If you’ve ever wondered about how exactly GoogleEarth can zoom in on your house, Maggi Kelly has a workshop for you. Kelly, associate professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and and associate cooperative extension specialist, has designed a series of internet workshops on GPS, GIS, and other geospatial technologies such as GoogleEarth. Many of the workshops combine instructor led classes with internet based workbooks and both introductory and advanced classes are available.
Her geospatial literacy training and web-based extension program recently earned Kelly the "Excellence in Education" award from the Geographic Information Association.
Kelly has also created two educational webGIS sites called oakmapper and coyotebytes. She developed the oakmapper to monitor sudden oak death, a disease first reported in 1995 that kills California oak trees. Coyotebytes was launched in 2007 to map human-coyote conflicts in urban and suburban areas. Both of the sites combine research with public input in order to gain a better assessment of environmental issues.
For more information about webGIS, see the GIIF website and The Berkeley Science Review’s article on the topic.
Senior Environmental Science major Daniel Song was watching the second round of the NCAA basketball tournament when he found the thick manila envelope addressed to him from the Fulbright Foundation.
“My heart skipped a beat,” he said. “I think it suffices to say I was ecstatic.”
Song, whose research has previously taken him to the Gump Station on Moorea, Cyprus, Turkey, and Washington D.C., will be spending a year as a Fulbright Scholar studying plants and bees on a Greek Island. The project is an extension of work he did last summer on the relationship between pollinators and a pesky species called the Yellow Star Thistle that has invaded California.
“Essentially I’ll be sitting outside in a thicket of thorny Yellow Star Thistle observing beetles, flies, bumble bees, solitary bees, and honeybees take sweet nectar from the flowers,” he said.
Continue reading "CNR Environmental Science Major Awarded Fulbright Scholarship" »
Want to play golf like Tiger Woods? The trick may be to play against him. A study conducted by Agriculture and Natural Resources Ph.D. candidate Jennifer Brown has shown that golfers may actually play better when pitted against a superstar like Woods. Brown analyzed over twenty thousand golf matches and factored in weather and course conditions to determine that golfers played an average of one stroke better when facing off against Woods.
Notice a rise in the cost of a loaf of bread at the supermarket? You’re not alone. Overall, retail food prices in the United States have increased 4.4 percent in the last year. Other parts of the world have been harder hit and extreme food shortages have lead to riots and civil unrest.
David Zilberman, professor of Agriculture and Resources Economics at CNR, has been studying food trends for thirty years. He thinks drought, biofuels, transportation costs as well as increased income and demand for food imports in Asia are responsible for the increase in food prices.
Continue reading "Global Food Shortages: A Lasting Problem?" »
Peng Gong, professor of in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, has been awarded the 2008 AAG Remote Sensing Specialty Group medal for Outstanding Contributions in Remote Sensing.
Continue reading "ESPM Professor Awarded Medal for Remote Sensing" »
The growth in China's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is far outpacing previous estimates, making the goal of stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases even more difficult, according to a new analysis by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and UC San Diego.
Previous estimates, including those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, say the region that includes China will see a 2.5 to 5 percent annual increase in CO2 emissions, the largest contributor to atmospheric greenhouse gases, between 2004 and 2010. The new UC analysis puts that annual growth rate for China to at least 11 percent for the same time period.
