CLIMATE OF CHANGE
Changemaking research
O
ngoing research in the Sierra Nevada presented some challenges over the summer for Professor of Geological and Environmental Sciences Laura Rademacher and her team. First, it was the record-breaking snowfall. “People were snowshoeing and skiing on the first couple trips this spring. They were definitely not hiking, let alone driving, to the study sites,” Rademacher said. Then, it was the bears, which—as it turns out—are highly attracted to the ethanol traps used to collect bugs at the site. “The bears have just been wreaking havoc on our traps,” said Jenny Dagnino ’23, an undergraduate student assisting with the research. After making modifications to the traps and getting a break from the snow, the team was able to move forward with its work exploring the impacts of climate change on mountain groundwater systems and the ecosystems they support.
The work is vitally important to the Central Valley of California, which receives much of its water from the Sierra Nevada. “You can think of the mountains as water towers,” said Zach Meyers, a postdoctoral researcher who is working on the project. “The snowpack in the mountains is what feeds the rivers and reservoirs.” Rademacher received a grant of more than $400,000 from the National Science Foundation to conduct the research alongside John Umek, an aquatic ecologist at the Desert Research Institute at Reno. Myers, Dagnino and a second undergraduate student, Jackson Morgan ’24, are working with them. The team works at Sagehen, near Truckee, California. The site has been monitored for various research projects for decades, making it an ideal location to evaluate changes over time. “We’ve noticed that some of the springs are behaving differently this year, and that’s a really interesting finding,” Rademacher said. “If you think about the bugs, the reason they live in these springs is because they like a stable environment. If there are big changes, it may no longer be so friendly for some of those bugs.” Dagnino is studying these springdwelling bugs more closely with the help of her advisor, Professor of Biological Sciences Ryan Hill. She received a grant through Pacific’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, which provides funding for student research. Dagnino took numerous trips to the site to set up emergence traps, a pyramid-shaped net used to capture insects.
Undergraduates Jackson Morgan ’24 and Jenny Dagnino ’23 collect water samples during a trip to Sagehen Experimental Forest in 2022.
She is hoping the work will be useful to future researchers, but it’s already providing invaluable experience. “We can only learn so much from class lectures, so these opportunities give us the experience to be well-rounded in our fields of study and for our future careers,” Dagnino said. Digging for solutions The changing climate poses a risk for one of California’s most lucrative industries—winemaking. With funding provided by Pacific, two professors are exploring ways to increase its sustainability. Professor of Biology Paul Orwin and Professor of Chemistry Skylar Carlson were awarded an interdisciplinary grant to study a certain type of bacteria, called Variovorax, that has the potential to increase plants’ ability to resist disease and drought. “We will look at the microorganisms that live around the roots of plants to understand how they help them grow faster,” Orwin said. “We want to understand how the microbes communicate with plants and how chemicals produced by microbes can help plants
Left: A colony of Variovorax on a petri dish from the lab of Professor of Biology Paul Orwin and Professor of Chemistry Skylar Carlson.
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PACIFIC MAGA ZINE | 2023