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.
Continue reading " $5.2 million grant from Moore Foundation funds ambitious project to barcode an entire ecosystem" »
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.
Continue reading "Spotlight On Scott Stephens" »
Two flora enthusiasts got the chance learn about cutting edge technology during a Geospatial Imaging and Informatics Facility workshop last week.
CNR graduate students Chuck Striplen and Danielle Svehla were awarded the GIIF workshop award for students and were invited to participate in the three day program free of cost. Hosted by the California Native Plant Society, the California Department of Fish and Game, and Aerial Information systems, the CNPS Vegetation mapping workshop was geared to teach participants both field research skills and computer based geospatial analysis.
Continue reading "Workshop Cultivates Grad Students' Interest in Vegetation Mapping" »
"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."
Read Kathleen Wong's fantastic story about Gillespie in the Berkeleyan.
Desirae Early and Ky Ngo were chosen last spring to participate in the 2007 Nissan-World Wildlife Fund Environmental Leadership Program which took them to Nashville, Washington D.C., and Brazil. Here, they share their experiences.
Ky Ngo:
In DC, we got the chance to meet many professionals who are involved in a broad range of environmental work—from someone at the World Bank to someone who works at Capitol Hill.
I loved the leadership training that we received in Washington DC. It really changed my life in that I realized what my strengths are and what I want to do in my future career. I finally accepted that you don't have to be a scientist to participate in conservation efforts. I fully realized my deep interest in green business and entrepreneurship and I now know that's where I want to put my energy and time.
Continue reading "CNR Students Share Experiences with WWF Fellowship" »
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.
The KQED science program Quest recently featured CNR ecologist Claire Kremen, and her research on bee pollination. In addition, an online-only special features the urban bees of entomologist Gordon Frankie.
Better Bees: Super Bee and Wild Bee
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.
Continue reading "Bees keep her busy as a, well, a bee" »
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.
Continue reading "Forestry Student’s Senior Project Applies New Technology to Old Data" »
In the News & Views blog of the Ecological Society of America, Professor Steve Beissinger discusses his and Zachariah Peery’s Feb 07article Reconstructing the historic demography of an endangered seabird.
He writes:
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?
Read Beissinger's blog full entry here.
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.
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| 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.
Continue reading "Mine Runoff Continues To Provide Clues To Microbial Diversification" »
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.
READ THE ARTICLE
From the Contra Costa Times:
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.
Continue reading "How the Earth breathes is key to climate change" »
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.
Continue reading "Study of rotting leaves could lead to more accurate climate models" »
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.
Continue reading "Shotgun sequencing finds nanoorganisms" »
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.
Continue reading "Pollinators help one-third of world's crop production" »
From the New York Times:
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.
Continue reading "The Efficiency of Bees" »
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.
Continue reading "California's New Experimental Forest (with video)" »
