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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MERCED

Environment

Air Pollution Impacts Childhood Development, New Study Shows

April 9, 2019

A child is surrounded by air pollution from traffic.
Children who live near major roads are at higher risk for developmental delays because of traffic-related pollutants. That’s the major finding of a new study authored by UC Merced environmental epidemiology Professor Sandie Ha and colleagues. The study appears in the journal...
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 less food, saltier water and fewer places to breed and...
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 (DOE) to advance their doctoral theses. The DOE...
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 into their giant, fungus-growing nests. It’s no...

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 wildfire interactions in the Sierra Nevada. UC Merced...
Several UC Merced professors will research how biochar can help reduce methane emissions from manure on dairies.

Researchers Hope to Tackle Methane Emissions in Manure Through Use of Biochar

You can smell them a mile away; there’s no mistaking the smell of cows and their methane emissions. The odor, of course, comes from tons of methane-spewing manure. Thanks to a multimillion-dollar grant from the California Strategic Growth...

New Project to Build Climate Resilience through Improved Land Management

A $4.6 million grant to UCs Merced and Irvine will help researchers develop new tools and methods for better managing the state’s forests, shrub lands and grasslands. The Innovation Center for Advancing Ecosystem Climate Solutions, a three-year...

Researchers Assess Western Forests’ Ability to Survive Next Drought

UC Merced researchers have evidence that California’s forests are especially vulnerable to multi-year droughts because their health depends on water stored several feet below ground. “Each year our forests, grasslands and shrublands depend...

Innovative Partnership Aims to Restore Sierra Nevada Forest Health

The French Meadows Forest Restoration Project, an innovative collaboration approved this week, aligns the expertise of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at UC Merced, the U.S. Forest Service, the Nature Conservancy and other agencies and groups to...

Emergence, Extinction of Massive Ancient Shark to be Explored with NSF Grant

Forty million years after dinosaurs went extinct, one of the largest predators that ever prowled Earth’s oceans emerged, feeding the imaginations of modern scientists and the nightmares of modern movie audiences. Megalodon — the name means...

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