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The latest issue of Breakthroughs, the Magazine of the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley, highlights the work of Assistant Cooperative Extension Specialists Dan Sanchez, Ellen Bruno, and Ted Grantham. Read the story here.

Increased frequency and severity of droughts threatens California’s endangered salmon population—but pools that serve as drought refuges could make the difference between life and death for these vulnerable fish. Read more in our new study, led by Ross Vander Vorste, published in Global Change Biology!

Human activities have caused flows in many of the Nation’s streams and rivers to be different from what they would be naturally. A new USGS study reports that, at a national scale, human management of land and water resources have modified natural patterns of streamflow along an estimated 1.2 million stream miles—more than one-third—of the Nation’s streams and rivers.

Hi! I am Zhenhua Sun, visiting Ph.D. student in the lab. During my stay I have been gathering data on water quality and macroinvertebrate community composition in ponds and wetlands across the globe. Our study areas and collaborators span Argentina, Canada, France, Ireland, Norway, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and the US!

In particular, we are asking whether natural, agricultural, and highway ponds differ in the contributions they make to landscape-scale biodiversity. In turn, this could in stormwater pond design, so that these elements of green infrastructure maximize ecosystem benefits.

Stay tuned for a forthcoming paper on the topic!

• The lab is full steam ahead this Fall 2019! We started scouting sites for our CADFW Delta restoring wetlands project, we are building traps for the field experiment at Pinnacles, and we are making progress in our data-driven projects (river-reservoir dynamics, CA drought, created wetlands, metacommunity stability).
• Guillermo and Kyle presented at the California chapter of the Society for Freshwater Science (CalSFS) – California Bioassessment Workgroup (CABW) meeting at UC Davis.
• Albert coauthored a review in Science, with SESYNC director Margaret Palmer, on the importance of flow regime for river ecosystem restoration. Check it out here! [see associated interview].
• The lab hosted Sebastien Rauch and Ekaterina Sokolova, who visited us from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.
• The lab also hosted John Sabo, director of Future H2O (Arizona State University), with whom we continue to collaborate on spectral methods and hydrologic regime shifts.
• Albert joined the editorial board of Conservation Letters, a leading journal on interdisciplinary conservation science.

More soon! 🙂

Jessie Moravek, Ph.D. student in the lab, gave a TEDx talk at the TEDxFulbrightGlasgow event last June, on hydropower development and its impacts on ecosystems and people. The talk is online now. Check it out here!

Interview with the PPIC Water Policy Center.

Interested in the environmental impacts of cannabis production? How are cannabis cultivators responding to California’s new legal market? What is the state of cannabis research in the University of California? For answers to these questions and more, check out the latest special issue of California Agriculture

• We welcome Jessie Moravek and Megan Pagliaro to the Ruhi Lab! Jessie is interested in studying the impacts of hydropower dams, and potential for mitigating them via reoperation and removal; and will be co-advised by Justin Brashares. Megan has been putting together an exciting research project on wetland restoration trajectories in the San Francisco Bay. Read more about them and their inspiring interests!
• We also look forward to hosting Tadeu Siqueira, Brazilian sabbatical visitor who received a FAPESP grant to research metacommunity dynamics under environmental fluctuations; as well as Ph.D. student Zhenhua Sun, who is visiting this Fall from Sweden to study biodiversity benefits of stormwater ponds. Welcome all!

The Ruhi Lab will receive funding from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, for the project ‘Reconnecting Delta food webs: evaluating the influence of tidal marsh restoration on energy flow and prey availability for native fishes’. This Fall we will start a 3-year project combining analyses of community composition, stable isotopes, and sensor time-series data, in collaboration with USGS and ICF, via State Water Contractors. More soon!