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According to a new study in the journal Science by researchers at UC Santa Barbara and UC Davis, greater water availability could “spoil” trees by reducing their adaptations to drought. “And that’s really critical to understand when we’re thinking about the global vulnerability of forest carbon stocks and forest health,” said ecologist Joan Dudney, an assistant professor at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management and in the Environmental Studies Program. “You don’t want to be a ‘spoiled’ tree when facing a major drought.”

About half of an average American building’s energy consumption is spent on heating and cooling. That’s a lot of money spent, fossil fuel burned and strain on an aging energy infrastructure during times of severe temperatures. 

It’s also a problem UC Santa Barbara researchers Charlie Xiao, Elliot Hawkes and Bolin Liao are hoping to make a dent in. In a paper in the journal Device, the trio present an adaptive tile, which when deployed in arrays on roofs, can lower heating bills in winter and cooling bills in summer, without the need for electronics.

Flames roared through Santa Barbara County in late 2017. UC Santa Barbara canceled classes, and the administration recommended donning an N95, long before the COVID pandemic made the mask a household item. Smoke and ash choked the air, but the Thomas Fire’s effects weren’t restricted to the land and sky. Huge amounts of ash settled into the oceans, leaving researchers to wonder what effect it might have on marine life.

Now scientists at UC Santa Barbara have discovered that wildfire ash adds nutrients to marine systems, and that microbes at the base of the food web can use these nutrients to grow. This contrasts with the impacts of ash in freshwater ecosystems, where it is often toxic. The results appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B…

As California, the U.S. and the world work to make good on commitments to conserve 30% of oceans and lands by 2030, all strategies are on the table — and under the microscope. When it comes to the ocean, one valuable tool is marine protected areas (MPAs), regions that are defined, designated and managed for long-term conservation. Among other benefits, MPAs protect habitats and promote species diversity. They also hold value for communities and industries.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute have published a new study on the impact of MPAs on the recreational scuba diving industry in California’s Northern Channel Islands. Their conclusions provide strong evidence of the benefit of MPAs for the scuba…

The rising temperatures brought on by human-driven atmospheric warming are bringing big changes to agricultural life in the Southwest. According to a recent paper by researchers at UC Santa Barbara and UC Merced, “increased temperatures from human-caused climate change are having persistent and damaging impacts on vegetation productivity, with significant implications for ranchers and other land users in the region.”

“If African countries created a ‘fish cartel’ to sell fishing rights to foreign vessels, they could increase their fish biomass by 16% and make 23% more in profits,” said lead author Gabriel Englander,  who initiated this work as a postdoctoral researcher in UCSB’s Environmental Markets Lab (emLab) in collaboration with Professor Christopher Costello, in the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. Englander is now a research economist at the World Bank.

With both plastic production and waste projected to escalate to unmanageable levels by 2050, scientists at UC Santa Barbara and UC Berkeley have launched a new AI-powered online tool that provides unprecedented insight into how the nations of the world can combine policies to end plastic pollution with the United Nations global plastics treaty, currently under negotiation. In March 2022, more than 175 nations agreed to develop the international, legally-binding treaty to end plastic pollution. Sixty of these nations, from the United Arab Emirates to Palau, have committed to achieving this by 2040.

Despite significant growth across the system, the University of California’s carbon emissions now are 30% lower than they were in 2009. Those reductions are the result of concerted efforts at every campus, including energy efficiency programs that have saved UC more than $400 million in energy costs, and the deployment of more than 100 on-campus solar projects.

At UC Santa Barbara, total greenhouse gas emissions in 2022 were 67% below 1990 levels — reductions primarily attributed to investments in energy efficiency and to strategic procurement of electricity generation from low-carbon sources. Today, 93% of UC Santa Barbara’s remaining operational greenhouse gas emissions are a result of combustion of natural gas on campus for heating and cooling.

Two new grants from the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases will support innovative research to advance the understanding of how climate change and extreme weather influence HIV-related health outcomes around the world.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH), UC Santa Barbara, UC San Francisco and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine will examine the effects of extreme weather events, such as heavy rainfall, hurricanes and drought, on short and long-term outcomes of over 2 million people living with HIV who have enrolled in HIV care at clinics in 44 countries around the world.

They specialize in different subjects, but biologist Cheryl Briggs and geographer Ian Walker are driven by common goals: restoration and conservation. And now these UC Santa Barbara researchers have each received a major grant from the University of California to pursue their respective projects.