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Dipterocarp Forest at Danum Valley | Mike Prince/FlickrDipterocarp Forest at Danum Valley | Mike Prince/Flickr

Understanding what makes rainforests distinct from one another could advance conservation efforts

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Even when they’re located near each other, not all rainforests are the same, UCLA-led research finds

Dipterocarp Forest at Danum Valley | Mike Prince/Flickr

A rainforest in Danum Valley, Malaysia. New UCLA-led research demonstrates how diverse rainforests can be, even when they are located in the same region. | Mike Prince/Flickr

Anna Novoselov | October 27, 2022

For many people, the phrase “tropical rainforest” might conjure the image of a landscape teeming with vegetation, exotic animals and extraordinary beauty.

But while the world’s rainforests do share some qualities — including serving as habitats for a diverse range of wildlife and storing vast amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide — new UCLA-led research shows just how different rainforests can be, even when they’re located near each other.

“Tropical forests are not a monolith,” said UCLA ecologist Elsa Ordway, lead author of the study, which was published Oct. 20 in Communications Earth & Environment.

The study is significant because understanding how forests vary from one another could help shape conservation initiatives and efforts to fight climate change. Decision-makers and stakeholders could use the research to more accurately predict how much forests mitigate climate change — and how vulnerable they are to it.

Vegetation in tropical forests, which draws carbon dioxide from the air for photosynthesis, stores about one-fourth of Earth’s terrestrial carbon in leaves, trunks and roots. The specific species living in a forest affect how much carbon it can hold and determine how it responds to natural and human disturbances.

Ordway and her co-authors analyzed two tropical landscapes in the Malaysian portion of Borneo, categorizing them into seven different types based on their growth rates, mortality rates, how much carbon they can hold and other characteristics.

To categorize the rainforests, the researchers used two types of remote sensing technology: a satellite-based laser detection system called LiDAR to measure the height and distribution of vegetation, and spectroscopy to determine the forests’ chemical composition.

Those measurements helped crystallize how the forests vary both in terms of their structure — tree height, foliage shape and gaps in the canopy, for example — and their function — how ecosystems work and how natural resources are distributed.

The researchers found that the two most important variables for distinguishing forest types were leaf mass per area and the amount of phosphorus contained in the canopy — the upper layer of the forest that is formed by treetops. Phosphorus is a chemical essential to plant growth.

“To be able to actually characterize these differences at large scales has really huge value for our ability to understand these forests and how they function,” Ordway said.

Borneo is the world’s third largest island. Its forests harbor a diverse range of habitats that support more than 15,000 plant species and more than 1,400 animal species. Just 25 acres of Bornean forest coud contain about 700 different tree species — nearly as many as in all of North America.

Since the 1960s, huge swaths of the island’s forests have been destroyed due to deforestation, fires, illegal logging and agricultural expansion — especially for palm oil plantations.

Mapping forests gives policymakers a better understanding of rainforests’ conservation value so they can pass laws and regulations to protect them. In addition, accurately determining rainforests’ carbon storage capacity can help shape market-based conservation programs such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries — known as REDD+ — which places a cash value on the carbon that rainforests prevent from being released into the atmosphere. Through such programs, large international banks have invested large sums to benefit countries that protect their forests.

And as satellite-based remote sensing improves, so too will the data available to scientists and policymakers. Upcoming satellite missions, such as a NASA hyperspectral satellite mission that is scheduled to launch in 2028, are expected to make vast amounts of data available for free, which could open the door to further studies on differences in forest function. The UCLA-led study could serve as a framework for future analyses and for identifying which variables are meaningful.

“We will soon have available an incredible amount of remote sensing data that’s going to be game-changing for what we’re able to measure and monitor across ecosystems globally,” Ordway said.

Until now, forest types have been mapped by researchers on the ground who identify different species and measure functional traits. But that type of analysis is limited by cost and scientists’ ability to access certain parts of rainforests.

Ordway said the same approach her team used could also be extended to studying other types of forests and other ecosystems.

This article originally appeared at UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Dysmus+Kisilu+with+Tony+Pritzker+in+background

Dysmus Kisilu wins UCLA’s Pritzker Award for environmental innovators

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Kenyan entrepreneur and his company, Solar Freeze, receive $100,000 prize for reducing food waste

Dysmus Kisilu speaking with Tony Pritzker in background

Dysmus Kisilu was honored for finding an environmentally friendly way to help small Kenyan farms preserve their produce in order to sell it during periods of peak demand. Tony Pritzker looked on while Kisilu spoke at the Nov. 10 award ceremony. | Damon Cirulli

David Colgan | November 11, 2022

Kenyan entrepreneur Dysmus Kisilu and his business, Solar Freeze, received the 2022 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award from the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

Kisilu’s company rents solar-powered coolers to reduce waste, curb carbon emissions and improve the marketability of crops on small, rural farms in Kenya. He was honored during a ceremony at the UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center on Nov. 10.

“To the smallholder farmers that I work with, this is for you,” Kisilu said.

The Pritzker Award, which is presented annually, carries a prize of $100,000 that is funded through a portion of a $20 million gift to UCLA from the Anthony and Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation. It is the field’s first major honor specifically for innovators under the age of 40 — those whose work stands to benefit most from the prize money and the prestige it conveys.

Kisilu co-founded Solar Freeze in 2018, bringing solar-powered cold storage to small Kenyan farms — enabling them to reduce food waste without increasing carbon emissions. The storage units, which are made using old shipping containers, allow farmers to preserve perishable produce inexpensively, giving them leverage to sell harvests after times of peak production when they command higher prices, which can help maximize their profits.

The company aims to further its mission with a new mobile app and by expanding to other parts of Africa.

Kisilu was nominated by Jaime Carlson, a senior advisor in strategy and investment at Softbank Energy, a business that promotes the spread of renewable energy. Carlson said she was struck by how Kisilu “thinks deeply and thoughtfully” to create solutions that fit local communities and market conditions.

The Pritzker Award was launched in 2017, and for the first time since 2019, the presentation was held in person — the 2020 and 2021 events were streamed online due to the pandemic. The 2022 award celebration was kicked off earlier in the day by a series of discussions among UCLA experts and international environmental leaders.

Marilyn Raphael, director of UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, saluted Kisilu, the other nominees, and the other innovators and scholars who attended the award ceremony.

“You have already touched many lives, and what you do every day will touch lives and inspire environmental heroes for generations to come,” she said.

The other two finalists for the award were Resson Kantai Duff, a conservationist who fosters understanding and stewardship of nature in communities that live among lions; and Tiana Williams-Clausen, director of the Wildlife Department of the Yurok Tribe, who is helping to restore wildlife to Yurok lands around the Klamath River.

From left, Dysmus Kisilu with Marilyn Raphael of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, Pritzker Award finalist Tiana Williams-Clausen and Tony Pritzker at the 2022 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award ceremony.

From left, Dysmus Kisilu with Marilyn Raphael of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, Pritzker Award finalist Tiana Williams-Clausen and Tony Pritzker at the 2022 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award ceremony. | Damon Cirulli

The distinguished panel of judges who chose Kisilu as this year’s winner was made up of Kara Hurst, head of worldwide sustainability at Amazon; Chanell Fletcher, deputy executive officer of environmental justice at the California Air Resources Board; Lori Garver, CEO of the Earthrise Media; and Ida Levine, lead expert on policy and regulation for the board of Impact Investing Institute.

Kisilu’s honor was presented by Tony Pritzker, who founded the award and is a member of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability’s advisory board.

“The objective of all this is to honor you at such a great point in your lives — giving you the opportunity to take it to the next level,” Pritzker said.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Image of Parker Mesa Overlook in Malibu, CAioes.ucla.edu

UCLA College celebrates Earth Day

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Image of Farwiza Farhan with baby elephant

Farwiza Farhan, winner of UCLA’s 2021 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award. Farhan works to protect the Leuser Ecosystem, the last place on Earth where tigers, elephants, rhinos and orangutans live together in the wild. 

Every year, Earth Day provides an opportunity to celebrate and renew a shared commitment to protecting the planet. Across UCLA, initiatives such as the Sustainable LA Grand Challenge are making strides toward conservation goals, both locally and globally. And in the UCLA College of Letters and Science, renowned scholars are joining forces across disciplines to advance knowledge and research, educate, advocate and lead the way to a more sustainable future. Here are just a few highlights from the 2021–22 academic year:

Championing leaders

The UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (IoES) hosted “Celebration of Environmental Heroes,” an event highlighting progress such as Ph.D. student Dani Hoague’s work with the Better Watts Initiative, discussed here with actor, writer and producer Issa Rae. Meanwhile, the annual Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award supports young leaders from around the world — most recently Farwiza Farhan, a conservationist working in Indonesia to protect one of the planet’s most biodiverse regions.

Issa Rae introduces UCLA graduate student Dani Hoague, who discusses her work with the Better Watts Initiative (BWI). The BWI team believes that a single action can make a difference in the community, and that collective action can greatly impact the world.

Community engagement

Besides providing a tranquil oasis on campus, the UCLA Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden inspires conservation through education, research and public outreach. Many events are open to the public, including monthly guided tours, the 2021–22 lecture series “Transplanted: Examining Contexts of Plants, People and Place,” and the Festival of Trees coming up on April 29. You can also listen to a carefully curated audio tour of the garden, featuring renowned experts highlighting its unique collections.

Environmental storytelling

At the IoES’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS), scholars come together across areas of study from English to anthropology to collaborate on media and communications that advance the cause of environmental science, policy and advocacy. LENS has received awards for outstanding environmental journalism and most recently partnered on the Labyrinth Project, a podcast that explores L.A.’s urban ecosystems and was created by Christopher Kelty, a member of the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics.

Images from the four episodes of Earth Focus

Images from the series “Earth Focus.” One episode earned the UCLA Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies an award from the Los Angeles Press Club. | Courtesy of KCET, LENS and Thomson Reuters Foundation

Global reach

The Congo Basin Institute, a joint initiative between UCLA and the nonprofit International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, is conducting the vitally important work of preserving the world’s second-largest rainforest. The institute recently received a major gift from the co-founder of Taylor Guitars and his wife to further ebony conservation research and restoration efforts in Cameroon. The project will support local communities, grow and plant trees, conduct ecological research and build a road map for rainforest reforestation.

Interdisciplinary research

At the newly launched UCLA Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies, scholars will conduct research to improve both human and planetary health. “Food is central to the human experience, and this new institute will play a leading role in examining aspects of our relationship with food as well as the ways in which food systems tie into larger issues like public health, sustainability and economic well-being,” said UCLA Chancellor Gene Block in a UCLA press release.

Learn more about the work of the UCLA College here.

Image of Marilyn Raphael, director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.Image credit: Ashley Kruythoff/UCLA

Talking environmental solutions with Marilyn Raphael

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Image of Marilyn Raphael, director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

Marilyn Raphael, director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Image credit: Ashley Kruythoff/UCLA

By David Colgan | 

Environmental news often focuses on the scariest problems, from climate disasters to extinctions.

While it’s important to understand these concerns, there are reasons for hope at UCLA, where faculty, researchers and students are finding solutions — technology to reduce environmental harms, ways of adapting to new climate realities, and strategies for battling environmental racism and injustice.

Marilyn Raphael, world-renowned environmental leader, climate scientist and director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, shared some environmental good news as we celebrate the planet we all depend on this Earth Day.

Over the past few decades, we’ve witnessed a growing number of localized problems from worsening storms to urban heat islands, due to climate change. How are UCLA researchers and students addressing these problems?

The ways we’re working to mitigate climate change are too many to list. But I’ll start in our own backyard — Los Angeles and California. We’re doing an enormous amount of research to understand and respond to wildfires, droughts and extreme flooding. Our faculty partner with state and local agencies so disaster prevention and response can be informed by good data and robust projections. It is difficult to conceive of flooding during a megadrought, but research shows that climate change is increasing the likelihood of flooding, and California must be ready for it. Cities like Sacramento, Stockton and huge parts of Los Angeles could be flooded during these extreme events. We need a plan for how we’ll react when that happens.

Looking globally, we’re working in places such as the Congo Basin, where we help local populations learn sustainable agriculture practices that can sustain their communities while protecting the environments they depend on. Small island nations are another focus. These places are the worst hit by hurricanes, depleted fisheries and sea level rise.

As a climate leader, how do we deal with the seemingly insurmountable problem of global climate change? What are the most promising ways that we can address this crisis in a meaningful way? And to what extent can we stop or slow it?

From the start, I think it’s important to understand we now have unavoidable change. We do have a chance to slow it and make it less severe, but only if we act now. Globally, we have done nothing sufficient enough to reduce emissions to a level that will change our trajectory.

One of the most important things we’re trying to do is to mobilize people with information and the means with which to engage with these issues in creative ways, from film to art installations. Few people get as excited about data as we researchers do. So we’re working on understanding and improving how people interact with their realities.

Sustainable cities have got to be another part of our response. More and more people (55% of the world’s population live in urban areas – headed for 68% by 2050) are living in cities, which makes them one of our best chances at getting more sustainable. How people get water, power, food — cities can become more efficient at all of it, and we have researchers laying a strong foundation for them to do so.

Can you share a couple of examples of new things being done to protect ecosystems and species?

UCLA researchers are using genetics in new ways that make conservation more efficient and effective. The California Conservation Genomics Project is sequencing the genomes of thousands of organisms across the state to create the most comprehensive multispecies genomic dataset. That can then be used to identify local and regional conservation concerns and protect biodiversity.

Genomic research is also being used to understand things like how climate change is affecting migratory birds, how animals disperse seeds in tropical regions and in numerous other ways. And that’s just genomics. We’re also combining field research with remote sensing data from NASA to look at the health of our forests, and we are engaging the indigenous groups who manage 25% of the world’s natural lands and have intimate knowledge of their environments stretching back millennia.

Mental health professionals are seeing more and more people having trouble dealing with the realities and their perceptions about environmental threats. What would you tell someone who is having such feelings?

Please, don’t just sit with your fears. Get out there and spend some time in nature — see what’s worth protecting. Spending time among oceans, mountains, forests or parklands is a salve for mental well-being, and there’s a growing body of psychological research to support this.

Another way to deal with climate stress and anxiety is to think of one thing that you as an individual can do to help. This does not have to be a big thing; it can be a small thing. Then do that and engage your friends. Don’t focus continuously on the whole problem — it is impossible for a single person to do anything reasonable to solve it. We are part of a vast, interconnected system. Because of that connection, what we do as individuals has an effect. Just do what you can and have faith that someone else is doing what they can too.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Image of Richard and Linda TurcoCourtesy of the Turcos

UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability receives $1.5 million pledge from founding director

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The gift from Richard and Linda Turco will support students engaged in environmental research

Image of Richard and Linda Turco

Richard and Linda Turco | Image courtesy of the Turcos

By Margaret MacDonald | 

Richard Turco, the founding director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, and his wife, Linda Turco, have pledged $1.5 million to the institute to establish an endowment for the support of undergraduate and graduate students.

The couple’s gift commitment has been augmented by $750,000 from the UCLA dean of physical sciences’ gift matching program, bringing the total to $2.25 million.

“Thanks in large part to the dedication and pioneering efforts of Richard Turco, the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability has evolved to become a real force for environmental truth and equity,” said the institute’s current director, Marilyn Raphael. “And now we add our deep gratitude for the Turcos’ generous gift commitment, which will provide the resources to effectively recruit, retain and empower generations of students eager to become change agents in the service of a sustainable environment.”

The initial gift funds will be contributed over the next five years, with the deferred balance coming from the couple’s estate. When fully funded, the endowment will support an annual lecture, publication awards and fellowships for graduate students, and research awards for undergraduates, with priority given to first-generation students and those with demonstrated financial need.

Richard Turco is a distinguished professor emeritus at UCLA and former chair of the university’s department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences. An atmospheric chemist, he joined UCLA’s faculty in 1988 and built a multidisciplinary research group focused on pressing environmental problems, including ozone depletion, urban air pollution and the impact of aerosols on climate. Those efforts eventually led to the establishment of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability in 1997, which Turco oversaw until 2003. He retired from UCLA in 2011.

The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1986, Turco has also been awarded NASA’s H. Julian Allen Award for outstanding research, the American Physical Society’s Leo Szilard Prize and a UCLA Distinguished Faculty Research Lectureship.

The Turcos’ pledge is the latest major donation the couple has made to UCLA. In 2017, they established an endowment to fund fellowships for outstanding graduate students in their third and fourth years of study in the department of atmospheric and oceanic studies — vitally important years in a doctoral student’s academic career. A portion of that endowment also supports an award for research papers published in scientific journals by graduate students or postdoctoral scholars. A 2019 gift from the couple established the first endowed faculty chair in the department’s history.

“The future of human civilization will best be served by education — at all levels, in all places — and the world’s great universities will be called on to provide an unshakable foundation for global progress, equity and prosperity,” Richard Turco said. “With this in mind, those, like myself, who have benefited most from past access to education should be among the most willing to support future access for others, with generosity and hope.”

Miguel García-Garibay, dean of the UCLA Division of Physical Sciences, which houses the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, lauded the Turcos’ ongoing support for students and faculty in the environmental sciences.

“Richard and Linda Turco have set a shining example of giving back, for which we are immensely grateful,” García-Garibay said. “Not only has Richard been instrumental in building UCLA’s excellence in researching environmental solutions, but he and Linda have chosen to establish a lasting legacy of financial support for this area, helping to ensure the institute’s impact for years to come.”

The building blocks of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability

Aerial view of La Kretz Hall

La Kretz Hall, home of the institute. | Image credit: UCLA

As the head of the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and a member of UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics in the 1990s, Richard Turco was well placed to tackle the challenges of what at the time was called “global change” — the planetary-scale environmental issues beginning to take center stage internationally.

Together with a group of like-minded faculty members from academic departments across campus, he organized a multidisciplinary research program to study the growing risks posed by ozone depletion, climate warming and other hazards. Turco and his colleagues felt strongly that a top research university like UCLA could — and should — take a lead role in the quest to understand and mitigate such existential threats to civilization.

Turco spearheaded several early projects, including a large-scale research study of the Los Angeles Basin watershed and the establishment of a geographic information system, or GIS, data processing lab. In 1997, the program officially became the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, which has since grown into broad and powerful agent in the service of a sustainable environment.

During Turco’s tenure as director (1997–2003), the institute moved into the newly built La Kretz Hall (above). The building, funded by a donation from UCLA alumnus and longtime sustainability supporter Morton La Kretz, was the first on campus to receive LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Design, certification by the U.S. Green Building Council.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu/news.

Illustration of rat near Hollywood signAmisha Gadani/UCLA

Intricacies of L.A.’s urban ecosystem are focus of new UCLA podcast

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Illustration of rat near Hollywood sign

The podcast’s premiere episode explores the conflict between people’s attempts to battle one species, rats, while preserving another, mountain lions. Image by Amisha Gadani/UCLA

By Jonathan Van Dyke

Not all of the celebrities in Los Angeles are humans.

Just witness the excitement around sightings of the city’s famous wild animals. One recent Los Angeles Times headline read, “Famed mountain lion P-22 makes dramatic appearance in Beachwood Canyon backyard.”

But even Angelenos who are fascinated by the big cats of the Santa Monica Mountains might not realize that the animals are threatened by factors that seem totally unrelated to their natural habitats. For example, what if the rodenticide being used to fight rat infestations in Los Angeles neighborhoods might ultimately harm P-22 and his running mates?

That’s the topic of the first episode of “The Labyrinth Project,” a new UCLA podcast available now on Apple, Spotify, Google, Amazon and Stitcher. Through six episodes, the series engages listeners in a range of ecological conundrums, all of which are as interconnected as the city’s vast natural ecosystems.

Its creator is Christopher Kelty, a UCLA anthropology professor and member of the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. Kelty’s Labyrinth Project research initiative inspired the podcast, and his work is funded in part by the UCLA Sustainable LA Grand Challenge.

“People see nature in different ways, and with different stakes,” he said. “Some people want to conserve nature in a certain way, other people want to exploit it and others are afraid of it. We wanted to really explore that idea.”

The premiere episode explores the conflict between people’s attempts to battle one species, rats, while preserving another, mountain lions. Studies by UCLA researchers and others have shown that rats killed by pesticides wind up in the food chain that ultimately leads up to bobcats and mountain lions, which can damage their immune systems and alter their genetics.

“We could ban the poisons, but the question remains: Do we want to live with rats? Should we be changing our relationship to rats as well as mountain lions?” Kelty said. “This podcast is an attempt to say that if you focus problem by problem, you won’t see the bigger picture. We’re trying to bring the bigger picture into focus in a way that’s easy to grasp. And we’re asking listeners to take a step back, and maybe to not have a strong opinion immediately.”

The podcast is written and produced by Kelty and five UCLA undergraduates and graduate students. Future episodes, which will be released each Monday, explore stories around coyotes, feral cats and the pressure people can feel from being bombarded with messages about living sustainably.

“I really delved into my own feelings about trying to live a sustainable lifestyle,” said Emma Horton, a third-year undergraduate student majoring in human biology and society, and a co-producer of one episode. “I found what I call ‘sustainability guilt practices’ all around me, and I realized there are these subtle forms of shaming consumers into living environmentally conscious lives, even though a lot of it is really out of reach for the average person.”

The team represents a wide range of academic interests. Spencer Robins, for example, is a doctoral candidate in English, with a focus on environmental literature.

“If you go out into Los Angeles and start talking with people who really know and care about the natural world here, you’re going to meet really wild characters with wild stories,” he said. In the Labyrinth Project, those characters range from trained scientists to a family that feeds a coyote at its front door to members of a satanist cult that morphed into the no-kill movement in Los Angeles.

For Chase Niesner, a graduate student in the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, the project drove home the interconnectedness of a wide range of issues.

“What this project is really about is understanding and respecting the complexity of the urban ecosystem, and understanding that if you pull one thread, it changes everything else,” he said. “In urban ecology, you really can’t think of any one conversation separately from the others.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.

An image of the Bitterroot River Montana forest fireJohn MacColgan/Creative Commons

Forest fires increasingly affecting rivers and streams – for better and worse

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An image of the Bitterroot River Montana forest fire

Bitterroot River Montana forest fire. Image credit: John MacColgan/Creative Commons

UCLA-led study finds greater ‘streamflow’ may mean more water for the West, but could increase risk for floods, landslides

By Anna Novoselov

Forest fires can have a significant effect on the amount of water flowing in nearby rivers and streams, and the impact can continue even years after the smoke clears.

Now, with the number of forest fires on the rise in the western U.S., that phenomenon is increasingly influencing the region’s water supply — and has increased the risk for flooding and landslides — according to a UCLA-led study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers examined streamflow — a measure of water volume over time in rivers and streams — and climate data for 179 river basins. (Basins are areas of land where precipitation collects and drains into a common outlet.) All of the areas were located in the western U.S., and all had been affected by forest fires between 1984 and 2020.

Using a mathematical model they developed, the scientists discovered that streamflow in the years after a fire tended to be higher than scientists would expect based solely on climate conditions, and that larger fires tended to be followed by larger increases in streamflow.

In basins where over 20% of the forest had burned, streamflow was 30% greater than expected based on climate conditions, on average, for an average of six years.

Park Williams, a UCLA associate professor of geography and the study’s lead author, said forest fires enhance streamflow because they burn away vegetation that would otherwise draw water from soil and block precipitation before it ever reached the soil. Intense forest fires can also “cook” soils, making them temporarily water repellent.

From 1984 through 2020, the amount of forested area burned each year in the West increased elevenfold, and that trend is expected to continue or even accelerate due to climate change.

“As a result, we’re starting to see sequences of years when large portions of forest are burned across some very important hydrological basins such as those in California’s Sierra Nevada,” Williams said.

The study’s findings suggest that wildfires will soon become yet another important consideration for those in charge of the supply and distribution of water resources. Each year, the region’s water managers must carefully calculate how much water will be available and determine how to conserve and allocate it.

In one sense, the increase in streamflow from forest fires may be beneficial, Williams said.

“This could come as good news to dry cities like Los Angeles, because it could actually enhance water availability,” Williams said.

But other outcomes could be troubling. For example, in the coming decades, too much water could overwhelm reservoirs and other infrastructure, and could increase the risk for catastrophic flooding and landslides in and around burn areas.

To adapt to increasing flood risks, Williams said, water managers in California may have to lower the water levels in reservoirs in the fall and winter to make room for excess water from major rainfall and snowstorms. Such a strategy could avoid disastrous flooding in some cases, but it could also put communities at risk for having too little water during the state’s increasingly hot, dry summers.

Water after a forest fire also tends to be heavily polluted, carrying mud, debris and large sediment loads. So even if the quantity of available water increases after a large fire, it’s likely that water quality will worsen.

Williams said he hopes the findings help water managers and climate scientists make better predictions about water availability and flood risk.

“Water is a really heavy and destructive thing,” Williams said. “It’s great when it comes to us in the expected amount. It is catastrophic when it shows up unexpectedly.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.

Image of parched land in NevadaFamartin/Wikimedia Commons

Megadrought in southwestern North America is region’s driest in at least 1,200 years

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Image of parched land in Nevada

Parched land in Nevada. A UCLA-led research team studied centuries of megadroughts in the region spanning southern Montana to northern Mexico and the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains. Photo credit: Famartin/Wikimedia Commons

Climate change is a significant factor, UCLA-led research finds

By Anna Novoselov

The drought that has enveloped southwestern North America for the past 22 years is the region’s driest “megadrought” — defined as a drought lasting two decades or longer — since at least the year 800, according to a new UCLA-led study in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Thanks to the region’s high temperatures and low precipitation levels from summer 2020 through summer 2021, the current drought has exceeded the severity of a late-1500s megadrought that previously had been identified as the driest such drought in the 1,200 years that the scientists studied.

UCLA geographer Park Williams, the study’s lead author, said with dry conditions likely to persist, it would take multiple wet years to remediate their effects.

“It’s extremely unlikely that this drought can be ended in one wet year,” he said.

The researchers calculated the intensity of droughts by analyzing tree ring patterns, which provide insights about soil moisture levels each year over long timespans. (They also confirmed their measurements by checking findings against historical climate data.) Periods of severe drought were marked by high degrees of “soil moisture deficit,” a metric that describes how little moisture the soil contains compared to its normal saturation.

Since 2000, the average soil moisture deficit was twice as severe as any drought of the 1900s — and greater than it was during even the driest parts of the most severe megadroughts of the past 12 centuries.

Studying the area from southern Montana to northern Mexico, and from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, researchers discovered that megadroughts occurred repeatedly in the region from 800 to 1600. Williams said the finding suggests that dramatic shifts in dryness and water availability happened in the Southwest prior to the effects of human-caused climate change becoming apparent in the 20th century.

Existing climate models have shown that the current drought would have been dry even without climate change, but not to the same extent. Human-caused climate change is responsible for about 42% of the soil moisture deficit since 2000, the paper found.

One of the primary reasons climate change is causing more severe droughts is that warmer temperatures are increasing evaporation, which dries out soil and vegetation. From 2000 to 2021, temperatures in the region were 0.91 degrees Celsius (about 1.64 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average from 1950 to 1999.

“Without climate change, the past 22 years would have probably still been the driest period in 300 years,” Williams said. “But it wouldn’t be holding a candle to the megadroughts of the 1500s, 1200s or 1100s.”

As of Feb. 10, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 95% of the Western U.S. was experiencing drought conditions. And in summer 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, two of the largest reservoirs in North America — Lake Mead and Lake Powell, both on the Colorado River — reached their lowest recorded levels.

Regulators have continued to implement water conservation measures in response to water shortages caused by the drought. In August, for example, federal officials cut water allocations to several southwestern states in response to low water levels in the Colorado River. And in October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency and asked Californians to voluntarily decrease their water usage by 15%.

Williams said initiatives like those will help in the short term, but water conservation efforts that extend beyond times of drought will be needed to help ensure people have the water they need as climate change continues to intensify drought conditions.

The study was a collaboration among researchers from UCLA, NASA and the Columbia Climate School.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.

Michael Studinger/NASA

Antarctic sea ice level could reach record low in 2022, UCLA climate scientist says

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Image of sea ice in the Bellingshausen Sea, Antarctica, photographed from an aircraft 1,500 feet above ground.

Sea ice in the Bellingshausen Sea, Antarctica, photographed from an aircraft 1,500 feet above ground. Image credit: Michael Studinger/NASA

By David Colgan

Sometime in the next few weeks, during late summer in the Southern Hemisphere, the area covered by sea ice around Antarctica will reach its annual minimum. According to UCLA climate scientist Marilyn Raphael, the measurement could set a new record low, just five years after the last record was established.

That’s because current conditions in the region are similar to those of late 2016 and early 2017, and the planet has just experienced a year of record-high ocean temperatures.

“The temperature of the ocean limits how much area the ice can cover,” said Raphael, a professor of geography and director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “The same thing happened five years ago, when warming and more exposed ocean caused earlier retreat of the ice.”

A paper co-authored by Raphael and published in the journal Nature Climate Change puts those developments in context by using historical data to determine the amount of area covered by sea ice across the entire Antarctic region, season by season, from 1905 to 2020.

Since 1979, scientists have relied on satellite imaging to track the daily extent of Antarctic sea ice, which expands dramatically during the Antarctic winter and contracts in the summer, typically reaching its minimum in mid-February. The new study, a collaboration between UCLA and Ohio University researchers, used extensive weather data, ocean data and previous research findings from locations around Antarctica to reconstruct which portions of the region were covered by ice before satellite imaging existed.

The total area covered by sea ice fluctuates each year according to the seasons. It also fluctuates in cycles of roughly five to seven years. The research also uncovered longer-term trends: The area covered by sea ice declined from 1905 to the 1960s, but since then, despite rising global temperatures, the average area per year covered by ice has increased — in stark contrast to the rapidly declining amount of sea ice in the Arctic region around the North Pole.

It will take further research to determine why these trends occurred and whether 2017’s record low signaled that global warming has begun to affect long-term patterns. But measurement of the 2022 sea ice minimum, expected between mid-February and early March, is the next critical observation point. A repeat of 2017, Raphael said, would provide further evidence that global warming may be playing a major role in this massive, complex natural system.

While previous papers reconstructed historic sea ice conditions seasonally at specific locations, doing so around the entire continent fills a critical gap in baseline information — particularly because conditions vary greatly from place to place in the region, said Mark Handcock, a UCLA statistician and co-author of the new study.

“Statistical methods can weave all the individual sources into a complete picture of the region,” he said.

Antarctic sea ice provides habitat for penguins, seals and other animals around Antarctica itself, but it also important to a range of life around the world. It plays a major role in climatic and oceanic patterns as far north as Iceland and the North Pacific Ocean.

“Antarctic sea ice helps control things like the equator-pole temperature gradient,” Raphael said, referring to the temperature difference between the equator and poles. “That gradient influences large-scale atmospheric circulation.”

Sea ice also influences thermohaline circulation, a global system of surface and deep-water ocean currents. One such current is the Gulf Stream, which is responsible for the Northeast United States’ relatively mild weather.

The scale of Antarctic sea ice is massive. At its maximum size, which typically occurs each September, the ice expands to cover about 7 million square miles — only slightly larger than the land area of South America.

The paper’s findings can be used in future studies on the underlying causes of historic sea ice changes and what to expect as climate change continues to warm the planet.

The research, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs, is expected to produce additional findings that will enable scientists to reconstruct historical models for the extent of sea ice at daily, rather than seasonal, intervals.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.
Courtesy of Paula White

Notches on lions’ teeth reveal poaching in Zambia’s conservation areas

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UCLA study shows the strange markings are the result of trapped big cats chewing through wire snares, indicating these animals are injured at far higher rates than previously assumed

Image of a lion skull

An encounter with lions in captivity helped UCLA’s Paula White solve the riddle behind the dental damage she had observed on wild lion and leopard skulls. Image courtesy of Paula White

By Alison Hewitt | 

In a hunting camp in Zambia more than a decade ago, UCLA biologist Paula White puzzled over the heavy skull of a trophy-hunted lion. Zambia permits limited hunting in certain areas to help fund its national conservation program, and White had gained permission to examine the trophy skulls and hides to evaluate how hunting was affecting conservation efforts.

This particular skull had a pronounced horizontal V-shaped notch on one of the canine teeth — a marking White had never seen before from natural wear. Over the next few months, she began noticing similar notches on other lions’ teeth.

It wasn’t until three years later, when she visited lions bred in captivity and saw them gnawing on a wire fence, that it clicked: The tooth notches in wild lions resulted from the animals chewing their way out of wire snares — noose-like traps set by poachers. The sheer number of notched teeth she’d seen suggested that such traps, illegal in conservation areas, were injuring far more lions than experts had estimated.

“It was an odd mix of thrilling to figure out the cause of the notches and horrifying to realize that so many animals had been entangled in a snare at some point in their lives,” said White, director of the Zambia Lion Project and a senior research fellow with the Center for Tropical Research at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

From 2007 to 2012, White crisscrossed Zambia examining and photographing the skulls, teeth and hides of trophy-hunted lions and leopards. She shared the photos with UCLA paleobiologist Blaire Van Valkenburgh, a carnivore tooth-wear expert.

They examined White’s photos of 112 lions and 45 leopards in two Zambian conservation areas and found that 37% of the lions and 22% of the leopards had snare scars and tooth notches, according to a study published today in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science.

“Identifying the snare damage to the teeth is a real innovation. I’d never seen anything like those horizontal notches before,” said Van Valkenburgh, a professor emerita of ecology and evolutionary biology. “Usually I’m looking at decades-old skulls in museums, but these are the animals we’re trying to conserve right now. This is real-time information, and that’s what you need for conservation decisions.”

Images on the left show notches caused by chewing wire snares, while those on the right show regular wear to lions’ teeth.

Images on the left show notches caused by chewing wire snares, while those on the right show regular wear to lions’ teeth. Image courtesy of Paula White

With lions and leopards having declined in numbers across their former African range and both now classified as “vulnerable,” vigorous conservation efforts are particularly important, the researchers said. The paper recommends requiring trophy hunters to share remains for forensic examination, which would help show whether current conservation programs are effectively reducing the number of human-caused injuries to the animals from illegal activities like poaching.

The researchers were surprised by the findings that more than a third of the lions and more than a fifth of the leopards White examined in the Luangwa Valley and Greater Kafue Ecosystem — which include Zambia’s largest conservation areas — had old snare injuries, even though they suspected existing data undercounted the problem. Previous estimates suggested that only 5% to 10% of Zambia’s lions had snare injuries, and there was virtually no prior data on such injuries among the nation’s leopards.

The authors also discovered that 30 of the 112 lions had shotgun pellets embedded in their skulls and that 13 of these 30 had both shotgun and snare injuries.

The study authors noted that overall rates of injuries among animals in the conservation areas are probably even higher than the current study suggests because researchers can’t count snared animals that never escaped or died undetected.

Some of the lions and leopards are injured or killed when they become unintended victims of wire snares set by poachers to catch wild game, while others fall victim to traps meant to protect poaching camps. Some poachers intentionally capture the big cats to sell their claws, teeth and other body parts. The animals can also be struck by shotgun pellets when people attempt to scare them away from livestock or homes.

Image of a poacher's noose-like wire snare

More than one-third of lions and one-fifth of leopards studied showed signs that they had chewed through poachers’ noose-like wire snares like the one pictured here. Courtesy of Paula White

Even for those that escape death, their injuries — damaged teeth, feet severed by snares and lead-shot poisoning — can seriously hinder their ability to compete for resources like food, mates and territory.

“Our new method of evaluating anthropogenic injuries provides a window into the stresses these carnivores are experiencing,” Van Valkenburgh said. “So for every trophy animal, a forensic examination such as ours should be routine. Studying the dead animals can help conserve the living animals.”

White’s research has already helped bring about policy changes by Zambia’s parks and wildlife department, which has lowered the number of lions that can be hunted annually by about two-thirds, stipulated that only older animals may be hunted and required that each trophy taken be examined by officials to confirm the age. Unfortunately, White said, problems like poaching and habitat encroachment continue to pose greater threats to conservation.

The paper recommends that countries expand their existing inspections by requiring hunters to provide their specimens for systematic photographic archiving to document tooth damage, snare scars or old embedded shotgun pellets before they export their trophies. The authors note that it’s also possible to detect snare-wear tooth injuries on tranquilized lions.

“I wholeheartedly believe that as long as hunting continues, scientists working with hunters can obtain information that would have been lost and which will really benefit conservation,” White said. “We could compare the past 10 years of data with data 10 years from now. I would hope that if the anti-poaching efforts are successful, we would see a reduction in these types of injuries.”
This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.