Kimberly Johnson, assistant dean of Instruction & Student Affairs, was recently received honored with the 2008 Excellence in Management Award by the Berkeley Staff Assembly.
Congratulations, Kimberly!
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Kimberly Johnson, assistant dean of Instruction & Student Affairs, was recently received honored with the 2008 Excellence in Management Award by the Berkeley Staff Assembly.
Congratulations, Kimberly!
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Maggi Kelly, director of CNR's Geospatial Imaging & Informatics Facility, associate cooperative extension specialist, and adjunct associate professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, recently earned the "Excellence in Education" award from the California Geographic Information Association.
The award honors programs with an extraordinary approach, contribution, development or commitment to GIS education in California. Nominees are judged on the basis of the breadth of courses offered, accessibility of classes, population served, technical facilities, and post-graduation support.
Kelly's research and outreach program has several themes and is informed by the disciplines of GIS science, geography, and landscape ecology. She links ecological patterns with process in spatially heterogeneous and dynamic landscapes -- providing data and expertise needed to understand current and projected drivers of landscape change in California. Her approach also embraces the evaluation of new technologies and development of best practices for ecological monitoring and landscape quantification. She is particularly interested in integrating high spatial resolution remotely sensed imagery and output from new active sensors with innovative image processing and spatial modeling techniques.
Many of Kelly's workshops combine instructor led classes with Internet-based workbooks. Both introductory and advanced classes are available.
For more information about webGIS, visit the GIIF website.
Related: Location, Location, Location - WebGIS puts science on the map (Berkeley Science Review).
“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.
]]> Along with his research, Song played intramural sports, volunteered as a CalSo counselor and a residential assistant, participated in a GIS project with Maggie Kelly, and volunteered through Cal Corps at Think College Now, a charter school in Oakland.He said the best thing about being a CNR student is the student advising.
“The already world renowned departments such as ESPM try to reach out across disciplines and that makes for very interesting course offerings and opportunities to interact with awesome faculty,” he said. “CNR pays extra attention to their students, something that other colleges may not necessarily be able to give.”
In the future, Song hopes to go to graduate school for ecology and public policy.
“I’m not sure where that will take me, but my current plan is for research to envelop the first half of my life and to dedicate the latter part of my life to environmental advocacy,” he said. “I also want to fit in time as a high school educator. Maybe I’ll go talk to Susan Kishi, she always seems to have the answers!”
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.
]]> He said the best way to fight global food shortages is through innovation and creative use of technology.“To me, the key element is adaptability,” he said. “That basically, we keep the environment going, and we fight to adapt in the most effective way. We need to have incentives against pollution, against waste, against greenhouse gases, against all this other stuff, but at the same time we need to allow people the freedom to be creative and to increase our resource space.”
To find out more, check out the full text of Zilberman’s interview with the Sacramento Bee and KTVU’s story on global food shortages featuring David Zilberman and Brian Wright.
The American Association of Geographers Remote Sensing Specialty Group was developed to foster an understanding of the remote sensing sciences. The Outstanding Contributions Award is given to members who make significant contributions to the field of remote sensing.
The award will be announced at the AAG Meeting in Boston at the RSSG business meeting on April 16th and presented at the AAG Awards Luncheon on April 19th.
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.
The researchers' most conservative forecast predicts that by 2010, there will be an increase of 600 million metric tons of carbon emissions in China over the country's levels in 2000. This growth from China alone would dramatically overshadow the 116 million metric tons of carbon emissions reductions pledged by all the developed countries in the Kyoto Protocol. (The protocol was never ratified in the United States, which was the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide until 2006, when China took over that distinction, according to numerous reports.)
Put another way, the projected annual increase in China alone over the next several years is greater than the current emissions produced by either Great Britain or Germany.
Based upon these findings, the authors say current global warming forecasts are "overly optimistic," and that action is urgently needed to curb greenhouse gas production in China and other rapidly industrializing countries.
The authors of the study, Maximillian Auffhammer, UC Berkeley assistant professor of agricultural and resource economics, and Richard Carson, UC San Diego professor of economics, based their findings upon pollution data from China's 30 provincial entities.
Auffhammer said this paper should serve as an alarm challenging the widely held belief that actions taken by the wealthy, industrialized nations alone represent a viable strategy towards the goal of stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.
"Making China and other developing countries an integral part of any future climate agreement is now even more important," said Auffhammer. "It had been expected that the efficiency of China's power generation would continue to improve as per capita income increased, slowing down the rate of CO2 emissions growth. What we're finding instead is that the emissions growth
rate is surpassing our worst expectations, and that means the goal of stabilizing atmospheric CO2 is going to be much, much harder to achieve."
Researchers traditionally calculate the CO2 emissions for a region or country from data on fossil fuel consumption. Existing models then use those emission figures and factor in such variables as population size, a society's affluence and technology developments to forecast the growth of
greenhouse gas emissions.
In explaining the startling differences in results from previous estimates for China's carbon emissions growth, the UC researchers point out that they used province-level figures in their analysis to obtain a more detailed picture of the country's CO2 emissions up to 2004.
"Everybody had been treating China as single country, but each of the country's provinces is larger than many European countries, both in geographic size and population," said Carson. "In addition, there is a wide range in economic development and wealth from one province to the next, as well as major differences in population growth, all of which has an effect on energy consumption that cannot be easily addressed in models based upon aggregate national data."
Since data on fossil fuel consumption is not reported at the province level in China, the researchers used waste gas emissions, available from China's state environmental protection administration reports, as a proxy for CO2 emissions in this paper.
Moreover, the researchers said, the majority of other studies forecasting China's CO2 emissions relied upon information from nearly a decade ago. During the 1990s, per capita income was growing faster than the use of energy in China, which typically relates to slower growth in carbon
emissions.
"A notable shift occurred in China around the year 2000, around the time when hope for an agreement with the U.S. on the Kyoto Protocol began to diminish along with external pressure for China to reduce its emissions," said Carson. "Energy use started to grow faster than income, and much of the energy that was used wasn't efficient."
The authors also pointed out that after 2000, China's central government began shifting the responsibility for building new power plants to provincial officials who had less incentive and fewer resources to build cleaner, more efficient plants, which save money in the long run but are
more expensive to construct.
"Government officials turned away from energy efficiency as an objective to expanding power generation as quickly as they can, and as cheaply as they can," said Carson. "Wealthier coastal provinces tended to build clean-burning power plants based upon the very best technology available, but many of the poorer interior provinces replicated inefficient 1950s Soviet technology."
"The problem is that power plants, once built, are meant to last for 40 to 75 years," said Carson. "These provincial officials have locked themselves into a long-run emissions trajectory that is much higher than people had anticipated. Our forecast incorporates the fact that much of China is now stuck with power plants that are dirty and inefficient."
Research funding for the study came from the University of California's Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation.
]]>The College of Natural Resources Citation is CNR's highest award, honoring individuals, couples, groups or organizations such as donors, volunteers, alumni, advisory board members, or friends of the College who have made extraordinary contributions to the CNR community.
Recipients are honored for their extraordinary commitment of time, sharing their expertise, advocacy and outreach, and/or private support to the College, its students, and its programs. The Citation recognizes those who have made a significant impact and have demonstrated an exceptional commitment the mission of the College.
In 2007, the award was bestowed upon Jim Lugg and Professor David Zilberman.
Criteria For Nominations:
Alumnus John Muir Laws, CRS '89, featured in The Washington Post:
He took his first hike into the Sierra Nevada, the landscape of his obsession, while still in the womb. His parents named him John Muir Laws. He once spent a week searching for a single perfect orchid to paint. He says, "I am constantly amazed by things." Such as? "The diversity of chipmunks." He is not joking. He cares about newts. If asked, he does an excellent imitation of a startled vole. He has opinions about beetles.
This fall, he published "The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada." It is 366 pages long and contains 2,800 illustrations, each painted by Laws. The new field guide, already praised by outdoor connoisseurs as a naturalist's bible, begins with "Small Fungi Growing on Wood" (specifically, Calocera cornea, the staghorn jelly fungus) and ends with stars (the night sky at winter solstice, Dec. 22). It is small enough to slip into your pocket but includes 1,700 species of flowers, trees, bugs, frogs, snails, skinks, birds, fish, rodents. It took him six years. The world needs more of this -- this kind of sustained, informed, deep gee-whizdom....
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This week, Slate.com's Joel Waldfogel considers "The Tiger Woods Effect -- How Tiger throws off golf's incentive structure."
Strong competitors are generally thought to bring out the best in everyone, but what if the competition is so strong it makes the top prize feel out of reach? Can strong competition actually undermine a reward structure? A new study by Jennifer Brown of UC Berkeley provides an answer to this question by looking at the world of professional golf, with Tiger Woods playing the role of the strong competitor.
Zubin Jelveh's Odd Numbers blog on Conde Nast Portfolio.com first noted the work on the "(Adverse) Effect of Competing with Superstars."
]]>by Dean Keith Gilless
Frozen pipes never concern San Francisco residents, but Minnesotans insulate the pipes around their homes every winter. The West Nile virus scares many Californians but doesn't alarm Scandinavians at all. Where you are in the world goes a long way toward determining the things you worry about.
Some Californians shy away from using wood for fear of contributing to the deforestation so frequently associated with global warming. But relying on imported goods means burning fossil fuels to bring those goods to market, which increases greenhouse gas emissions. The arguments to promote "locally grown" are no more or less valid when considering one's consumption of lumber and other forest products.
Many tropical forests, however, are disappearing and adversely affecting global warming. This deforestation follows a classic pattern: It starts with logging, but harvesting in and of itself does not necessarily result in an increase of greenhouse gas emissions. What happens to the harvested material, the material left behind and the way the land is used after harvesting, all factor into determining whether or not greenhouse gas emissions increase.
Trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, store the carbon in wood fibers and release the oxygen. If the trees become lumber, plywood, furniture or other wood products and the land is replanted, there is a net reduction of carbon emissions and the cycle of carbon absorption continues. If the forest is cleared, the wood burned in open piles and the land converted to non-forest uses, there is a net increase in carbon emissions.
The typical pattern in the tropics has been to clear the forest for agriculture, which can lead to a decrease in soil fertility before the land is ultimately converted to cattle pasture. A modern twist on this model involves clearing the forest for biofuel cultivation, especially sugar cane for ethanol.
Either way, the result is an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, but not one tied to California's consumption of wood. In fact, Chinese markets have a far more direct impact on tropical forests than California does. Our consumption tends to affect the Pacific Northwest, Canada and our own forestlands more than the tropics.
Still, Californians may want to examine the impact of their consumption on global warming and the world's ecosystems.
Consumers choosing to use less wood to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, for instance, may have the exact opposite effect. Alternative nonrenewable building materials such as steel, concrete and plastic emit greenhouse gases during their manufacture.
There's also the ethical question to consider regarding whether it's appropriate to export the impact of our consumption - that is, is it OK to meet our demands with someone else's resources? Foresters on California's private lands adhere to some of the highest environmental standards in the world. State law protects water quality, wildlife habitat and soils, and our forestlands are managed using advanced technology and science. Our practices mean forestry removes carbon and conserves resources more efficiently in California than in most corners of the globe.
Yet California imports about 75 percent of the wood used in the state. That means a lot of wood we use is coming from places where Californians have no say over environmental practices.
As consumers look to make "green" choices and policymakers struggle to define markets that might provide a financial incentive to store more carbon in forests, it would be wise to recognize that wood is a renewable resource and forests are inextricably integrated into California's economy. Dozens of communities are dependent on sustaining forests for their quality of life.
Consumers have clear options and will send signals to the marketplace by virtue of their purchases. Choosing California grown wood can help remove greenhouse gases from our air, encourage the planting of more trees and keep our forests healthy for generations. It will also keep the impact of our consumption close to home.
Global warming has focused attention on California's forests in an unprecedented manner. Time will tell if Californians will support sustainability with actions, not just words.
This OpEd originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on Jan. 17, 2008.
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