Award Winning ESPM Associate Professor Creates Cutting Edge Workshop
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.
CNR Environmental Science Major Awarded Fulbright Scholarship
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.
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.
After the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman tsunami, hundred of thousands of survivors struggled to put their lives back together. "After The Wave" looks into the lives of villagers in Phang Nga province in Thailand, almost three years after the tsunami. The documentary also focuses on the efforts of a grassroots non-profit organization led by CNR alumnus Bodhi Garrett, which has helped the local population move forward in practical ways to rebuild their local communities.
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....
Cooperative Extension Specialist Appointed to State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection
Gary Nakamura, Cooperative Extension specialist and Co-Director for the Center of Forestry, was appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger to the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection. He has served on the board since 2007 and has been a forestry specialist for CNR since 1985. Nakamura previously worked for the U.S. Forest Service and Champion International Corp.
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.
Mark Tanouye receives award to investigate brain diseases
Mark A. Tanouye, professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, recently received one of six 2008 Neuroscience of Brain Disorders Awards from the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience.
$5.2 million grant from Moore Foundation funds ambitious project to barcode an entire ecosystem
In the middle of the South Pacific, about 12 miles west of Tahiti, is a tropical island that soon will emerge as a model ecosystem, thanks to the efforts of a U.S.-French research team led by University of California, Berkeley, biologists.
Moorea, home of the UC Berkeley Richard B. Gump South Pacific Research Station and France's Centre de Recherches Insulaires et Observatoire de l'Environnement (CRIOBE), will be the site of an ambitious project to create a comprehensive inventory of all non-microbial life on the island. Supported by a new $5.2 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Moorea Biocode Project over the next three years will send researchers climbing up jagged peaks, trekking through lush forests and diving down to coral reefs to sample the French Polynesian island's animal and plant life.
Exploring issues of race, land, and identity, geographer Carolyn Finney finds a place for herself in ESPM
“People often ask me, how did you come up with this subject?” says Carolyn Finney, assistant professor of society and the environment. “And part of it was academic — I’m reading stuff in classes, I’m not seeing very much at all in geography about African Americans and the environment, that interaction. And when I do it’s about environmental justice, which is kind of a narrowly defined experience of the environment.
“But I’m in many ways more interested in the public conversation,” she adds. “How are we having this conversation in the newspapers, on TV, who are we seeing, who are we not seeing, what are the stereotypes?”
Fire, once a key phenomenon in the balance of forest ecosystems, has gone rogue, thanks to years of detrimental land-use policy. Now, Scott Stephens and his band of pyromaniacs are restoring forests and setting the record straight.
CNR Faculty and Students Combat Southern California Wildfires
From fighting wildfires in the field to predicting the role of the Santa Ana winds, CNR students and faculty have proven to be an invaluable resource in combating the more than a dozen fires that raged in Southern California in the past weeks.
Max Moritz, a fire ecologist and assistant professor of environmental science, policy and management, has been featured in The New York Times for his research on mapping the land susceptible to wildfires and USA Today describing homeowners’ roles in fighting and preventing wildfires.
The Sierra Club lauds UC Berkeley for Society and Environment major
CNR's new Society and Environment major helped propel the University of California system to the #4 slot in Sierra magazine's new story on "green" colleges and universities. The feature, "Ten that Get It", in its November/December issue also congratulates the UC system on its "green policy."
"When such a large and important educational institution takes such significant, systemic steps toward addressing global warming it can’t help but influence the thinking of many tens of thousands of students,” said Bob Sipchen, the magazine’s editor-in-chief. “If students carry these strong environmental values back to their communities and into their careers, UC’s initiative will reverberate globally."
ESPM grad student interviewed by NPR, describes fighting fire
Rachel Smith, a graduate student in Environmental Science, Policy and Management with the Moritz Lab, was recently interviewed by NPR about her experiences fighting fire in Southern California.
Excerpted from the interview:
"As we work, the forest shadows deepen. The temperature drops. The humidity soars. Gradually, the fire is cooling. By the time we reach the cedar, it's past midnight. Our incident commander decides to knock off for a few hours before we try to cut down the dangerous tree. We spend the night spiked out inside the fireline, nestled in a burned-over hollow. I sleep with my boots on, just in case."
CNR Student Receives Environmental Leadership Award
By Yasmin Anwar, UC Berkeley Media Relations
A UC Berkeley student is among six young North American environmental leaders to win a 2007 Brower Youth Award for her work in boosting funding for environmental sustainability on the UC Berkeley campus.
Rachel Barge, 21, a junior majoring in conservation and resource studies and minoring in forestry, has been honored for spearheading such campus projects as The Green Initiative Fund (TGIF), which finances clean energy and transportation, water conservation and improved recycling and composting programs.
"A professor of environmental science, policy, and management, insect biologist Rosemary Gillespie’s studies of spider evolution have carried her from the misty moors of Scotland to islands across the Pacific. Her analyses of island colonization, spider-style, have demonstrated that organisms invade virgin territory, blossom into new species, and establish communities in a predictable pattern."
Claire Kremen, a conservation biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, whose applied research advances the fields of ecology, biodiversity and agriculture, has been named a MacArthur Fellow, one of 24 nationwide "genius" award recipients announced Tuesday (Sept. 25) by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
By Bill Dennison, Cal Forestry alum & past president of the California Forestry Association
The U.S. Forest Service recently became the first federal agency to register with the California Climate Action Registry, a first step to track greenhouse gas emissions attributable to global climate change from U.S. Forest Service operations.
According to research conducted by ESPM Professor Gordon Frankie as well as Kremen, the solution may be your garden. Urban and suburban gardens can provide refuge for native species of wild bees driven from their natural habitat.
What you can do to fight global warming and spark a movement
A new book co-edited by a CNR alumna attempts to answer a question familiar to anyone concerned with climate change:
"What can I do?"
Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement, co-edited by Sissel Waage, ESPM Ph.D. '00, features a wide array of authors ranging from activists to scholars to students, who each discuss what the average person can do to turn their private concerns into public action.
Sankar Sridaran just graduated from CNR in May, but he is already setting out to make a difference in the world. The molecular environmental biology major and SPUR and honors student was chosen for a competitive fellowship working for the Parasitic Diseases Division at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta.
Sridaran’s work at CDC Atlanta will focus on the development and assessment of molecular markers for drug resistance in malaria causing Plasmodia. He says, “The project was so appealing to me because it is a perfect combination of the interest I developed in evolution while working on my thesis project with Dr. Specht but also integrates my interest in public health and my other long term career goals.”
On August 3, 2007, graduate student Nathaniel Gerhart died in a fatal accident while conducting fieldwork in Indonesia. He was 32.
An NSF Fellow in Indonesia, as well as a devoted naturalist, birdwatcher and frisbee player, Gerhart was researching rain forest conservation for his Ph.D. in ESPM.
Services and memorials have been held in Jakarta and in New York, with the New York memorial available via webcast here.
Friends and colleagues will host an on-campus memorial on Sept 23 at 2 p.m., at the Faculty Club.
Maggi Kelly to be inducted into the California Hall of Fame
Nina "Maggi" Kelly, along with eight other former Cal student-athletes, has been selected for induction into the California Athletic Hall of Fame.
Kelly is an associate specialist in Cooperative Extension, adjunct associate professor of ecosystem sciences, and director for the Geospatial Imaging & Informatics Facility.
She played for the Cal women's water polo team at the club level from 1983-87 before it was elevated to varsity status. A member of the U.S. National team for 10 years (1987-94, 1997-98), she competed in four World Championships and was named the USA Water Polo Female Athlete of the Year in 1992. Kelly was also the top U.S. goal-scorer at the World Championships in Rome in 1994.
Inducted into the U.S. Water Polo Hall of Fame in 2006, Kelly was a part of three national club championships while playing for the Bears. After receiving her bachelor's degree in geography, Kelly earned a master's degree from North Carolina in 1991 and a Ph.D. from Colorado in 1996.
VIDEO: Claire Kremen and Gordon Frankie on Better Bees
California farmers depend on bees to pollinate the state's multi-million dollar fruit and nut crops, but last season thousands of bee colonies disappeared around the country.
David Winickoff, assistant professor of bioethics and society, has been selected to be a Greenwall Faculty Scholar in Bioethics after an extensive process of reviews and interviews.
Winickoff will be working on a project called “Bioethics and Property Relations in University Life Science Research.” The Greenwall Faculty Scholar Program is a prestigious career development award to enable young faculty members to carry out research in the field of bioethics.
Carolyn Merchant Awarded Berkeley Research Futures Grant
Professor Carolyn Merchant from the department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management has been awarded the spring 2007 Berkeley Research Futures Grant. The grant, funded by the office of the chancellor for research as well as CNR, will provide $50,000 in support of Merchant’s work, “Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Emerging Technologies.”
Two CNR postdoctoral students have been named Miller Research Fellows for 2007.
Tessa Burch-Smith from the department of Plant and Microbial Biology and Corrie Saux Moreau from the department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management were nominated on the basis of their academic achievement and the potential of their scientific research.
Burch-Smith, who will be working with faculty sponsor Professor Patricia Zambryski, is studying plasmodesmata aperture regulation in plant cells.
Saux Moreau, sponsored by Professors Craig Moritz (Integrative Biology) and George Roderick (ESPM), is studying the population structure and ecology of ants in the Australian wet tropics.
Executive Associate Dean, Departmental Leadership Announced
Stephen Welter, professor of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management, has been named executive associate dean of CNR beginning August 1.
Welter is a former chair of the division of Organisms & Environment, recipient of the Academic Senate’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and a respected researcher in the field of insect biology. As executive associate dean, he will represent the College on the ANR Program Council, oversee the Office of Instruction and Student Affairs, and represent the Dean’s Office with authority equivalent to that of Interim Dean Keith Gilless.
Departmental leadership changes, effective July 1, were also announced.
Commencement address by Dr. Florence Wambugu, CEO, Africa Harvest
Graduation day is a significant and memorable event in one's life time. It marks a transition from one phase of life to another. It is, therefore, an immense privilege for me to be here today, to celebrate with you this significant day for the graduands, faculty, administration and parents.
Professor J. Keith Gilless has been appointed interim dean of the College of Natural Resources effective July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2008. Gilless joined the faculty in1983 and is professor of Forest Economics and Management jointly in the departments of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and of Agricultural and Resource Economics. He is currently serving as the executive associate dean of the College and will succeed Dean Paul Ludden, who has accepted the position of provost and vice president for academic affairs at Southern Methodist University.
Devastating over 1 million oak trees across Northern California in the past 10 years, Sudden Oak Death is a killer with no cure. But biologists including CNR's Matteo Garbelotto are looking to the trees' genetics for a solution.
Public curiosity about bees kept UC Berkeley graduate student Alex Harmon-Threatt on her toes at an annual wildflower festival at the Sunol-Ohlone Regional Wilderness, south of Livermore, on April 7. Kids and adults alike peered through her magnifying glass at a collection of native wild bee species on display: bumblebees, mining bees, sunflower bees, leaf-cutter bees, yellow-faced bees — even bees that "land on you lightly and drink your sweat," she told incredulous young visitors.
Forestry Student’s Senior Project Applies New Technology to Old Data
John Dingman’s three-ring binder for his senior honors project overflows with data ranging from topographic maps to digital elevation models to tree cores. Dingman, a senior forestry major at CNR, spent the summer of 2006 trekking through Mount Diablo State Park to collect firsthand data for his project on vegetation type mapping using GIS.
Although hiking from sunup to sundown through ticks and scrub was often exhausting, Dingman talks about his research with a familiarity and enthusiasm that stems from a sense of personal accomplishment. He says, “I was surprised by how much I really enjoyed working on this project. I appreciated the time I spent outside collecting the data and analyzing the data to develop my own algorithms to reduce GIS spatial error.”His project is part of a unique CNR program called Sponsored Projects for Undergraduate Research, or SPUR Dingman says SPUR was a positive experience because, “it allowed me as an undergraduate to design a research project, and apply my knowledge to study vegetation change.” Through SPUR, Dingman worked with Professor Maggi Kelly of the Kelly Research and Outreach Lab to develop his plan and research methods.
It’s a simple question that I often get asked about an endangered species: “What caused it to decline?” but I find it to be one of the hardest to answer without giving a hand-waiving response. Determining causes of decline for a species based on data-driven conclusions rather than informed opinion is challenging because it first requires figuring out which demographic rate is depressed and then requires evidence linking it to one or more causes. Yet, to provide clear recommendations for recovering a threatened species, is there any more meaningful question to answer than what is causing it to decline?
Mine Runoff Continues To Provide Clues To Microbial Diversification
Pink slime at the surface of water trickling through an old mine in California is proving to be a treasure for researchers in their quest to learn more about how bacterial communities exist in nature.
Microorganisms thriving in toxic conditions were recovered from a natural biofilm growing at the Richmond Mine in Iron Mountain, California."
A letter published in Nature shows that it is possible to follow what microorganisms are doing in their natural environment by identifying the range of proteins that they produce. The technique, utilized in a microbial community thriving in battery acid-like streams underground at Richmond Mine near Redding, Calif., combines recently developed ways to sequence microbial genes with methods to identify the range of proteins from specific microbial members.
From The San Francisco Chronicle [original URL]
By Alison Rood
When Professor Gordon Frankie wants to impress schoolchildren with the importance of bees, he lays out an array of foods such as berries, grapes, pears and chocolate alongside a couple of dried-out tortillas and rice cakes and asks them which foods they prefer.
"Invariably the kids go for the fruits and chocolate," he said. "Then I tell them: In a world without bees, the only choice they'd have would be the dried-out tortillas or rice cakes, since wheat and rice are self-pollinated. Even chocolate, from the cacao plant, depends on the pollination of bees. That gets their attention."
Frankie, an entomologist at UC Berkeley and a specialist in the behavior of native bees, has been the leader of a decadelong urban bee research project. By documenting bee diversity and populations in urban gardens throughout California, he's discovering which flowering plants attract native bees and determining whether urban gardens can support bees. He said the declining native bee population is comparable to global warming in terms of a potential ecological catastrophe.
To better understand why an endangered seabird's numbers plummeted over the past century, researchers at CNR turned to museums for help.
By studying marbled murrelet specimens collected around the early 1900s, biologists now have reconstructed the seabird's rates of reproduction and survival before its dramatic decline, providing for the first time a baseline measure of health by which contemporary populations can be compared.
Looking out across an expanse of oak-grass savanna from the top of a 65-foot research tower near Ione in Amador County, biometeorologist Dennis Baldocchi [professor of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at] UC Berkeley sums up his part in the effort to get a more accurate picture of climate change.
"We want to see how the earth breathes, essentially," he said.
One of the pieces of the climate puzzle that hasn't come into focus yet is this flux of carbon between the earth and the atmosphere. How this interchange will be affected by changes in sunlight, temperature, rainfall and soil moisture is still a big gap in the climate models.
Study of rotting leaves could lead to more accurate climate models
Over the past decade, in numerous field sites throughout the world, mesh bags of leaf and root litter sat exposed to the elements, day and night, throughout the four seasons, gradually rotting away.
Now, those bags of decomposing organic matter have allowed a research team led by scientists from CNR and Colorado State University to produce an elegant and simple set of equations to calculate the nitrogen released into the soil during decomposition, which in turn could significantly improve the accuracy of global climate change models.
Across the board, CNR doctoral programs ranked among the top
The faculty of each of CNR's departments have been ranked among the top 5 in their fields, according to a new "Scholarly Productivity Index," with the Plant Biology program ranked #1 in the nation.
The rankings, assessed by the private company Academic Analytics, are based on measurements of faculty productivity in terms of publications, federal-grant dollars awarded, and honors and awards.
Data from the 2005 rankings -- which are not without their share of controversy -- were published and explained in depth in The Chronicle of Higher Education (available by subscription here).
UC Berkeley doctoral programs from within CNR received impressive rankings:
For 11 years, Jill Banfield has collected and studied the microbes that slime the floors of mines and convert iron to acid, a common source of stream pollution around the world.
Imagine her surprise, then, when research scientist Brett Baker discovered three new microbes living amidst the bacteria she thought she knew well. All three were so small - the size of large viruses - as to be virtually invisible under a microscope, and belonged to a totally new phylum of Archaea, microorganisms that have been around for billions of years.
Researchers barcode DNA of 6,000 fungi species in Venice museum
In the storerooms of a Venice, Italy, museum, a University of California, Berkeley, scholar and Italian experts are at work on a rare collection, but the objects aren't Renaissance paintings or the art of ancient glassblowers. Instead, the team is collecting samples from the largest and best preserved collection of fungi in Italy to create an unprecedented DNA database.
The perception that fruits and vegetables are too expensive helps explain why Fresno County farmworkers eat too few of these foods, according to Christy Getz, a UC Berkeley specialist who focuses on natural resource-dependent workers and communities.
Undergrad Matt Stuckey uses DNA to understand butterfly evolution in the Sierra
Matthew Stuckey, fourth year in Environmental Economics and Policy and Conservation Resource Studies, is researching how the butterfly Colias behrii colonized the Sierra Nevada.
Through mentorship with Professor George Roderick and graduate student Sean Schoville, Stuckey has been working on cloning nuclear genes to assess genetic variation within and among populations of C. behrii.
Roderick’s team is using genetics to understand how organisms have colonized new areas. SPUR funds have helped provide chemicals and lab supplies necessary for molecular cloning – a technique essential for Stukey’s research.
The SPUR program also benefits the mentors who work closely with undergraduates on their research. For Schoville, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, having Stuckey's help has been a huge benefit. “These undergraduates are some of the brightest students,” he says. “Working with them gives me a great opportunity to see their minds grow and mature.”
Chancellor's Outstanding Staff Award honors ESPM Grad Advisor
Student-affairs officer Richard Battrick drew a collective nomination from all the grad students in his department, who see him as a "beloved advocate, counselor, and mentor." Writes nominator Jennifer Imamura: "I've never seen anyone so adept at solving bureaucratic messes, and who does so so willingly."
Battrick has made himself an invaluable resource in his five years at ESPM, having "mastered the areas of interest of nearly all of the 80 faculty members, the courses offered to students each semester, and indeed the names and faces of each of the 200 graduate students," his nominators say. More than one student said that meeting Battrick was an inducement to attend Berkeley, because he made an immediate positive impression with his "warmth, extreme helpfulness, and genuineness" during the application process.
Students frequently line up to see the adviser, who keeps a bowl of candy on his desk for his visitors, welcoming them with "his reassuring smile and his entire persona, one ideally suited for calming even the most distressed graduate student panicked over a late registration fee or a missing letter in their dissertation."
The World Technology Network has honored Professor Inez Fung with the World Technology Prize for the Environment. Fung is co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment, professor of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Earth & Planetary Science.
Pollinators help one-third of world's crop production
Pollinators such as bees, birds and bats affect 35 percent of the world's crop production, increasing the output of 87 of the leading food crops worldwide, finds a new study published Oct. 25 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences and co-authored by a conservation biologist from ESPM.
The study is the first global estimate of crop production that is reliant upon animal pollination. It comes one week after a National Research Council (NRC) report detailed the troubling decline in populations of key North American pollinators, which help spread the pollen needed for fertilization of such crops as fruits, vegetables, nuts, spices and oilseed.
Garrison Sposito honored by American Chemical Society
Garrison Sposito was honored in September at a four-day symposium of the American Chemical Society, at which more than 60 scientific papers were presented on the theme of applying rigorous methods in physical chemistry to understand complex processes in environmental systems, a major thrust in Professor Sposito’s scientific career. Next year, a special issue of the geochemistry journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta will be published in honor of his research accomplishments.
Fire researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are launching a new set of interactive online tools to help homeowners, community leaders and researchers assess the risk of wildfire damage to their homes and communities.
The interactive site, officially called the Fire Information Engine Toolkit, debuted Wednesday, Sept. 13 and can be found at http://firecenter.berkeley.edu/toolkit. It was developed by researchers at the Center for Fire Research and Outreach, based at UC Berkeley's College of Natural Resources. Users can type in a specific address to see if they live in a region at risk for wildfires, as well as obtain information about historic fires that have occurred in the area since 1950.
Homeowners can also use the site to get a science-based assessment of their vulnerability to wildfire based upon the answers they provide on an online form.
The Whale and the Wind Turbine: Biomimicry in Design
October 25, 2006
4:00-5:30pm
Andersen Auditorium at Haas Business School
Biomimicry is a design discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature's time-tested patterns and strategies, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf. The goal is to create products, processes, and policies---new ways of living---that are well-adapted to life on earth over the long haul.
Janine Benyus, the author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, will describe what's new in the field, describe deep patterns of biological design, and engage us in a discussion of what's possible when we invite nature to the design table.
One of the practices that many modern cultivation mutualists (that is, farmers) do to help their crops grow is provide domesticated honeybees to pollinate them. The bees flit from male to female flowers, carrying pollen between them. Without such pollination, crops like hybrid sunflowers, grown for their seed, would fail.
Farmers often rent honeybee colonies from apiculturists. But honeybees aren’t particularly efficient pollinators. For one thing, they don’t always flit enough between male and female. And the number of managed honeybee colonies is in decline in the United States and elsewhere because of overuse of pesticides and other problems. So one goal for researchers is to see if honeybee pollination can be enhanced.
A study [found here] by Sarah S. Greenleaf of Princeton and Claire Kremen of the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrates one factor that can improve the efficiency of honeybee pollinators: the presence of wild bees.
"The idea had been kicked around for a long time," said Lynn Huntsinger, a professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. "We felt we weren't meeting the needs of students (in the department) more interested in the social sciences."
Huntsinger said the major will particularly help prepare students for work in at a nonprofit organization to fix environmental problems.
"Not only would they have the social science skills, but they would understand the biological dimensions," she said. "We need people like that in the world."
The new major enhances CNR's strength as a college poised to solve environmental problems. But while the story's headline dubs CNR as the "Environmental College," the S&E major is really one piece of a much broader landscape focused on sustaining environmental, economic, and human health.
High-elevation studies look at climate change in the Sierra
From the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle:
Some of the world's best evidence of global warming was buried under 18 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada last winter, and [UC Berkeley Forestry alumna] Connie Millar was determined to dig it out.
Millar, a veteran field scientist for the U.S. Forest Service, sweated uphill with three colleagues on a July morning, headed deep into Lundy Canyon, just north of Mono Lake, one of the few access points to the Sierra crest along its rugged eastern flank....
This story also quotes Forestry alumnus Bob Coats.
The U.S. Forest Service has dedicated the first new experimental forest in California in 40 years. The Sagehen Forest is in the Lake Tahoe Basin, eight miles outside of Truckee. Bay Area ABC affiliate KGO-7 looks at what it is all about.
An Associated Press news story that appeared today in over 100 sources nationwide quotes ESPM doctoral student Dan Fahey on the health effects of depleted uranium ammunition on U.S. veterans.
Performing high-altitude research on global warming
From the SF Chronicle's science writer Carl Hall, featuring CNR alumnae Ann Dennis and Connie Millar:
Stately corpses of bristlecone pine trees, some dead for 2,000 years but still refusing to lie down, stood watch last week as botanist Ann Dennis and a crew of naturalists stepped off plots on the shoulders of 14,246-foot White Mountain Peak near the Nevada border.
Working more than 10,000 feet above the sunbaked floor of the Owens Valley, the scientists were transforming one of California's highest mountaintops into a living laboratory of climate change.
Dennis and her colleagues are part of a global network of mountain-climbing researchers, all using precisely the same methods to observe the impact of global warming at high altitudes on five continents simultaneously....
Dramatic natural phenomena such as huricanes and heat waves have renewed the mainstream media's interest in global warming, and several excellent articles have recently feature UC Berkeley climate change scientists.
Gary Nakamura, Cooperative Extension specialist and Co-Director for the Center of Forestry, was appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger to the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection. He has served on the board since 2007 and has been a forestry specialist for CNR since 1985. Nakamura previously worked for the U.S. Forest Service and Champion International Corp.
Claire Kremen, a conservation biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, whose applied research advances the fields of ecology, biodiversity and agriculture, has been named a MacArthur Fellow, one of 24 nationwide "genius" award recipients announced Tuesday (Sept. 25) by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
A new book co-edited by a CNR alumna attempts to answer a question familiar to anyone concerned with climate change:
Nina "Maggi" Kelly, along with eight other former Cal student-athletes, has been selected for induction into the 
Welter is a former chair of the division of Organisms & Environment, recipient of the Academic Senate’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and a respected researcher in the field of insect biology. As executive associate dean, he will represent the College on the ANR Program Council, oversee the Office of Instruction and Student Affairs, and represent the Dean’s Office with authority equivalent to that of Interim Dean Keith Gilless.
Graduation day is a significant and memorable event in one's life time. It marks a transition from one phase of life to another. It is, therefore, an immense privilege for me to be here today, to celebrate with you this significant day for the graduands, faculty, administration and parents.
Professor J. Keith Gilless has been appointed interim dean of the College of Natural Resources effective July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2008. Gilless joined the faculty in1983 and is 
Although hiking from sunup to sundown through ticks and scrub was often exhausting, Dingman talks about his research with a familiarity and enthusiasm that stems from a sense of personal accomplishment. He says, “I was surprised by how much I really enjoyed working on this project. I appreciated the time I spent outside collecting the data and analyzing the data to develop my own algorithms to reduce GIS spatial error.”His project is part of a unique CNR program called 
Looking out across an expanse of oak-grass savanna from the top of a 65-foot research tower near Ione in Amador County, 
Matteo Garbelotto of UC Berkeley prepares a fungal sample from the Venice Museum of Natural History to send to his lab for sequencing and analysis.
Matthew Stuckey, fourth year in Environmental Economics and Policy and Conservation Resource Studies, is researching how the butterfly Colias behrii colonized the Sierra Nevada.
Student-affairs officer Richard Battrick drew a collective nomination from all the grad students in his department, who see him as a "beloved advocate, counselor, and mentor." Writes nominator Jennifer Imamura: "I've never seen anyone so adept at solving bureaucratic messes, and who does so so willingly."
The World Technology Network has honored Professor Inez Fung with the World Technology Prize for the Environment. Fung is co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment, professor of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Earth & Planetary Science.
Farmers often rent honeybee colonies from apiculturists. But honeybees aren’t particularly efficient pollinators. For one thing, they don’t always flit enough between male and female. And the number of managed honeybee colonies is in decline in the United States and elsewhere because of overuse of pesticides and other problems. So one goal for researchers is to see if honeybee pollination can be enhanced.