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LinkedInPosts Tagged: resilience
UC Hopland Healthy Soils Project and The UC Berkeley Urban Bee Lab
The California Department of Food and Agriculture's Healthy Soil Program provides funding for on-farm initiatives aimed at implementing soil practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance carbon storage. The UC Hopland Healthy Soils Project was created in collaboration with the Hopland Research and Extension Center (HREC) and undertaken by UC Berkeley's Dr. Gordon Frankie to assess the impact of various hedgerow plant species on pollinator diversity. Hedgerows typically consist of shrubs, trees, grasses, and flowering plants that offer various advantages to the surrounding farm ecosystem. These advantages include but are not limited to: weed control, windbreak, erosion control, improved air and water quality, biodiversity enhancement, and increased pollinator activity.
To measure the effect of the hedgerows on pollinator activity, Dr. Frankie and his team at the UC Berkeley Urban Bee Lab conduct bee surveys on both the treatment area (hedgerow) and the control area (weeds and grasses) four times a year during spring, summer, and fall. The ultimate objective of this project is to strike an ecological balance by selecting plant species that benefit a range of organisms such as bees, birds, butterflies, and others, while simultaneously mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and sequestering carbon in the farm soil.
Assistant Researcher Jerid Vega with Pineapple Sage (Salvia elegans) at the Urban Bee Lab Garden in Berkeley, CA
Dr. Frankie, with the UC Berkeley Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, is an urban entomologist with over 25 years of experience focusing on the behavioral ecology and community organization of solitary bee species in specific environments within California and Costa Rica. Over the past two decades, Dr. Frankie has conducted extensive studies on bee diversity, seasonality, and host plant preferences at various sites in northern California and seasonal dry forests in Costa Rica. His research also involves monitoring changes in annual bee frequencies and mortality factors that may impact bee populations. Recently, Dr. Frankie's work has shifted from pure wildland studies to comparative bee studies in both wildlands and urban residential gardens, driven by the discovery that urban areas can support diverse local bee species. This shift aligns with a broader concern of global pollinator decline and the need to find new ways to conserve and protect pollinators across different habitats.
A pollinator visiting Lantana or Shrub Verbena (Lantana camara) at the Urban Bee Lab Garden in Berkeley, CA
Dr. Frankie and his assistant researcher Jerid Vega recently stopped by HREC to add herbaceous plants and flower seeds to their project's test hedgerow. Jerid graduated from Berkeley in the spring of 2023 with a B.S. in Molecular Biology from UC Berkeley's College of Natural Resources. Both Dr. Frankie and Jerid argue there is inherent value in recognizing what biodiversity is. “Supporting that biodiversity can be achieved through investments in smaller, more pollinator friendly gardens” says Vega.
Admittedly, Dr. Frankie acknowledges that picking plants for the hedgerow and observing their relationships with pollinator visitors is a very slow process. The time it takes for plant species to establish can be an obstacle to speedy species surveying. When asked how their research team selects and manages the plant species for a specific project, Dr. Frankie and Jerid credit nursery workers, master gardeners, and community members for their suggestions. Dr. Frankie's ideology on plant selection is collective, the product of conversation about pollinator activity from his team, colleagues, and master gardeners. “Those are the people who spend time with the plants, watching them far more than I do!” Dr. Frankie chimes.
Urban Bee Lab Garden in Berkeley, CA
The Desert Mallow and native Redflower Buckwheat (pictured below) are just two of the many plant species that Dr. Frankie and his research team are in the process of observing. These native wildflowers not only produce striking, colorful blooms but also offer a wealth of nectar and pollen, making them a valuable food source for bees, butterflies, and other beneficial insects. Their extended blooming periods, typically from spring through late summer, ensure a consistent supply of sustenance for pollinators throughout the season. Additionally, both plants are well-adapted to arid and semi-arid regions, making them resilient and low-maintenance choices for gardeners. The Desert Mallow and Redflower Buckwheat exemplify the harmonious relationship between native plants and their pollinator counterparts that enhances biodiversity and contributes to a healthier ecosystem.
It's important to recognize that these pretty flowers attract all kinds of insects that aren't as suitable to some as the docile hummingbird. “It's not just bumble bees that these plants attract, it's wasps and flies that do their own part in benefiting ecosystem biodiversity,” adds Jerid Vega. The myth of insect pollinators being inherently eager to sting humans can be a significant obstacle in the way of convincing people to plant pollinator-friendly gardens. This fear of insects perpetuates reluctance to support both wildland and urban insect populations. In reality, these insects are not naturally aggressive toward people. “They're primarily focused on foraging for nectar/pollen to feed their colonies, and will only sting as a last resort if they feel threatened or cornered” concludes Jerid.
Educating people about the behavior and importance of bees and other pollinators is crucial. Dispelling the myth that bees are out to sting us can encourage more individuals to embrace pollinator-attracting plants, contributing to the conservation of these vital species. Understanding the true nature of bees and their role in pollination can lead to a more harmonious coexistence between humans and these remarkable insects.
When asked what potential small gardens with pollinator-preferred species have to attract a high diversity of bee species, Dr. Frankie provided some examples of encouraging results starting with his lab at the Oxford Tract. When the Bee Lab first moved to this site off campus, they started with bare soil. Since moving there full time in 2020, the garden has attracted over sixty species of native bees. The Bee Lab has also consulted on community gardens outside of the Bay Area in the past, including Emerson Community Garden in San Luis Obispo and a Diverse Home Garden in Ukiah. Emerson Community Garden surveyed 5 native bee species pre-planting and 42 species post-establishment. Diverse Home Garden in Ukiah surpassed that of Emerson, surveying 65 bee species in total over the course of 12 years.
The Bee Lab does their work with the help of community educators and a select group of volunteers primarily composed of undergraduate students interested in entomology, resource studies, or environmental conservation. Dr. Frankie's team sifts through volunteer applications annually, and are attracted to students they know will stay on board and have an interest in community outreach. Despite The Bee Lab being a small non-profit entity, they still respond to any invitations they can asking for lessons about pollinator vs. plant relationships.
Learn more about the UC Berkeley Bee Lab here.
This project was supported by funding through the CDFA's Healthy Soils Demonstration Program and 'California Climate Investments'. The HREC Hedgerow Demonstration Project is part of California Climate Investments, a statewide initiative that puts billions of Cap-and-Trade dollars to work reducing greenhouse gas emissions, strengthening the economy, and improving public health and the environment - particularly in disadvantaged communities.
Researchers create app to help drones improve farm efficiency
When flown at the right times, drones can help farmers adapt to a changing climate
Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have developed a web application to help farmers and industry workers use drones and other uncrewed aerial vehicles, or UAVs, to generate the best possible data. By helping farmers use resources more efficiently, this advancement could help them adapt to a world with a changing climate that needs to feed billions.
Associate Professor Alireza Pourreza, director of the UC Davis Digital Agriculture Lab and postdoctoral researcher Hamid Jafarbiglu, who recently completed his doctorate in biological systems engineering under Pourreza, designed the When2Fly app to make drones more proficient and accurate. Specifically, the platform helps drone users avoid glare-like areas called hotspots that can ruin collected data.
Drone users select the date they plan to fly, the type of camera they are using and their location either by selecting a point on a map or by entering coordinates. The app then indicates the best times of that specific day to collect crop data from a drone.
Jafarbiglu and Pourreza, who is also a UC Cooperative Extension specialist of agricultural mechanization, said that using this app for drone imaging and data collection is crucial to improve farming efficiency and mitigate agriculture's carbon footprint. Receiving the best data — like what section of an orchard might need more nitrogen or less water, or what trees are being affected by disease — allows producers to allocate resources more efficiently and effectively.
"In conventional crop management, we manage the entire field uniformly assuming every single plant will produce a uniform amount of yield, and they require a uniform amount of input, which is not an accurate assumption," said Pourreza. "We need to have an insight into our crops' spatial variability to be able to identify and address issues timely and precisely, and drones are these amazing tools that are accessible to growers, but they need to know how to use them properly."
Dispelling the solar noon belief
In 2019, Jafarbiglu was working to extract data from aerial images of walnut and almond orchards and other specialty crops when he realized something was wrong with the data.
"No matter how accurately we calibrated all the data, we were still not getting good results," said Jafarbiglu. "I took this to Alireza, and I said, 'I feel there's something extra in the data that we are not aware of and that we're not compensating for.' I decided to check it all."
Jafarbiglu pored through the 100 terabytes of images collected over three years. He noticed that after the images had been calibrated, there were glaring bright white spots where they were supposed to look flat and uniform.
But it couldn't be a glare because the sun was behind the drone taking the image. So Jafarbiglu reviewed literature going back to the 1980s in search of other examples of this phenomenon. Not only did he find mentions of it, but also that researchers had coined a term for it: hotspot.
A hotspot happens when the sun and UAV are lined up in such a way that the drone is between the viewable area of the camera's lens system and the sun. The drone takes photos of the Earth, and the resulting images have a gradual increase in brightness toward a certain area. That bright point is the hotspot.
The hotspots are a problem, Jafarbiglu said, because when collecting UAV data in agriculture, where a high level of overlap is required, observed differences in the calibrated images need to come solely from plant differences.
For example, every plant may appear in 20 or more images, each from varying view angles. In some images, the plant might be close to the hotspot, while in others it may be situated further away, so the reflectance may vary based on the plant's distance from the hotspot and spatial location in the frame, not based on any of the plant's inherent properties. If all these images are combined into a mosaic and data are extracted, the reliability of the data would be compromised, rendering it useless.
Pourreza and Jafarbiglu found that the hotspots consistently occurred when drones were taking images at solar noon in mid-summer, which many believe is the best time to fly drones. It's an obvious assumption: the sun is at its highest point above the Earth, variations in illumination are minimal, if not steady and fewer shadows are visible in the images. However, sometimes that works against the drone because the sun's geometrical relationship to the Earth varies based on location and the time of year, increasing the chance of having a hotspot inside the image frame when the sun is higher in the sky.
"In high-latitude regions such as Canada, you don't have any problem; you can fly anytime. But then in low-latitude regions such as California, you will have a little bit of a problem because of the sun angle," Pourreza said. "Then as you get closer to the equator, the problem gets bigger and bigger. For example, the best time of flight in Northern California and Southern California will be different. Then you go to summer in Guatemala, and basically, from 10:30 a.m. to almost 2 p.m. you shouldn't fly, depending on the field-oriented control of the camera. It's exactly the opposite of the conventional belief, that everywhere we should fly at solar noon."
Grow technology, nourish the planet
Drones are not the only tools that can make use of this discovery, which was funded by the AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems. Troy Magney, an assistant professor of plant sciences at UC Davis, mainly uses towers to scan fields and collect plant reflectance data from various viewing angles. He contacted Jafarbiglu after reading his research, published in February in the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, because he was seeing a similar issue in the remote sensing of plants and noted that it's often ignored by end users.
"The work that Hamid and Ali have done will be beneficial to a wide range of researchers, both at the tower and the drone scale, and help them to interpret what they are actually seeing, whether it's a change in vegetation or a change in just the angular impact of the signal," he said.
For Pourreza, the When2Fly app represents a major step forward in deploying technology to solve challenges in agriculture, including the ultimate conundrum: feeding a growing population with limited resources.
"California is much more advanced than other states and other countries with technology, but still our agriculture in the Central Valley uses technologies from 30 to 40 years ago," said Pourreza. "My research is focused on sensing, but there are other areas like 5G connectivity and cloud computing to automate the data collection and analytics process and make it real-time. All this data can help growers make informed decisions that can lead to an efficient food production system. When2Fly is an important element of that."
This article was originally published on the UC Davis College of Engineering News page.
UCCE seeks statewide input to develop future wildfire programs
University of California Cooperative Extension has recently expanded their team of fire advisors and staff. This new group of UCCE fire professionals is interested in learning about the concerns of the communities that UCCE serves, as well as the natural resource professionals already working to address these issues.
Results from this survey will enhance the team's ability to partner with residents, landowners, agencies, academics, and other organizations to reduce California's vulnerability to wildfires. These new advisors will also share survey results with UCCE colleagues throughout the state, who already provide important fire-related programming across diverse landscapes and audiences.
"Wildfires will continue to affect all Californians, either directly or indirectly," said Katie Low, UCCE statewide fire coordinator. "It's invaluable to have the input of as many people as possible to guide the development of our wildfire-related extension programs, so that they can provide the most useful resources and information to communities across California."
The survey asks questions about topics such as:
- Gaps within existing educational programming and resources
- Challenges community members are facing in addressing wildfire risk
- Empowerment of communities to make property management decisions and prepare for wildfire
- Acceptability of prescribed fire and other fuels treatments
By participating in this study, you can choose to enter a drawing to win one of fifty $20 VISA gift cards.
To take the online survey, please visit https://bit.ly/UCCE_Fire_Survey.
This research is being led by a team of new UCCE fire advisors and staff. If you have any questions about this survey, please contact the fire/forestry professionals involved in this survey effort:
- Luca Carmignani, UCCE fire advisor for Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Diego counties, carmignani@ucanr.edu
- Alison Deak, UCCE fire advisor for Fresno, Madera, and Mariposa counties, aldeak@ucanr.edu
- Katie Low, UCCE fire academic coordinator for Nevada and Placer counties, katlow@ucanr.edu
- Barb Satink Wolfson, UCCE fire advisor for Monterey, San Benito, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz counties, bsatinkwolfson@ucanr.edu
- Ryan Tompkins, UCCE forestry advisor for Plumas, Sierra, and Lassen counties, retompkins@ucanr.edu
For more information about wildfire-related programming from University of California Cooperative Extension, please visit https://ucanr.edu/sites/fire/ or the Facebook page https://bit.ly/fireSolutions.
Just what is a ‘resilient’ forest, anyway?
Study finds resilient, frequent-fire forests have far fewer trees
What does a “resilient” forest look like in California's Sierra Nevada? A lot fewer trees than we're used to, according to a study of frequent-fire forests from the University of California, Davis.
More than a century ago, Sierra Nevada forests faced almost no competition from neighboring trees for resources. The tree densities of the late 1800s would astonish most Californians today. Because of fire suppression, trees in current forests live alongside six to seven times as many trees as their ancestors did — competing for less water amid drier and hotter conditions.
The study, published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, suggests that low-density stands that largely eliminate tree competition are key to creating forests resilient to the multiple stressors of severe wildfire, drought, bark beetles and climate change.
This approach would be a significant departure from current management strategies, which use competition among trees to direct forest development.
Defining ‘resilience'
But first, the study asks: Just what does “resilience” even mean? Increasingly appearing in management plans, the term has been vague and difficult to quantify. The authors developed this working definition: “Resilience is a measure of the forest's adaptability to a range of stresses and reflects the functional integrity of the ecosystem.”
They also found that a common forestry tool — the Stand Density Index, or SDI — is effective for assessing a forest's resilience.
“Resilient forests respond to a range of stressors, not just one,” said lead author Malcolm North, an affiliate professor of forest ecology with the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences and a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station. “‘Resistance' is about surviving a particular stress, like fire — but there's a lot more going on in these forests, particularly with the strain of climate change.”
Competitive nature
For fire-adapted forests in the Sierra, managing for resilience requires drastically reducing densities — as much as 80% of trees, in some cases.
“Treatments for restoring resilience in today's forests will need to be much more intensive then the current focus on fuels reduction,” said Scott Stephens of UC Berkeley, a co-author on the paper.
The study compared large-scale historical and contemporary datasets and forest conditions in the southern and central Sierra Nevada, from Sequoia National Forest to the Stanislaus National Forest. It found that between 1911 and 2011, tree densities increased six- to seven-fold while average tree size was reduced by half.
A century ago, both stand densities and competition were low. More than three-quarters of forest stands had low or no competition to slow a tree's growth and reduce its vigor. In contrast, nearly all — 82%-95% — of modern frequent-fire forests are considered in “full competition.”
The study indicates that forests with very low tree densities can be more resilient to compounded threats of fire, drought and other climate stressors while maintaining healthy water quality, wildlife habitat and other natural benefits. Forests burned by high-severity fires or killed by drought lose such ecosystem services.
Wake-up call
The authors say the 2012-2016 drought, in which nearly 150 million trees died from drought-induced bark beetle infestations, served as a wake-up call to the forestry community that different approaches are required to help forests confront multiple threats, not only severe wildfires.
A shift away from managing for competitive forests and toward eliminating competition could allow the few to thrive and be more resilient.
“People have grown accustomed to the high-density forest we live in,” North said. “Most people would be surprised to see what these forests once looked like when frequent surface fires kept them at very low densities. But taking out smaller trees and leaving trees able to get through fire and drought leaves a pretty impressive forest. It does mean creating very open conditions with little inter-tree competition. But there's a lot of historical data that supports this.”
“We think resilient forests can be created, but it requires drastically reducing tree density until there's little to no competition,” said Brandon Collins of UC Berkeley, another co-author on the paper. “Doing this will allow these forests to adapt to future climate.”
Additional co-authors include Ryan Tompkins of UC Cooperative Extension, and Alexis Bernal and Robert York of UC Berkeley.
The study was funded by the National Park Service Pacific West Region, U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station, U.S. Joint Fire Sciences Program, and the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources Division.
Evaluating Regional Food Resilience in the San Francisco Bay Area
While the provision of clean water, removal of wastes, and infrastructure for other basic human necessities are considered in the planning of modern development in the United States, the provision of food is rarely a consideration. More often, transportation infrastructure, including roads, ports, and rails, is considered synonymous with food infrastructure, and little attention is paid to distances from the development to food retail, distribution hubs, ports, or food sources. In modern development it is assumed where there is a road, there will be food. This was not the case in pre-Industrial development; limited means of high-speed transportation, and the absence of technologies such as refrigeration, required carefully planned development to maximize efficiencies of transportation and proximities of food sources.As communities strive for increasingly sustainable means of development, an important consideration is planning for food resilience, of the ability to secure food within one's community in light of outside stressors such as natural disasters or limited fuel resources. Food resiliency requires balancing several considerations related to the locality of food, and contains a greater degree of complexity than the popularized 100 mile ‘local food' radius. While greater densities of development receiving efficient modes of food distribution offer one facet of food resilience, lower densities that offer opportunities for in-situ production provide yet another.
This research investigates relative food system resiliency by evaluating opportunities for adapting food systems within existing community patterns. The San Francisco Bay Area provides a relevant case study of both pre- and post-industrial development at a range of densities and networked with multiple transportation infrastructures. The evaluation of communities within this region reveals important considerations for environmental designers aiming to increase food system resilience in new and existing communities. This includes examining multiple scales of adaptation to production and distribution networks, and challenges the popularized 100 mile ‘local food' radius for achieving regional food resilience.
The study examines a convenience sample of four communities on a rough east-west transect within the San Francisco Bay Area and along Interstate 580: San Francisco, Oakland, Dublin and Mountain House. See Figure 1. The communities represent a range of densities, area coverage, and populations which correspond roughly to their location along the transect, with the larger and denser communities (San Francisco and Oakland) at the western end, and the smaller and less-dense communities at the eastern end of the transect. The transect is important in both geographic and historical terms, as the western end also corresponds to the oldest community with development occurring in an east-ward expansion.
At the scale of the neighborhood, the study identified travel distance to a full-service retail grocery store as the most significant criterion for assessing community food resilience. Using aerial photography and GIS data, a maximum one-way travel distance within each community to a full-service retail grocery store was established. For this study, a full-service retail grocery store was defined as a supermarket carrying fresh produce, such as Safeway, Andronico's or Lucky's. Convenience stores which sell primarily soft drinks, alcoholic beverages and snacks, were not included, as they do not typically provide access to fruits and vegetables (or other whole foods). The study calculated the average distance to a full-service retail grocery store within the community.
The study also defined the ‘productive potential' of each community, a measure of a typical back yard's ability to meet the fruit and vegetable diet for a family of four, based on average home lot size and coverage, USDA consumption figures and typical home-garden yields. A combination of aerial photographs, zoning maps and real-estate data for each community was analyzed to determine a typical lot configuration for each community, illustrating the average lot size, average home size and coverage. Although individuals may choose to use open space areas on their lots in a variety of ways, including ornamental landscaping, xeriscaping, recreational features such as basketball courts, lawn and hardscaping, in addition to food gardening, the productive potential of any lot is pre-determined by open space provided. Raised bed gardening, a typical home-garden approach to growing food, yields an average 1.24 pounds per square foot. In the U.S. an average of 1.5 pounds of fruits and vegetables is consumed per person per day. The productive potential of each community was derived from applying the raised bed average yield to 90% of the typical lot open space in each community, and then calculating what percentage of the full-year fruit and vegetable diet for a family of four would be met by that yield.
Flexibility is key to resilience. While San Francisco might not be able to produce all its fruit and vegetable needs via urban agriculture, access to multiple neighborhood grocery stores and to efficient modes of food distribution offer alternative means of adopting alternative food systems. Oakland, shares many of the same advantages as San Francisco, but with greater lots sizes (and generally a better microclimate), opportunities for urban agriculture are far greater. Dublin, while not sharing the same access to efficient modes of food distribution as San Francisco and Oakland, offers the greatest opportunities for residential urban agriculture with a productive potential of 190%. With minimal opportunities for home production, great distances between home and local grocery retail, and removed location from efficient distribution centers, the community of Mountain House appears to be the least capable of adaptations to the existing food system.
The results of this research exemplify the need for environmental designers to balance considerations of density and geographic location in new development. While density provides opportunities for limiting personal automobile commute times, it can also interfere with opportunities to promote UA as an alternative food source. Recognizing the geographic location of new development, the impacts to food distribution networks, and the proximity of local food retail outlets should also be an important consideration for environmental designers. In essence, the infrastructure of a community's food system (including global, regional, and local sources and distribution networks) should be an equal consideration to new development in the San Francisco Bay Area, and beyond, if community's are to be designed as resilient food systems.
