The most extreme drought event in hundreds of years caused a catastrophic die-off of the Sierra Nevada’s mature trees in 2015-2016.
A study published today in Nature Geoscience details how UC Merced Professor Roger Bales and his colleague Professor Michael Goulden from UC Irvine tracked the progress of the devastation caused by years of dry conditions combined with abnormally warm temperatures.
The most extreme drought event in hundreds of years caused a catastrophic die-off of the Sierra Nevada’s mature trees in 2015-2016.
A study published today in Nature Geoscience details how UC Merced Professor Roger Bales and his colleague Professor Michael Goulden from UC Irvine tracked the progress of the devastation caused by years of dry conditions combined with abnormally warm temperatures.
Climate change is bad news for forests, and a new study by UC Merced Professor Emily Moran demonstrates one aspect of that news.
Higher summer temperatures hurt tree seedlings’ growth and survival.
But whether that is entirely bad depends on the degree of change in the number of young trees.
At the northern tip of the UC Merced campus, an unremarkable aluminum gate leads into a field that extends, seemingly, into infinity. Perpendicular to the gate, the LeGrand Canal, drawn from Lake Yosemite, snakes around campus into the emerald pastures, through farm rows and almond orchards across the highway. It’s the rainy season and bulbous cumuli foreground the rippled line of the Sierra Nevada that slices across the open sky.
Overdoses and suicides were among the most common reasons for mothers dying within a year of giving birth in California, according to a new study published this week.
Hundreds of students join the UC Merced campus each year intent on health-related careers.
What they might not know, though, is that there are resources on campus that can be critical in helping them achieve their goals.
“If it weren’t for the Pre-Health Advising program, I might not be where I am,” said Dr. Randell Rueda, a 2011 graduate of UC Merced who is in his residency as a family doctor in his hometown of Fresno. “I would have struggled in school and with myself.”
Akhila Yechuri is taking what she learned as an undergrad at UC Merced to Hyderabad, India, researching health disparities as the campus’s first undergrad to earn a Fulbright scholarship.
“I'm so overwhelmed and excited,” she said. “This is really thrilling.”
Wastewater methane reclamation for the City of Merced. Odor abatement in BART Plazas. Solar collection for oxygen generation on Mars. UC Merced campus drone tour. Skin test analyzer for Valley Fever patients.
This might sound like a list of cutting-edge, high-tech inventions, which they are, but they are also a sampling of the projects featured at UC Merced’s Innovate to Grow event — I2G — held earlier this month by the School of Engineering.
Three big UC Solar projects are poised to be the next big breakthroughs in low-cost, accessible sustainable commercial and residential energy in California and far beyond.
Researchers are building working models of one project developed through a grant from the California Energy Commission for a solar unit that can provide electricity and heat to commercial and residential buildings.
A nine-year experiment by a UC Merced Department of Life and Environmental Sciences professor and his colleagues is illuminating the importance of soil carbon in maintaining healthy and functioning ecosystems because of its influence on the microbial communities that live in soil.
These communities’ health can help researchers understand the effects of climate change.
