrated Hardwood Range Management Program, which was established in 1986 by the California Legislature to address poor oak regeneration and ongoing woodland losses. The program continued for 23 years until its budget was cut in 2009.
At UC Berkeley, he coordinated all Cooperative Extension activities in the Department of Forestry and Resource Management from 1989 to 1993, served as associate dean for forestry and director of the Center for Forestry from 1998 to 2002 in the College of Natural Resources, and oversaw the College's capital projects program, space planning and research infrastructure as associate dean for forestry and capital projects from 2002 to 2004.
Standiford earned a bachelor's degree in forestry from North Carolina State University, where he ranked second in his graduating class. He earned his master's degreeinwildland resource science, with an emphasisonsilviculture, from UC Berkeley and his doctoral degree in agricultural economics from UC Davis. The American Association of Agricultural Economists honored his “ABioeconomic Model of California'sHardwoodRangelands” as Dissertation of the Year in 1989. Over his career, he has published hundreds of articles and publications on the sound management of forestandrangelands.
In retirement, Standiford plans to teach at the UC forestry camp and remain active with the Society of American Foresters. He also plans to travel with his wife, Judy, and spend time coaching and camping with his five grandchildren
“I have been blessed with the most wonderful job in the world,” Standiford said. “The best part was the honor of working with such wonderful people on campus, in the counties, and the wide group of landowners and managers who taught me so much.”
The UC ANR Informatics and Geographic Information Systems Statewide Program (IGIS) is pleased to announce that it has finalized the schedule of workshops that it will be offering for spring 2015. This series of agriculture and natural resources-oriented geographic information systems, remote sensing and global positioning system training workshops will be held at a variety of venues around California.
Scientists in my native state of California were handed a gift: a trove of detailed information about the state's forests taken during the 1920s and 1930s and digitized over the past 15 years. When we compared this historical data – covering an area bigger than Great Britain – to current forests surveys, we found that California's famed giant trees are suffering due to drier and warmer conditions.
This change to the forest landscape is important not only to the people of California. Large trees are huge sinks of carbon dioxide, provide habitat for many creatures and play a vital role in the water supply by, for example, providing catchment areas for snow. Forests that are denser with smaller trees are also more likely to burn.
Studying how the structure of forests is shifting over time provides us insight into how forests — a resource we depend on for many environmental and economic reasons — could change in a world of warmer temperatures.
Saved from destruction
Researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and Davis, the Department of Forest Management at the University of Montana, and the US Geological Survey's California Water Science Center worked together on a paper on California's forests published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The historical data for our study came from the Wieslander Vegetation Type Mapping (VTM) collection, which was created in the 1920s and 1930s. It's been described in a 2000 paper as “the most important and comprehensive botanical map of a large area ever undertaken anywhere on the earth's surface.”
This botanical map was pioneered by Albert Wieslander, an employee of the Forest Service Forest and Range Experiment Station in Berkeley, California. The collection consists of 18,000 detailed vegetation plots, over 200 vegetation maps, 3,100 photographs and hundreds of plant specimens. Overall, the collection covers about 280,000 square kilometers, or just over a third of the state. Combined, the data created a detailed picture of the state's vegetation in the early 20th century — an important marker ecologists today can use for comparison.
During the 2000s, several groups, including my lab, launched efforts to digitize the plot data, maps and photograph portions of the collection. There still are some missing pieces. Indeed, the journey from paper collection to digital data has been a long one, with several cases in which documents were nearly destroyed either intentionally or by accident. It's a cautionary tale about the importance of rescued and shared historical data in ecological and geographical analysis.
In our large trees study, we wanted to look at forest structure throughout the state by comparing the 1920s and 30s data with contemporary data collected through the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program. The FIA program is similar to the VTM project: Forest Service crews report on the species, size, and health of trees across all forest land ownerships. Our study was comprehensive, covering the five ecological regions of the state - over 120,000 square kilometers in total – and took into account land-management and land-use history.
Denser forests with more smaller trees
We found that statewide, tree density – or the number of trees in a given area – in forested regions increased by 30% between the two time periods and that forest biomass declined by 19%. This means that there are more smaller trees filling in the forest, while the number of large trees is shrinking. (A large tree was defined as having a diameter larger than 60 centimeters or two feet.)
Also, we found that forest composition in California in the last century shifted toward increased dominance by oaks relative to pines, a pattern consistent with warming and increased water stress. It also fits the shifts in vegetation we can surmise from the paleorecord in California over the last 150,000 years.
Why this shift from fewer large trees to more smaller trees?
Water stress seems to be the best explanation for the pattern we observed. Water stress in a forest is caused by a combination of rising temperatures, which cause trees to lose more water to the air and to earlier melting of snowpacks, which reduces the amount of water available to trees. And indeed, large tree declines were more severe in areas experiencing greater increases in water deficit since the 1930s.
Large trees, in general, seem to be more vulnerable to water shortfalls. This might be because larger, taller trees have trouble getting water to the tops of the trees when water is short, a phenomenon being studied by many tree physiologists.
It might also be that these big trees – some likely 300 years old or more – grew up in a different, colder and moister climate. Regardless of the reasons for large tree decline, we likely can expect more water stress in California from rising global temperatures.
A different forest than what your grandparents saw
Apart from the fact that we tend to love and admire our emblematic large trees, they also serve very important roles in the forests. And changes to forest structure – a shift to fewer large trees and more smaller trees – are important for us to pay attention to.
Forests with large trees store more carbon; groups of larger trees provide preferential habitat for many species; forest structure impacts the way fires burn and impacts the way forests store and release water. These changes are a warning of possible changes to come. The loss of these trees, for example, would take away a massive carbon sink, change the way wildlife use these forests, and change the way they burn.
Finally, we would like to stress the importance of rescuing, curating and digitizing historic data. The changes we observed here, although large, did not happen over night – indeed, they really took two or three generations to occur.
Each generation perhaps sees the nature around them as the “normal.” Yet the forests of our grandparents and great-grandparents, observed by the Wieslander crews, were very different than ours today and they will be different again for our grandchildren. We need these historic data to document these changes and demonstrate the rate of change in the natural world.
Some key references:
Jepson, W. L., R. Beidleman, and B. Ertter. 2000. Willis Linn Jepson's ‘‘Mapping in Forest Botany''. Madroño 47:269–272.
Kelly, M., B. Allen-Diaz, and N. Kobzina. 2005. Digitization of a historic dataset: the Wieslander California vegetation type mapping project. Madroño 52(3):191-201
Wieslander, A. E. 1935. A vegetation type map of California. Madroño 2:140-144
Historical California vegetation data that more than once dodged the dumpster have now proved their true value, documenting that a changing forest structure seen in the Sierra Nevada has actually happened statewide over the past 90 years.
A team of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, UC Davis and the U.S. Geological Survey compared unique forest surveys collected by UC Berkeley alumnus Albert Wieslander in the 1920s and ‘30s with recent U.S. Forest Service data to show that the decline of large trees and increase in the density of smaller trees is not unique to the state's mountains.
“Older, larger trees are declining because of disease, drought, logging and other factors, but what stands out is that this decline is statewide,” said study leader Patrick McIntyre, who began the research while a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley and now manages biodiversity data for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “Forests are becoming dominated by smaller, more densely packed trees, and oaks are becoming more dominant as pines decline.”
The authors found that the density of large trees declined in all regions of California, with declines up to 50 percent in the Sierra Nevada highlands, the south and central coast ranges and Northern California.
“Based on our data, water stress helps to explain the decline of large trees,” McIntyre said. “Areas experiencing declines in large-tree density also experienced increased water stress since the 1930s.”
The increased density of smaller trees is usually attributed to fire suppression statewide, he noted. Scientists debate the cause of the decline of larger trees, which has been observed in other parts of the world as well, but many suspect that larger trees need more water than smaller trees to withstand droughts and disease.
Co-author David Ackerly, a professor of integrative biology, said that stressed forests and the loss of large trees could exacerbate the global carbon situation, especially since many are hoping that forests will soak up more and more fossil fuel emissions.
“There's no question that if you are losing large trees, you are losing the standing carbon in the forest,” he said. “Loss of these big trees and the impact of drought stress become a big concern going forward in terms of its impact on the carbon cycle; they can turn a carbon sink into a source of carbon released to the atmosphere.”
The results may help forecast future forest responses to climate change, and in particular suggest that increased temperatures and changing water availability may lead to large-scale changes in forest composition throughout western North America.
One change the study observed occurs repeatedly throughout California's history, as documented by paleoclimatic records in pollen, McIntyre said. Oaks are becoming more prevalent, replacing pines. Pines tend to dominate during cooler, wetter periods.
“Our study shows that areas of greater water stress tend to be dominated more by oaks than by pines, a signal we see despite variation in logging and fire around the state,” McIntyre said.
The study might never have happened if Wieslander's data, stored both in Sacramento and at Berkeley, had not been saved several times from the trash bin, said co-author Maggi Kelly, a UC Berkeley cooperative extension specialist and professor of environmental science policy and management (ESPM). Wieslander acquired the vegetation data while he worked for the California Forest Experiment Station, a Berkeley outpost of the U.S. Forest Service and the forerunner of UC Berkeley's Department of Forestry, now part of ESPM.
“This is really an astonishingly broad and detailed depiction of vegetation in California at that time and it's important that through its nearly 100-year life it has almost been lost a number of times,” she said. “Patrick's is one of the largest and most comprehensive looks at this historic data set in comparison to comparable contemporary data.”
Most of the plots, maps and photos have been digitized thanks to efforts by Kelly, co-author James Thorne of UC Davis and campus librarians who saw future value in the data. Digitization and the study were funded by the Keck Foundation through the Berkeley Initiative on Global Change Biology (BiGCB), as part of an ongoing effort to create an ecological informatics engine, or EcoEngine, for analyzing historical digitized data relating to ecological change.
“All these records are now brought together in digital form in the EcoEngine, which will allow more people to plumb the data and ask more questions, such as, What about logging? What do the photographic records show?” Kelly said. “We need to remember that there are a lot of valuable collections of data that we can use to make inferences about the future.”
Other co-authors are Christopher Dolanc of UC Davis and Alan and Lorraine Flint of the USGS California Water Science Center in Sacramento.