Climate Change

Researchers Look Ahead to Fire Season 2025

April 22, 2025

Flames, the beach and the ocean are depicted in a scene from the January 2025 Palisades fire.

Pictures accompanying Professor John Abatzoglou's presentation on the 2025 fire season were blurry. That was intentional, he said, because so much about wildfire is unpredictable. "There's a lot that we know, and a lot we don't know," he said. However, Abatzoglou said,...

Media Creates False Balance on Climate Science, Study Shows

The American media lends too much weight to people who dismiss climate change, giving them legitimacy they haven’t earned, posing serious danger to efforts aimed at raising public awareness and...

Stands of brown, dead trees throughout Sierra Nevada forests

Multiyear Drought Caused Massive Forest Die-off in Sierra Nevada

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...

Sierra Seedlings Illustrate Effects of Climate Change on Next Generation of Forests

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...

Professor Sora Kim examines a fossilized shark's tooth.

One Key to Climate Change Could Be Stuck in a Shark’s Tooth

Most people wouldn’t think sharks can teach researchers about the planet’s distant past and its more immediate future. UC Merced paleoecologist Professor Sora Kim isn’t most...

Ph.D. students Craig Ennis and Vicky Espinoza visited Sacramento with Vice Provost and Graduate Dean Marjorie Zatz to speak with lawmakers about the contribution of graduate research to California's development.

Graduate Students Make a Case for Research at Capitol

Two UC Merced Ph.D. students took to the State Capitol yesterday with representatives from the other UC campuses to advocate for the importance of the research being done across California. Craig...

Kimber Moreland with the accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) instrument. Photo courtesy of Lawrence Livermore National Lab: LLNL-PHOTO-769483.

Three Environmental Systems Graduate Students Receive Department of Energy Fellowships

Under the leadership of Professors Asmeret Berhe and Stephen Hart, three UC Merced Environmental Systems (ES) graduate students have been awarded fellowships from the U.S. Department of Energy (...

Waterbirds take flight over a large wetland area along the Pacific Flyway.

Climate Change is Negatively Affecting Waterbirds in the American West

Climate change is having a profound effect on the millions of migrating birds that rely on annual stops along the Pacific Flyway as they head from Alaska to Patagonia each year. They are finding...

Leaf-cutter ants in the tropical rain forest of Costa Rica carry cut leaves back to their colony.

Study: Tiny ‘Ecosystem Engineers’ Are an Overlooked Source of Carbon Dioxide Emissions

It’s estimated that a leaf-cutter ant colony can strip an average tree of its foliage in a day, and that more than 17 percent of leaf production by plants surrounding a colony goes straight...

Scientists Simulate Forest, Fire Dynamics to Understand Area Burn of Future Wildfires

Climate change and wildfire make a combustible mix with deadly and costly consequences. Scientists have been trying to understand that link for many years, studying the effects of climate and...