Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology

Eric Post: Arctic Awe and Anxiety

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. 

Bringing Out the Best in Wild Birds on Farms

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.

Sharp Decline in Basking Shark Sightings in California

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.

Arctic Shrubs Add New Piece to Ecological Puzzle

Implications for Carbon Exchange in a Warming, Drying Tundra

15-year experiment on Arctic shrubs in Greenland lends new understanding to an enduring ecological puzzle: How do species with similar needs and life histories occur together at large scales while excluding each other at small scales? The answer to this question has important implications for how climate change might shift species’ distributions across the globe.