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 protection as central to forest […]
UC Merced
Posted inRegional
New Tools Indicate How Thinning and Fire Affect Forest Water Use and Boost Runoff
August 10, 2020 – Forest-management actions such as mechanical thinning and prescribed burns don’t just reduce the risk of severe wildfire and promote forest health — these practices can also contribute to significant increases in downstream water availability. New research from UC Merced’s Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI) provides the tools to help estimate and verify those […]
Posted inRegional
Researchers Use Monkey Flower to Study Climate Change
Aug. 21, 2019 -California’s drought was hard not to notice — the dry lawns, fallowed fields and hot temperatures were evident across the state. To better understand how the drought affected the natural ecosystem in which we live, biology Professor Jason Sexton and his graduate students conducted a study on a California plant known only […]
Posted inUncategorized
Lengthy Study Shows Value of Soil Health and Forest Restoration after Damaging Events
May 23, 2019 – 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 […]
Posted inRegional
Scientists Explain Mechanisms Affecting Runoff Levels During Drought
January 18, 2018 – Scientists at UC Merced’s Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI), UC Irvine, UC Davis and the USDA Forest Service have enumerated the mechanisms that serve as master regulators of streamflow and drought intensity by studying California’s 2012-15 drought. Their findings are detailed in a new paper published in Scientific Reports. Researchers used measurements from the Southern Sierra […]
Posted inRegional
Study: Wildfires, Climate Change Could Make Sierra a Polluter
June 14, 2017 – What if nature were to become a polluter, discharging millions of tons of planet-warming carbon into the atmosphere in much the same way as diesel-fueled trucks or coal-fired power plants? This nature-as-polluter scenario might seem far-fetched, but it’s well on its way to becoming reality, according to a recent study co-authored by […]