Environment

May 1, 2026

Leah Stokes, a political scientist, energy expert and climate communicator from UC Santa Barbara, speaks from the stage at UC Merced.
It's time to think bigger about mitigating climate change. Measures such as recycling, turning off lights and reducing energy use are great, but making a real impact is going to take systemic change, said Leah Stokes, a political scientist, energy expert and climate communicator from UC...
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...
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...
Several UC Merced professors will research how biochar can help reduce methane emissions from manure on dairies.
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-...
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...
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...
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. “...

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