Recycling trees onsite can sequester carbon, save water and increase crop yields, making it a climate-smart practice for California’s irrigated almond orchards. Professor Amelie Gaudin, Plant Sciences, UC Davis, worked with postdocs, grad students, and Cooperative Extension colleagues.
When hikers returned to UC Davis Stebbins Cold Canyon Reserve in 2016, a year after the Wragg wildfire, many expected to see a devastated landscape. They did, but many were also energized about the new changes they saw. Allie Weill, then a graduate student with Professor Andrew Latimer, Plant Sciences, published a paper on this.
Forest ecologist Malcolm North, with USDA and UC Davis Plant Sciences, helps put Australia’s wildfires into a California context, and what can be learned.
Sierra Nevada forests are losing plant diversity due to high-severity fires, according to a study from the University of California, Davis. These fires are turning patches of forest into shrub fields — indefinitely, in some cases.
A new article in the journal Science – Fields on Fire: Alternatives to Crop Residue Burning in India – addresses the environmental problems associated with crop burning in India, and presents alternatives such as changing cropping systems and adopting different management practices. J.K. Ladha, Plant Sciences, UC Davis, is a co-author.
An article in California Agriculture addresses how critical research is underway to understand the consequences of the massive wave of tree mortality in the Sierra Nevada. Urgent dialogue has started among UC scientists, forest managers, and public agencies to manage the consequences of the unprecedented tree die-off and increase the resiliency of forests to future droughts.
Thinning forests and conducting prescribed burns may help preserve trees in future droughts and bark beetle epidemics expected under climate change. Thinning and prescribed fires reduced the number of trees that died during the bark beetle epidemic and drought that killed more than 129 million trees across the Sierra Nevada between 2012–2016.
