California, and the broader American West, is undergoing a momentous but under-appreciated revitalization of its ecosystems. The populations of almost every medium and large carnivore species are steadily increasing, and species not seen in nearly 100 years are making their reappearance. Professor Justin Brashares discusses why this has come to be and what this means for California’s wildlife and human communities. 

The department's annual Graduate Research Symposium, also known as The ESPM GradFest Symposium, celebrates and showcases graduate student research.

ESPM graduate student Marco Pfeiffer and professor Ronald Amundson study the relationship between soil, climate, and landscape in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.

Through her research as part of the Rosenblum lab, Girard discovered two new species of peacock spiders and is working to build a phylogeny of the entire group. 

When we compared detailed information about the state’s forests taken during the 1920s and 1930s to current forests surveys, we found that California’s famed giant trees are suffering due to drier and warmer conditions. 

National environmental regulations can be at odds with the free trade agenda because they potentially place burdens on importers to establish products that conform with domestic environmental rules. 

Since 2010, Professor Dennis Baldocchi’s biometerology lab has been monitoring the restoration of wetlands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to measure their viability as carbon farms. And they’re getting close to finding methods that can make predicting the “productivity” of these areas much easier and more cost efficient.

Several years after a prescribed fire, we were counting sequoia seedlings sprouting in newly formed canopy gaps in order to see if these conditions promoted seedling establishment.

Although early conservation efforts were closely tied to hunting and management of game species, conservation priorities have since shifted toward biodiversity and ecosystem conservation.