University of California

The movement of carbon between the atmosphere, oceans and continents — the carbon cycle — is a fundamental process that regulates Earth’s climate. Some factors, like volcanic eruptions or human activity, emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Others, such as forests and oceans, absorb that CO2. In a well-regulated system, the right amount of CO2 ...

Organic agriculture may be as old as dirt, but that doesn’t mean its impacts are fully understood. A team of scientists in the United States and Canada are doing their part to change that. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara, University of British Columbia, and University of Colorado Boulder discovered that organic farming significantly affects the ...

Illegal fishing practices through spoofing tracking devices in ships have become a common practice in the industrial use of our oceans. A new study published in the journal Nature corroborates the trend and offers a view of the changing oceanic activities and landscape. Led by Global Fishing Watch, a company founded by Google, the study ...

For millions of Los Angeles-area motorists, the Whittier Narrows Recreation Area flashes by in an instant — a tattered oasis of wetlands, sycamore and oak that punctuates the monotonous sprawl of industrial parks, cinder-block sound walls and residential cul-de-sacs along the 60 Freeway and Rosemead Boulevard. But to Andrew Salas, chairman of the Gabrieleño-Kizh tribe, ...

Bats use the same neurons for social navigation as they do for spatial navigation. The study involved wireless neural recording and imaging of groups of Egyptian fruit bats flying in a large room. The bat’s “place” neurons in the hippocampus fired not only to indicate the animal’s location but also the identity of other bats ...

Using forecasts run on a NASA supercomputer, scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; the University of California, Berkeley; and the Korea National University of Transportation assessed the ability of NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System Subseasonal to Seasonal Version 2 (GEOS-S2S-2) forecasting system to predict atmospheric and land surface conditions ...

Satish Kumar and his graduate research team at UC Santa Barbara’s Vision Research Lab have led the charge in developing an AI-based methane detection tool called MethaneMapper. This first-of-its-kind software can spot methane gas via complex algorithms. The algorithms analyze multiple visual spectrums of images taken from custom-built cameras 10,000 feet aboveground. “The amount of ...

UCLA researchers led by Aydogan Ozcan and Mona Jarrahi have developed a multispectral imaging technology capable of turning a monochrome sensor into a multispectral one. Rather than the traditional absorptive filters used for multispectral imaging, the technology uses a diffractive optical network to form 16 unique spectral bands periodically repeating at the output image field ...

In California, extreme heat and drought conditions now occur at regular intervals, drying out grassland, pine needles and other foliage, adding to the century-old tinderbox that stokes these enormous fires. However, the state is now harnessing a powerful tool to dampen the effects of these fires, namely artificial intelligence, and specifically machine learning. The abundance ...

Environmental managers will have a powerful new resource for helping our forests survive and recover from wildfire, drought and disease. UC Davis ecologist Derek Young is leading a team to develop the Open Forest Observatory, a pioneering project combining drone photography and forest mapping with machine learning, remote sensing, big-data crunching and open information sourcing. ...