Environment

Multinational Effort to Map South Africa’s Biodiversity from the Air Earns NASA Award

October 15, 2025

BioSCape, a multinational research project co-led by UC Merced, the University at Buffalo and the University of Cape Town, which monitored Earth’s biodiversity from the air, has received a Group Achievement Award as part of the 2024-25 NASA Honor Awards. A new documentary also showcases...

A kneeling woman holds the skull of a saber-toothed cat in front of a chest of drawers containing fossils.

CAREER Award Will Help Professor Predict How Species Respond to Climate Change

Paleoecology Professor Jessica Blois recently became the campus’s 19th recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award. The NSF...

UC Solar Awarded $1.1M Grant to Build Solar-Powered Water Purification Systems

UC Solar received a $1.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) to develop solar-thermal desalination technologies that reduce the cost of creating...

Merced River Helps Explain How Soils Capture and Store Planet-Warming Carbon

Soils are carbon sinks, storing more planet-warming carbon than the atmosphere and all animal and plant life combined. But they can also release massive amounts of stored carbon into the...

Following a Devastating Pandemic, California’s Sea Stars are Evolving

In 2012, Environmental Systems graduate student Lauren Schiebelhut was collecting DNA from ochre sea stars living along the Northern California coast — part of an effort to study genetic...

Berhe Selected by National Academies to Serve as “New Voice” for Science

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) just announced that they’ve selected Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe to serve as an inaugural member of the Academies’...

Students Discover Cannibal Lizards on Remote Aegean Island

It reads like a mashup of Greek mythology and H.G. Wells. “The Odyssey of Doctor Moreau,” perhaps. Explorers find their way to a remote Aegean island and discover it’s inhabited by...

Man and woman kneel in grassy field with others in the background.

Calling All Citizen Scientists!

Local community members are invited to serve as citizen scientists at UC Merced’s next CALeDNA BioBlitz, scheduled for Sunday, May 20, from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. at the Merced Vernal Pools and...

Engineering Students Get an Inside Look at Wastewater Treatment

Three field trips this semester gave Professor Marc Beutel’s students an up-close understanding of biological wastewater processes used in treatment plants across the country. Most recently...

Sierra Nevada forest tree trunks in a mechanically-thinned forest.

Billions of Gallons of Water Saved by Thinning Sierra Forests

There are too many trees in Sierra Nevada forests, say experts from UC Merced, UC Irvine and the National Park Service working at the National Science Foundation Southern Sierra Critical Zone...

Research