The University of California, Davis, has appointed Associate Professor Amélie Gaudin as the holder of the new Endowed Professorship in Agroecology. The position was established thanks to donations at UC Davis to support the teaching, research, and service of a professor leading research in agroecology or a related field who serves in the Department of Plant Sciences.

Foundation Plant Services (FPS) at the University of California (UC) Davis is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Maher Al Rwahnih as the next FPS Director. Maher’s extensive work with clean stock programs and viral diseases of woody plants along with his development of advanced diagnostic tools make him uniquely suited to advance the mission of FPS.

Pima cotton is the predominant variety of cotton grown in California. It’s ideal for making premium fabrics for clothing and bed sheets. But Fusarium wilt disease, caused by a soil-borne fungus, can devastate a cotton crop. It’s responsible for crop losses in several production regions in the U.S. and worldwide. 

If consumers cannot tell the quality of a product when they buy it, it can drive high-quality products, like a good French wine, out of the market. Consumers would not pay a premium, and producers would have no incentive to make costly quality improvements. This widely held economic tenet, formalized in a famed article by Nobel Prize-winner George Akerlof, suggests that without standards, consumers could be left with mostly “lemons,” such as defective used cars.

Warren Winiarski knows how to make beautiful wine and wants to help his beloved Napa Valley continue to do so for years to come. The legendary founder and former winemaker of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars fame is funding an ambitious research project to update and expand the globally recognized Winkler Index and give the industry new tools to cope with climate change.

The Department of Plant Sciences welcomes Imtiyaz Khanday as an assistant professor of plant reproductive biology and as an assistant agronomist for the Agricultural Experiment Station in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the University of California, Davis.

Immobile organisms, plants have needed to evolve ingenious and highly specific defenses to threats, such as predators. These defenses come in the form of chemicals known as specialized metabolites and are responsible for the plant kingdom’s rich source of drugs, poisons, and dyes.

Beth Forrestel, an assistant professor and plant biologist in the Department of Viticulture and Enology, leads the project to modernize the Winkler Index that growers used for decades to match suitable wine grape varieties with different regions of the state. Even though smoke, wildfires and pandemic-induced restrictions presented some formidable obstacles to field research in 2020, the initial year of the study, Forrestel reports progress by those involved with the work.

by UC ANR Staff Writer

Burrowing rodents can cause extensive and expensive damage to orchards and crop fields. To manage the pests without chemicals used on conventional farms, organic growers can consult a new publication from UC Agriculture and Natural Resources scientists.

Fatumo Latito sits on a narrow, hand-carved, wooden bench inside her tiny hut fashioned from branches and a mixture of cow dung and mud. It’s pouring outside, but she hasn’t forgotten the last drought. 

“Everyone lost livestock. If your herd was big, then you lost maybe half of them. If you only had a little, then you lost everything. I had four cows, and I lost them all,” she said through a translator.