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Environment

July 10, 2025

Photo depicts Brittany Barreto Martinez pouring liquid into a test tube in a lab.
San Luis Reservoir in Merced County - one of California's largest artificial lakes - not only irrigates Central Valley farmland and supplies drinking water across Silicon Valley and the South Bay, but also draws swimmers, boaters and anglers year-round. Yet for months at a time, forest-green...
Researchers stand near a large solar collection panel.
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...
A verdant forest floor
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...
Professor Sora Kim examines a fossilized 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...
Vicky Espinoza presents her story at a recent symposium.
Graduate student Vicky Espinoza shared the plight of some San Joaquin Valley families with a wide audience this spring in her role as a Next Generation delegate to this year’s Chicago Council...
A picture of a soil chronosequence in Hawaii shows yellow sulfur-rich soil that has built up over millions of years.
A rigorous, first-of-its-kind global study provides new insights into the natural history of soil biodiversity and shows that changes in soil pH during soil development is a major driver of most of...
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...
Kimber Moreland with the accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) instrument. Photo courtesy of Lawrence Livermore National Lab: LLNL-PHOTO-769483.
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 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.
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...

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