In 2023, the UC Nature received $1 million from the state of California to fund innovations supporting the state’s ambitious climate goals. The two-year grants seed climate-focused entrepreneurship that will have a swift and measurable impact on climate resilience.
The five projects funded by the climate awards take a wide range of approaches to combat climate crisis impacts. These range from applying artificial intelligence to track biodiversity, to supporting undergraduates from diverse backgrounds to explore the field sciences, to enlisting data and technology to protect coastal communities from drought, wildfire, and other effects of a warming planet. Every project utilizes existing UC Nature datasets or is being tested and deployed on UC Nature reserves.
“The state of the environment affects every one of us, whether through heat waves, the risk of wildfire, or the well-being of our neighborhoods,” says Steve Monfort, executive director of the UC UC Nature. “As California’s premier outdoor laboratory, the UC Nature is proud to catalyze solutions that keep California healthy in the face of the climate crisis.”
Stories in this series will be posted as they become available.
Projects
¿field curious? smashes barriers to outdoor science
UC Merced’s ¿field curious? program lowers barriers keeping underrepresented students from trying their hand at field research with gear, information, and weekend trips to UC Nature reserves.
Using tech to break bottlenecks in wildlife monitoring
An automated system for identifying species in the field and recording that information in a data repository should dramatically increase our capacity to monitor small animal biodiversity.
Mining coastal network data to benefit communities
UC researchers are applying environmental data from UC Nature reserves to forecast climate change impacts such as flooding in coastal communities.
A toolkit to assess ecosystem resilience to wildfire
Using drone images taken at reserves, scientists are developing an online tool that can identify factors such as slope aspect and vegetation type to analyze a landscape’s wildfire risk.
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