UC Davis polar ecologist Eric Post has kept a close eye on Arctic Greenland for nearly 30 years, documenting changes to the warming landscape and the plants and animals who call it home. 

In the classroom environment, he’s seen climate change create a different shift among students — one in which climate anxiety is an unavoidable and increasingly frequent reality. 

Levi Lewis, one of Peter Moyle’s many former undergraduate students, now runs the Otolith Geochemistry and Fish Ecology Laboratory at UC Davis. His previous research has taken him to wetlands, seagrass beds and coral reefs around the world. He’s currently studying Delta smelt and longfin smelt — two critically endangered fishes in San Francisco Bay. We talked about climate anxiety, privilege and the value of science, empathy and staying the course. 

Peter Moyle is widely considered the “godfather of California fish biology.” The UC Davis professor emeritus has been conducting native fish surveys here for more than 50 years. He also played a major role in restoring Yolo County’s beloved local stream, Putah Creek.

Perhaps trees aren’t the only green solution when it comes to cooling urban spaces and reducing energy costs. Honeysuckle, Virginia creeper, pink trumpet and other vines could be a fast-growing substitute in climate-smart cities of the future.

Researchers from UC Davis are leading a nearly $880,000 federal grant to study how vines may provide cooling and shade in Western states in less time than it takes a tree to grow tall.

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.

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. 

El Niño, an oceanic phenomenon that affects worldwide weather patterns, significantly affected the number of enslaved Africans transported from West Africa to the Americas between the mid-1600s and mid-1800s, according to a study from the University of California, Davis. 

Wheat products account for roughly 20% of what people eat every day around the globe. As climate changes, wheat crops must adapt to new weather patterns to keep up with demand. 

The University of California, Davis, is leading a five-year, $15 million research project to accelerate wheat breeding to meet those new climate realities, as well as to train a new generation of plant breeders. 

How small mountain lakes spend their winters is largely unknown to scientists, despite winter representing nearly half the year in such environments. A study by the University of California, Davis, helps demystify what happens above and below the ice.