In the past five years, collisions between wildlife and vehicles cost California at least $1 billion and potentially up to $2 billion, according to estimates in an annual report by the Road Ecology Center at the University of California, Davis. 

Food that ends up in the landfill is a waste of money and creates an abundance of greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found almost 41 million tons of food waste was generated in the country in 2017.

Edward “Ned” Spang, a UC Davis associate professor of food science and technology, is joining researchers from American University and 13 other institutions for a $15 million, 5-year project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation to gather data and create solutions to reduce food waste across the country.

UC Davis is part of a team of western land grant universities sharing a $7.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study the effect of wildfire smoke on grapes and wine.

Oregon State University is leading the 4-year project to better understand how wildfire smoke compromises grapes, which poses a threat to the $20 billion wine industry in the United States.

Researchers from the University of California, Davis, have been awarded a $10 million grant by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to find ways to sustain irrigated agriculture while improving groundwater quantity and quality in the Southwest under a changing climate.

“This is the summer that feels like the end of summer as we have known it,” journalist Shawn Hubler wrote in a New York Times article earlier this year about the very real effects of climate change we are experiencing across the country right now. 

Warming temperatures over the past 60 years have led to increased wine quality, but a new study looking at sugar and color content in grapes indicates the industry may be facing trouble if trends continue, according to collaborative research out of the University of California, Davis, and University of Bordeaux. 

There might be more native California poppies, lupines and sunflowers popping up along streets and sidewalks in the region. The UC Davis Department of Human Ecology has teamed up with local nonprofit Miridae Living Labs, which uses native plants and insects as tools for education and research, to launch the “Seed Pile Project,” a community initiative that aims to find out which native plant seeds are best at dispersing in cities, roadsides, alley ways and other places they may naturally fall.

Eric Chu, assistant professor in human ecology, has spent years studying how local governments and communities plan for and adapt to the impacts of climate change. Chu was recently chosen by the U.S. Global Change Research Program to help prepare the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5), a congressionally mandated report on the science of climate change and its impacts on the country.

There’s a hive of PhDs at the University of California at Davis who are working to reinvent food production in the Golden State. Researchers have fanned out across the globe collecting rare plant samples; others are grafting Frankenstein trees and stitching together root systems of plums and peaches to create better almond and walnut trees.