Environmental Studies
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Rare Mountain Lion Standoff in San Francisco Ends Peacefully After a 30-Hour Search
“Males will often travel far out,” says Chris Wilmers, an ecologist at UC Santa Cruz and the lead researcher of the Santa Cruz Puma Project. “They’re essentially trying to find a vacant territory, and the Santa Cruz Mountains are pretty trapped in by development on all sides. They wander, and they keep going, and they…
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Winter Storms Ease Drought in California, for Now
Michael Loik, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said Californians should continue to live with a conservative mind-set regarding water supply. “Drought is the norm in California,” he said. “The next drought is just around the corner.”
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The Zombees Are Here (And That’s Probably OK)
Stacey Philpott, an ecology professor at UC Santa Cruz, has studied how honeybees and yellow-faced bumblebees interact with A. borealis, and her work suggests that honeybees fall victim to the fly more often in specific environments, like urban gardens.
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Did wolves save Yellowstone’s aspen trees?
“Elk have declined a lot since wolves were reintroduced, but it’s not clear that that’s due to wolves,” said Chris Wilmers, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the author of another recent study that assessed the impacts of large carnivore recovery across North America.
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Ask Lookout: Why has Santa Cruz’s water demand dropped?
The decline stems from both cultural shifts and better fixtures in homes – things like low-flow toilets and high-efficiency washing machines – said Brent Haddad, director of the Center for Integrated Water Research at UC Santa Cruz.
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Have Wolves Saved Yellowstone’s Aspens?
“Most ecologists suspect that wolves and other predators have something to do with the decline of elk,” said Environmental Studies Professor Chris Wilmers. “But how much can be attributed to wolves, how much can be attributed to predators in general, how much is attributed to those other causes hasn’t been worked out yet.”
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Scientists push for greater climate role for Latin America’s overlooked ecosystems
Lead author Scott Winton, an ecologist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the U.S., carried out three years of extensive fieldwork to produce the first data-driven map of recently documented and predicted peatlands in Colombia’s Orinoquía and Amazonian regions.
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Reintroduced Carnivores’ Impacts on Ecosystems Are Still Coming Into Focus
“It’s not that there’s not evidence consistent with a trophic cascade in Yellowstone,” said Chris Wilmers, a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of California Santa Cruz, and the paper’s lead author. “It’s that the effects are a lot more complicated and weaker than what was initially thought.”
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Don’t rush the trails: Conservation must come before recreation
An opinion column in Lookout Santa Cruz cited research by Professor Chris Wilmers on the impacts that the mere presence of people can have on mountain lions.
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New directory helps donors navigate the complex world of global reforestation
Researchers from the University of California Santa Cruz evaluated groups across four categories: permanence, ecological, social and financial, each backed by scientific literature on best practices. Karen Holl, a professor at UC Santa Cruz and reforestation expert, told Mongabay. “There was really no standardized way to answer that question.” So how can a tree investor…
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Large Carnivores Are Helping To Balance Ecosystems, But It’s Complicated
The study, led by Christopher Wilmers, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, looked at the findings of more than 170 papers to clarify what we know about the ecological impacts of large carnivore recovery in North America and what mysteries remain.
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Scientists conduct groundbreaking study in Calif.’s Death Valley National Park
The study’s authors have “showed record-breaking heat tolerance,” Michael Loik, an environmental studies professor and agronomist at UC Santa Cruz who was not involved in this study, told SFGATE.