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After learning in early 2017 that they had received research funding as members of a graduate student team, Sasha Kramer and Kelsey Bisson spent months planning the research cruise that would take place that December. But their plans changed when the Thomas Fire, which would become the largest California wildfire in history at that time, spread from Ventura to Santa Barbara County. The object of this part of their study was to describe the phytoplankton community, microscopic organisms that are foundational to the marine food web. Composed of several broad groups, including bacteria and single-celled algae, phytoplankton live in the sunlit upper regions of the ocean, not only feeding a diversity of animals in the Channel, from tiny zooplankton to whales, but also performing important roles in the ocean’s carbon and nutrient cycles. An…

The world needs more electricity. As populations grow, standards of living increase and more people gain access to modern conveniences, countries will need to expand their energy generation capacity. India, with its rapidly developing economy and a population of more than 1.3 billion, epitomizes this trend. The country finds itself at a crossroads regarding its energy future: Small decisions today will resound in the coming years. In their latest report, the Indian government set a target of 450 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030. For comparison, the country’s total energy generation capacity today is about 380 gigawatts, out of which 90 gigawatts are of renewable energy, not including large hydropower stations. How this plan shapes up will dictate how many fossil-fuel powerplants they can avoid building.

A global team of researchers set out to understand how human-made noise affects wildlife, from invertebrates to whales, in the oceans, and found overwhelming evidence that marine fauna, and their ecosystems, are negatively impacted by noise. This noise disrupts their behavior, physiology, reproduction and, in extreme cases, causes mortality. The researchers call for human-induced noise to be considered a prevalent stressor at the global scale and for policy to be developed to mitigate its effects.

Scientists at five western universities, including UC Santa Barbara, investigated the effects of human-driven climate change and more than a century of fire suppression, which has produced dense forests primed to burn. Their research, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, confirms the importance of both factors in driving wildfires, but revealed that their influence varies, even within the same region of the Western U.S.

Dan Reed, a research biologist at UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute, and his colleague Professor Hunter Lenihan, a professor at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, along with other researchers at UC Santa Barbara and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, sought to determine to what extent the spillover effect compensated for the fishing grounds incorporated into marine reserves. To this end, they leveraged catch reports from lobster fishermen as well as scientific surveys. Their results, published in Scientific Reports, affirm the benefits that MPAs confer to fisheries and ecosystems.

Researchers examined urchin populations inside and outside marine reserves, where protection from fishing should have enabled urchin predators to rebound and control their populations. But instead of finding fewer urchins, they found that one species was unaffected by the reserves, while the other flourished. Their work was supported by the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research program, and results appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. 

When it comes to predicting famines, researchers and relief agencies would ideally like indicators that can signal potential food insecurity before the growing season even begins. Fortunately, this is now possible thanks to research out of UC Santa Barbara’s Climate Hazards Center. A new paper published in PLOS ONE(link is external) reveals that the onset of the rainy season is an excellent predictor of agricultural drought, conditions that can lead to food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa. The center, a research partner of the Famine Early Warning Systems Network Team (FEWS NET) of the United States Agency for International Development (US AID), is already applying these insights to conditions in vulnerable areas, which seem to be headed for another tough year.

Human health and environmental health are intricately linked. For example, when the veterinary drug Diclofenac unintentionally caused mass vulture mortality in India, free-ranging dog populations increased with readily available carrion, and thus human rabies cases from rabid dog bites skyrocketed. The solution to this problem was to ban the use of Diclofenac, with the hopes that alternative veterinary drugs would allow vulture populations to rebound and human rabies risks to decrease--an “ecological lever” for improving environmental and human health. Solutions like this are in high demand by sustainability researchers and practitioners, but there is no central data repository for all such solutions. 

In the first study of its kind, Danielle Touma, with fellow Bren School researcher Samantha Stevenson and colleagues Flavio Lehner of Cornell University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and Sloan Coats from the University of Hawaii, have quantified competing anthropogenic influences on extreme fire weather risk in the recent past and into the near future. By disentangling the effects of those man-made factors the researchers were able to tease out the roles these activities have had in generating an increasingly fire-friendly climate around the world and the risk of extreme fire weather in decades to come.

Joining such notables as Nelson Mandela, Marie Curie and Adam Smith, industrial ecologist Sangwon Suh has become an invited member of the Royal Society of Arts. The organization, which traces its roots back to 1754 and the cusp of the industrial revolution, was founded to encourage the arts, manufacturing and commerce. In its invitation to Suh, the society cites his contributions to “positive social change, as well as alignment with our values of being open, optimistic, pioneering, rigorous and enabling.