By Kathleen Wong, UC Natural Reserve System Climate is the hottest topic in California these days. As global warming heats up the West, it’s set off a cascade of effects ranging from toxic algal blooms, to tree die-offs, to wildfires of unprecedented size and ferocity. The situation has everyone asking the same question: what is […]
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2020-21 Mathias Grant recipients
Most people will be staying close to home in 2021 due to the pandemic. UC Santa Barbara graduate student Samantha Sambado will not be among them. Her doctoral research will take her on multiple journeys up and down California, in search of ticks and the human pathogens they carry. “Ticks are the number one vector […]
Teaching a field program amid a pandemic
Krikor Andonian and Tim Miller, instructors of the NRS’s California Ecology and Conservation program, deliver a report from the field on their Fall 2020 course. CEC program is one of relatively few UC classes being conducted in person right now, and is likely be the only one that will remain in its own social bubble […]
Swapping a weatherbeaten cabin for snug modern quarters
This story is part of NRS reserves transformed by Proposition 84 funds, a series describing the facilities improvements and expansions at NRS reserves supported by Proposition 84 bond funds. In California’s North Coast region, people have long been accustomed to making do. Trips to the store can be time consuming in this thinly populated section […]
2019-20 Mathias Graduate Student Research Grant awards
Joshua trees will be under the gun in the California of the future. Scientists predict that it’ll become too hot and dry for these striking Mojave plants to persist in much its the high desert habitat by 2100. How much water these treelike yucca plants can store at one time is key to their conservation. […]
California Heartbeat Initiative soars ahead
A University of California project to study the availability of water in California’s ecosystems is off to a soaring start. The California Heartbeat Initiative (CHI) uses drones, sap flow meters, and other remote sensing techniques to monitor the water status of plants across large swaths of the landscape. The project aims to interpret water status […]
Limited underground water storage make plants less susceptible to drought
Plants accustomed to accessing smaller amounts of moisture stored in underground rock formations are more resilient to drought conditions.
Angelo soils yield potential antibiotics
By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley Soil, the source of our best antibiotics, can be more thoroughly mined for new drugs and other useful chemicals with the help of metagenomics. In a paper appearing June 13 in the journal Nature, UC Berkeley researchers report sequencing the genomes of every microbe in a teaspoon of soil from the […]