Redwoods are among the most well-studied trees on the planet, and yet their mysteries continue to surprise and delight scientists and nature lovers. 

The idea of food chains and food webs in the animal kingdom is simple: Remove a link or thread, and the system is broken. But nature is complex, and it’s not always clear how the absence of one species may impact others. 

Other times, the connection is devastatingly clear. 

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body charged with assessing the science related to climate change, has released its latest report outlining the affects global warming has on nature and people around the world.

UC Davis researchers are collaborating with the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources on a project to help farmers in the state improve their fertilization and irrigation practices. CDFA received $2 million from the USDA for a three-year project that includes sending seven UC Cooperative Extension personnel to the San Joaquin Valley to perform education and demonstration projects, provide on-farm consultation and conduct outreach activities to promote locally appropriate best practices.

The world’s abalone are threatened, endangered or otherwise vulnerable in nearly every corner of the planet. While captive breeding efforts are underway for some species, these giant sea snails are notoriously difficult to spawn. If only we could wave a magic wand to know when abalone are ready to reproduce, without even touching them. 

Three UC Davis students have launched Hands on the Land, a new student organization working on landscape renewal through repairing and restoring native ecosystems. Alana Luzzio, a first-year ecology graduate student and one of the group’s co-founders, says the goal is to reconnect people to the land, community and each other while keeping ecological and climate goals in mind.

“As a society, we’ve kind of lost our connection to the land,” Luzzio said.

When pay-to-conserve programs don’t come through with payments, they don’t conserve, indicates a case study by the University of California, Davis, of a REDD+ Readiness program on the island of Pemba, off the coast of Tanzania. 

A supportive environment can bring out the best in an individual — even for a bird. 

After an E.coli outbreak in 2006 devastated the spinach industry, farmers were pressured to remove natural habitat to keep wildlife — and the foodborne pathogens they can sometimes carry — from visiting crops. A study published today from the University of California, Davis, shows that farms with surrounding natural habitat experience the most benefits from birds, including less crop damage and lower food-safety risks.

About the size of a small school bus, the basking shark is the second largest fish in the ocean and is found in temperate and tropical waters across the globe. In the mid-1900s, basking sharks were observed by the thousands each year off California’s coast. Now they are rarely seen at all in this region, called the California Current Ecosystem, or CCE.

Politics and society largely dictate climate policy ambitions and therefore the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions, yet climate change models and projections rarely include political and social drivers. A study from the University of California, Davis, simulated 100,000 possible future policy and emissions trajectories to identify relevant variables within the climate-social system that could impact climate change in this century.