ESPM"s UC Berkeley Forest Bathology and Mycology Lab, run by CE Specialist Matteo Gargelotto, is organizing the annual Sudden Oak Death Blitz in Sonoma County this weekend. The Santa Rosa Press Democrat notes that last year over 500 volunteers took leaf samples from 2,168 trees in the 15-county region.
ESPM professor Scott Stephens is featured in this Mercury News article about wildfire risk in California. Stephens notes that CA's naturally dry landscapes make wildfires inevitable, and that climate change is extending the length of a typical fire season, changing what we know about wildfire patterns.
ESPM CE Specialist and adjunct professor Matteo Garbelotto was featured on KION News on Sudden Oak Death, a tree disease that is killing millions of oak trees on CA's Central Coast. Garbelotto comments that SOD has killed more trees in the Big Sur area than elsewhere in the state, due to highly conducive weather conditions.
ESPM CE Specialist Bill Stewart is featured in this NBC Bay Area video segment on the massive Fort McMurray fire in Alberta, Canada. Stewart, who leads the UC Center for Fire Research and Outreach noted that the fire is an example of a community living in a fireprone environment surrounded by fuel.
ESPM CE Specialist Bill Stewart is quoted in this KQED article on the massive wildfire that swept through the Fort McMurray oil sands region of Alberta. Stewart notes that there's "no stopping the advance of a fire such as the wind-driven flames in Alberta, which is spreading embers well beyond fire lines."
ESPM professor Dennis Baldocchi and former researcher Sebastian Wolf published a research article to PNAS on the sensitivity of carbon uptake by terrestrial ecosystems to large-scale extreme climate events. The research team gathered their findings through the Ameriflux network, a community of scientists and site that meausre ecosystem carbon, water, and energy fluxes in North and South America. ERG's Margaret Torn oversees the Ameriflux Management Project, which supports the Ameriflux network.
ESPM graduate student Brian Whyte is quoted in this KQED Deep Look feature on Argentine ants and the resilience of native ant species in Jasper Ridge. Whyte also assisted with the filming and research of the ants in the video.
ESPM's Professors Ron Amundson and John Battles and alum Erik Oerter and ERG's Professor Margaret Torn and student Ian Bolliger were featured in the Berkeley Science Review on UC Berkeley climate change research.
A spate of howler monkey deaths in Nicaragua, Panama, and Ecuador has researchers scrambling to identify the cause. ESPM Professor Katharin Milton says that there haven’t been reports of unusual deaths in other monkey species so far, but because howler monkeys are by far the most abundant monkey species at many sites in Central America, die-offs in their populations might be most obvious.