ABOUT THE WRITER Jason M. Rodriguez is a professional journalist with more than a dozen years’ reporting and editing experience. He hails from the Chicago area, and has worked for Crain’s Chicago Business, the Chicago Sun-Times and was a video editor for CNN during the 1996 Democratic National Convention. He currently covers county government for the Sun News in the Myrtle Beach, S.C., area.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR Gail Miles Benedict is a finearts painter who moved from her hometown of San Diego to Merced in 2001 to be a part of the new University of California campus. She co-founded the arts program Arts UC Merced Presents . . ., coordinates the annual UC Merced Bobcat Art Show, is a member of the Merced County Performing Arts Presenters Coalition and the Contemporary Humanitarian Artists Association, comprising artists who meet regularly to discuss art, critique each other’s work, inspire each other and put together group shows. Her painting style incorporates surrealism and symbolism and sometimes collage.
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FALL 2013 | UC MERCED MAGAZINE
Westerling has said there is no doubt the increase in temperatures coming over the next century will give rise to more and more intense wildfires, but there are other factors to consider, too. “In the southern coastal areas, fires are more wind-driven regardless of how they are ignited, so in the Fall, the Santa Ana winds contribute greatly to how large and fast a fire grows.” Not only is his data important to fire and park officials and the state’s residents – especially as the urban-wildland interface expands, it will also be important for those who manage other resources – like the state’s dwindling water supply. Bales is mapping the Sierra snowpack and observes that as the average temperature rises, more precipitation falls as rain – rather than the snow the state has come to depend on in the Sierra. That means less in reserves. Bales said the state is moving toward the “three ‘I’s of water” needed in addressing climate change — infrastructure, institution and information. “In the context of providing an acceptable quantity and quality of water at the right time and the right place, California is going in the direction of evaluating what infrastructure improvements are needed to provide water security,” he said. “What institutional changes can facilitate better water security and can provide water when and where it is needed? “The foundation, though, is that you really have to have better information, because many of our water institutions have operated with very limited data in the past.” Bales said water institutions have been able to do that because the climate has been relatively stable and the demands have been commensurate of the availability of water. But that’s changing. “We can’t necessarily use past history,” Bales said. “We also have increasing population that’s trying to make use of the same resources that a smaller population made use of in the past.” He advocates for a unified, statewide water monitoring system and has been working with colleagues to develop a low-cost system of sensors. They have already been placed in the American River watershed area and are in use now. That technology is just some of the research UC Merced has been working on. “Our research is really focused on what do you about it,” Bales said. “How we respond to build some resiliency into the state’s water systems or forest management and so forth.”
‘Like nothing we’ve seen in the past’ Paleoecology Professor Jessica Blois, studies how species and communities have responded to climate change over the past 21,000 years – since the height of the last ice age. Blois uses data on how life responded in the past to try and understand how biodiversity might respond to future climate changes. But the climate is changing so rapidly now, it’s “like nothing we’ve seen in the past,” she said.
Jessica Blois at Wagon Caves in the Los Padres National Forest. Photo by Seth Finnegan, UC Berkeley
“Ideally we would have something in the past that we could use as an analog for the future,” she said. “But one of the problems is that the future is without analog,” she said. The number of people and the ways they are modifying the world’s landscape — through emissions and other activity — is drastically changing the course, and the rate, of the Earth’s climate, she said. “One thing that’s of concern to me is range shift. In the past, species shifted their geographic distributions quite a bit,” she said. “They shifted where they were found on the landscape as climates changed.” The worry is that the rate of current and future climate change is more than species can handle naturally, and they won’t be able to shift to new locations on their own. “We are seeing responses in many species,” she said, including plants that have never been found before in certain climates – such as species of palms found in Sweden – and in animals moving to higher elevations as their habitats grow too warm for them. Researchers don’t know if species can move or track those new environs quickly enough. There also might be situations where there is no habitat for them to move to, she said.