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An analysis of 115 studies comparing organic and conventional farming finds that the crop yields of organic agriculture are higher than previously thought. Researchers also found that taking into account methods that optimize the productivity of organic agriculture could minimize the yield gap between organic and conventional farming.
Environment archive
Unique Sulawesi frog gives birth to tadpoles
December 31, 2014: Amid the amazing biodiversity of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi lives a 5-gram frog that gives direct birth to tadpoles, without ever laying eggs. This unique reproductive strategy, found in a group of fanged frogs endemic to the island, is described for the first time by UC Berkeley herpetologist Jim McGuire and colleagues from Indonesia and Canada.
UC Natural Reserve System gets $1.9 million for climate change research
December 23, 2014: An ambitious plan to use the UC Natural Reserve System to detect and forecast the ecological impacts of climate change in California has received a $1.9 million research award. The proposal will establish a UC-wide Institute for the Study of Ecological and Evolutionary Climate Impacts (ISEECI).
Mark Bittman’s menu to include UC Berkeley
December 11, 2014: Mark Bittman, popular food writer and New York Times columnist, will be a distinguished visiting fellow on campus during spring semester, collaborating with faculty, staff and students connected to the Berkeley Food Institute.
UC’s first crop of ‘global food’ fellows includes three Berkeley students
December 10, 2014: Three UC Berkeley students are among 54 fellows announced Dec. 9 by the University of California’s Global Food Initiative, launched earlier this year to address food security, health and sustainability issues.
Big Ideas guest lecturer Wendy Schmidt advocates for a sea change
November 26, 2014: Schmidt Ocean Institute co-founder Wendy Schmidt delivered a guest lecture to students in the College of Letters and Science’s Big Ideas “Oceans” course, telling them a sea change was needed to rebuild humans’ relationship with the planet. “We are the last generation to have the chance to do something about this,” said the Graduate School of Journalism alumna, who is president of the Schmidt Family Foundation.
Dodging a sixth mass extinction 
November 25, 2014: Integrative biology professor Anthony Barnosky not only has a new book out, Dodging Extinction, but also appears in a new documentary airing Nov. 30 on the Smithsonian Channel. The film, Mass Extinction, Life at the Brink, also features UC Berkeley geologist Walter Alvarez and Barnosky’s wife, Stanford ecologist Elizabeth Hadly.
Foragers find bounty of edibles in urban food deserts
November 17, 2014: Urban residents in neighborhoods lacking stores with fresh, affordable produce need to look no further than their own yards to find wild edibles to add to the dinner table. Two Berkeley professors and a team of students are foraging in three East Bay communities as part of a unique project that is surveying, logging data, testing soil and aiming to educate neighborhoods about the value of these greens.
Lightning expected to increase by 50 percent with global warming
November 13, 2014: UC Berkeley atmospheric scientist David Romps and his colleagues looked at predictions of precipitation and cloud buoyancy in 11 different climate models and concluded that global warming will generate 50 percent more lightning strikes across the U.S. by the end of the 21st century.
Study says California solar boom makes the state a national leader, prepares new generation of workers
November 10, 2014: A new report from UC Berkeley’s Don Vial Center for Green Jobs notes California’s leading role in the solar energy field, and recommends steps to secure the state’s solar energy future in terms of energy supplies and for workers, too.
Center for the Built Environment’s 2014 Liveable Building Awards
November 6, 2014: The David & Lucile Packard Foundation Headquarters in Los Altos, Calif., is the winner of the 2014 Livable Buildings Award issued by UC Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment Industry Partners. Meanwhile, the DPR Southwest Headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, scored with an honorable mention.
Julia Morgan Hall’s new UC Botanical Garden party place
October 30, 2014: Julia Morgan Hall, now relocated to the UC Botanical Garden in Strawberry Canyon, is open for business meetings, weddings, parties and other events following an extensive restoration. The building was designed by the famed Berkeley architect and alumna in 1911.
Cal Dining goes local for Food Day 
October 28, 2014: Cal Dining celebrated Food Day 2014 (Friday, Oct. 24) by serving dinners made from locally grown and sustainably produced foods, from broccoli and rutabagas to persimmons and lemon mousse cake. A slideshow shows the action.
AC Transit, BART seek campus views on transit
October 27, 2014: AC Transit planners will hold a campus workshop Thursday, Oct. 30, to get feedback on East Bay and transbay bus service. Members of the campus community are also invited to answer online surveys about AC Transit and BART, as part of the agencies’ long-range planning.
Maximino Martinez Commons garners $500,000 PG&E award
October 27, 2014: The campus recently celebrated a $500,000 incentive award from Pacific Gas & Electric’s “Savings By Design” program, for building and maintaining Maximino Martinez Commons as a sustainable student-residence hall. The LEED Gold-rated facility is designed to save energy and water and to filter storm-water runoff.
How do chemicals affect breast-cancer risk?
October 23, 2014: Improved testing of the multitude of chemicals we encounter daily will help us understand if and how these exposures contribute to development of breast cancer, says Megan Schwarzman, a research scientist at the School of Public Health’s Center for Occupational and Environmental Health. She and two coauthors offer commentary in the journal Reproductive Toxicology.
Bancroft opens stunning California Captured on Canvas exhibit
October 21, 2014: The Bancroft Library is providing a window onto California’s unique history and culture with an new exhibit of oil paintings from its pictorial collection, some of which haven’t been publicly displayed before.
Earth’s magnetic field could flip within a human lifetime
October 14, 2014: UC Berkeley geophysicist Paul Renne, grad student Courtney Sprain and their Italian and French colleagues found that Earth’s last magnetic reversal took place 786,000 years ago and happened very quickly, in less than 100 years – roughly a human lifetime. The rapid flip is much faster than the thousands of years most geologists thought.
POV: ‘Development engineers’ take aim at global poverty
October 6, 2014: A new generation of development engineers, “dedicated to using engineering and technology to improve the lot of the world’s poorest people,” is emerging around the world, write Shankar Sastry and Lina Nilsson of UC Berkeley’s Blum Center for Developing Economies, in a Washington Post opinion piece.
$4.5 million for big-data projects in ecology, astronomy, microscopy
October 2, 2014: The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has upped its support of data-driven science at UC Berkeley by awarding three professors $1.5 million each over five years to pursue big-data projects in ecology, astronomy and microscopy. The faculty members – Laura Waller, Joshua Bloom and Laurel Larsen – were named Moore Investigators in Data-Driven Discovery.
Berkeley and the making of Yosemite
September 25, 2014: Yosemite National Park would be something quite different were it not for UC Berkeley and its visionary scientists, alumni and leaders. That’s the blue-and-gold current flowing through Yosemite: A Storied Landscape, a just-published e-book that brings to vivid life the first national park in celebration of its 150th birthday.
Shake your silk-maker: The dance of the peacock spider
September 24, 2014: The radio show “Science Friday” profiled UC Berkeley graduate student Madeline Girard and her study of peacock spiders, using Girard’s amazing video of the rhythmic, disco-like courtship dances males employ to entice and placate females.
2014 Berkeley-Rupp Prize for boosting women in architecture, sustainability announced
September 15, 2014: Sheila Kennedy, an internationally recognized architect, innovator and educator, is the 2014 recipient of the Berkeley-Rupp Prize. The award is given by UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design to a design practitioner or academic who has made a significant contribution to advance gender equity in the field of architecture, and whose work emphasizes a commitment to sustainability and community.
Lessons for saving our forests
September 11, 2014: UC Berkeley professor Scott Stephens lost 400 research sites in last year’s Sierra Nevada Rim Fire, but the harm to the forest ecosystem is incalculable. Now fires are raging again in Yosemite. Stephens offered advice on how to reduce future catastrophes, in a NewsCenter story that first ran in October 2013; it is reposted here.
Changing how we farm can save evolutionary diversity, study suggests
September 11, 2014: A new study by biologists at Stanford University and UC Berkeley highlights the dramatic hit on evolutionary diversity when forests are transformed into agricultural lands. The findings point to using diversified farming as a way to preserve the evolutionary history embodied in wildlife.
Biologists try to dig endangered pupfish out of its hole
September 9, 2014: A UC Berkeley biologist is giving important guidance in the efforts to rescue a critically endangered fish found only in Devils Hole, about 60 miles east of Death Valley National Park. It is estimated that fewer than 100 Devils Hole pupfish remain. Considered the world’s rarest fish, the wild pupfish faces a 28 to 32 percent risk of extinction over the next 20 years.
Flapping baby birds offer clues to origin of flight
August 28, 2014: The origin of flight is a contentious issue: Some argue that dinosaurs climbed trees and learned to fly in order to avoid hard falls, others that birds ran along the ground and pumped their forelimbs to gain lift, eventually taking off. New evidence from UC Berkeley biologists favors the tree-dweller hypothesis.
John Harte: A whole-Earth approach
August 26, 2014: Symmetry magazine profiles John Harte, professor of energy and resources, who applies his physics background to deep questions of ecology and work to save the planet.
Berkeley air-monitoring project wins White House nod
August 22, 2014: The White House has given a public nod to a ground-breaking UC Berkeley air-monitoring project and its new collaboration with a Colorado public media platform, which aims to build a citizen-science story-corps to help monitor carbon emissions in the Bay Area.
Professional-ed trainings focus on critical environmental issues
August 13, 2014: The College of Natural Resources has launched a series of professional-education programs on critical environmental issues. First up: “The Economic Impact of Climate and Energy Policy on Public and Private Sectors,” a three-day certificate course taught by 11 UC faculty members, now open for enrollment.
