Environment

California’s iconic coast redwoods are used to growing in cool, coastal areas where the average temperature is around 59 degrees Fahrenheit. But as average yearly temperatures rise and heatwaves push to 100-degree-plus spikes, the trees are responding by slowing the very operation that nourishes them, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.

The bright orange plumes of water scientists first noticed billowing across a river in Alaska’s Brooks Range in 2018 were even more acidic and metallic than water leached from metal mines, despite their pristine surroundings. That is according to a new study from the University of California, Davis, of six of the impacted watersheds.

The study, published in the journal AGU Advances, found that these metals can travel far and become more toxic as they go. Metal concentrations were about 70 times higher as much as 60 miles downstream from where they entered the river.

A quarter-century after its founding, the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science is a place of groundbreaking discoveries, collaborations and educational offerings attracting top-notch students, scholars and researchers. 

A transformational gift of $25 million from the Robert and Margrit Mondavi family in 2001 established the RMI to study, advance and improve wine, brewing and food sciences.

What if the methane from landfills and wastewater treatment plants could become an affordable raw material for sustainable plastics? 

Some naturally occurring bacteria, called methanotrophs, can consume methane and use its carbon to produce biodegradable plastics, which are stored inside their cells. But producing plastic is only part of the puzzle. Recovering and purifying it from the bacteria contributes significantly to costs; thus, reducing these costs can help make methane-derived bioplastics economically competitive with conventional plastics. 

Professor Steven Sadro is the new chair of the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis. Sadro, who joined the faculty in 2015, is a freshwater ecologist who studies how lakes and streams respond to environmental change.

When two major wildfires burned through the Sierra Nevada in 2020 and 2021, they took thousands of giant sequoia trees with them. Without prescribed burns, thousands more would have died, according to a new study from the University of California, Davis. 

A summer beach day in Oregon often involves a cool, gray blanket of fog that not only shapes the experience of beachgoers, but also the coastal and inland environment. 

Now, commercially available surfing webcams are helping scientists measure Oregon’s coastal fog, according to a study from the University of California, Davis, in collaboration with the USDA Forest Service. 

The University of California, Davis, Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) today released its “

California’s San Joaquin Valley produces an enormous share of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables. But it takes an unsustainable amount of groundwater to do it. New state rules aimed at reducing groundwater use are expected to force up to 20 percent of the valley’s irrigated fields out of production – a blow to farmers and communities.

Worker bees are the first line of defense when it comes to removing contamination in honeybee colonies, but a queen has her ways, too.

A honeybee queen facing chronic exposure to pesticides will take up that contamination and pass it along to her eggs, a process researchers call maternal offloading. 

The findings, which document for the first time the extent a queen will go to survive, are published in the journal Current Biology. Research was led by the University of California, Davis.