UC Blogs
Her Name Was Olive
Her name was Olive. Every Friday morning she'd come bounding over to greet me, her tail wagging happily, one ear up, one ear down. I called her "My...
Olive attentively watches for Kris Kolb. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Sarah Hodge pets Olive, while Kris Kolb gardens. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Olive faithfully follows Kris Kolb as she hauls away clippings. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Thirty-year farm advisor gets her day in the sun
Hasey, a plant pathologist by training, conducts research and works with farmers on a wide variety of crops, plant systems and cultural methods in Sutter and Yuba counties. She called the results of the walnut pruning research "a real paradigm shift."
Hasey and Bruce Lampinen, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis, learned that trees that have been trimmed sparingly or not at all produced a bigger yield than trees that were pruned more aggressively.
"We've had several growers adopt it," Hasey said. "We always caution growers that whenever we have something new, to do it on smaller acreages first to see how it works. But there are several growers who are adopting it now because it's working so well. We do have fairly long-term data."
A Very Dry Winter
Have you noticed? It’s very, very dry out there. And with each rainless day that passes, the what-ifs do another lap around my worry-worn brain:
What if we don’t get another drop of rainfall this season?
What if we do not get any more snowfall?
The National Weather Service reported in November that only 3.95 inches of rain had fallen in San Francisco since Jan. 1, the smallest amount of precipitation to date since record keeping began 164 years ago. The previous record dry year was in 1976 when 5.57 inches of rain fell in San Francisco over the 311 days between Jan. 1 and Nov. 7.
“We’ve never had any year dryer through October,” Jan Null, a meteorologist for Golden Gate Weather Services, told the San Francisco Chronicle on Nov. 10.
Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute and a Huffington Post blogger, wrote in his Nov. 20 HuffPost blog, “California precipitation has, on average, been declining, from an average of around 23 inches per year to around 21 inches per year — a nearly 10 percent decline in the past 117 years. This could be the result of natural variability, disparities in measurements over time, or climate change — we don’t know for sure. But it is bad news in a region where growing populations and demands for water are already an economic, political, and social challenge.”
California knows droughts. But can we ever do enough water saving to lessen our worry? What do you do to save or reuse water? For instance, at our house, it takes quite some time to get hot water to our master bathroom. We collect that warm-up water from our showers and use it to water back yard plants. It’s just a little, and it’s easy, but it’s something, right?
Sure, some stuff is easy (flushing less, removing the lawn), but some stuff is not: seeding clouds (yes, this happens regularly!) and building huge water tunnels it’s in the works). But can we ever do enough?
It’s doubtful. But we could start with some re-education. The natural ebbs and flows of California’s droughts cause folks to forget their good water-use habits. Seems each new generation needs a reminder. Solano County has stepped up with just such a reminder.
Solano County high school students can win up to $1,500 in cash by entering the 2014 Water Awareness Video Contest, sponsored by the Solano County Water Agency. The contest challenges teens to create compelling and original 60-second public service announcement videos on a select water-efficiency topic. The 2014 theme is “Spy on your sprinklers: Check your sprinklers monthly for water-wasting problems.”
Interested high school students should visit solanosaveswater.org
Rain. (photo from commons.wikimedia.org)
Yosemite toad undeterred by cows grazing in meadows
Amphibians are in decline globally. The Yosemite toad was once prevalent in the high Sierra including Yosemite National Park, where it was first discovered and after which it is named. Since the early 1980s, the amphibian’s population and habitat have plummeted.
In the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where livestock graze among toad habitat, UC scientists erected fences to keep the cattle out of toad breeding and rearing areas and studied the effects on Yosemite toad populations for five years.
“The Yosemite toad has been proposed for listing under the Endangered Species Act,” said Ken Tate, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis and a principal investigator for the study. “One of the potential factors proposed to be driving the species decline is cattle grazing. However, our research does not support this.”
The researchers found that meadow wetness played a greater role in Yosemite toad presence.
"The toads use wetter areas and the cattle use drier meadow areas, which provide better forage,” Tate said.
“Determining the Effects of Cattle Grazing Treatments on Yosemite Toads (Anaxyrus [=Bufo] canorus) in Montane Meadows” was published in the November 2013 issue of PLOS One http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0079263. Tate’s coauthors on the study are Susan K. McIlroy, research scientist with U.S. Geological Survey in Boise, Idaho; Amy J. Lind, research wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station; Barbara H. Allen-Diaz, professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley; Leslie M. Roche, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis; William E. Frost, UC Cooperative Extension advisor; and Rob L. Grasso, fishery and aquatic ecologist with U.S. Forest Service Eldorado National Forest.
This is the latest of three articles examining the relationship between cattle grazing and growth in numbers of Yosemite toads. In April 2012, PLOS One published “Cattle Grazing and Conservation of a Meadow-Dependent Amphibian Species in the Sierra Nevada,” online at http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.pone.0035734. The first article “Cattle Grazing, Mountain Meadows, and Sensitive Species,” written in 2011, is online at http://rangelandwatersheds.ucdavis.edu/main/projects.htm.
Wings of Freedom
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." That's the line that came to me Saturday when I released a week-old Gulf Fritillary...
A newly emerged Gulf Fritillary, Agraulis vanillae. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Gulf Fritillary returns to the site where it was released. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
This Gulf Fritillary caterpillar survived the frost. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)