When Paulina González-Gómez was caught admiring baby birds chirping outside her classroom window, her third-grade teacher cautioned she wouldn’t make a living watching birds. Undeterred, she is now forging a career studying how changes in the environment influence the behavior, physiological traits and life cycles of birds.
With an extendable pole fitted with a small camera, Alison Ke could get a clear view of the inside of a nest box, including one time when a small, green Pacific parrotlet laid eggs. Ke, who earned a Ph.D. in ecology from UC Davis, led a research project to find out how converting rainforest to farmland affects the habitat of birds who rely on tree holes, or cavities, for nesting.
A group of researchers, which includes research affiliate Dr. John Trochet with the UC Davis Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology, has been working for the past 10 years to collect evidence that the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker is still in existence.
From jaguars and ocelots to anteaters and capybara, most land-based mammals living in the Brazilian Amazon are threatened by climate change and the projected savannization of the region. That’s according to a study published in the journal Animal Conservation by the University of California, Davis.
I was a plant girl. As an undergraduate student at UC Davis, I’ve spent my summers restoring wetlands with native plants, summiting peaks to study alpine cushion plants, and dissecting seeds in labs. Animals were never in the picture, and birds were no exception. So when I kept seeing “Bird ID skills needed” on botany position advertisements, I knew my plant-only class days were over.
It’s rare to leave a lecture, field survey or casual conversation with John Eadie without a smile or a chuckle. The University of California, Davis professor is known for his sense of humor, enthusiasm and vast knowledge about ecology and wildlife conservation. It’s what students and colleagues admire most about him.
A male platypus has a paddle-shaped tail, flat bill, sleek furry body and half-inch spurs connected to a venom-secreting gland on each hind leg. They are among the few venomous mammals.
That’s one of the many animal facts visitors may learn when they visit the UC Davis Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology (MWFB), which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
UC Davis polar ecologist Eric Post has kept a close eye on Arctic Greenland for nearly 30 years, documenting changes to the warming landscape and the plants and animals who call it home.
In the classroom environment, he’s seen climate change create a different shift among students — one in which climate anxiety is an unavoidable and increasingly frequent reality.
The idea of food chains and food webs in the animal kingdom is simple: Remove a link or thread, and the system is broken. But nature is complex, and it’s not always clear how the absence of one species may impact others.
Other times, the connection is devastatingly clear.
When pay-to-conserve programs don’t come through with payments, they don’t conserve, indicates a case study by the University of California, Davis, of a REDD+ Readiness program on the island of Pemba, off the coast of Tanzania.
