UC Santa Barbara

The Nature Conservancy and UC Santa Barbara release the first comprehensive maps of coconut agriculture, and the subsequent loss of native forests, on atolls throughout the tropical Pacific. Over the last 200 years, this pervasive land cover change has profoundly altered ecosystems and hydrologic resources, potentially affecting atoll communities’ resilience to climate change and other environmental ...

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 ...

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 ...