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Streams hide an underwater world of tiny insects in a fantastically varied web of life. Why species are found where within streams, however, remains rather mysterious. 

“Distinguishing climate change effects arising from an increase in the frequency of abrupt events and gradual directional changes requires a long-term perspective,” said Dan Reed, a research biologist at UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute and one of the founders of the SBC LTER.

"How big of a problem is deep-water ocean dumping … along not just the California coast, but nationwide?"

Because of the high biodiversity of the Santa Barbara coast, due to the rich and productive mosaic of nearshore marine habitats, even in a small area of the coast, the impacts of debris disposal could potentially affect multiple marine habitats and their biodiversity.

Purple sea urchins are munching their way through California’s kelp forests at a speed and scale that have stunned scientists, fishermen and divers alike.

Santa Barbara Coastal Long-Term Ecological Research (SBC LTER) program researchers and students work together to unravel the ocean’s mysteries within the Santa Barbara Channel and along the coasts that line it.

Using DNA from large herbivore dung, scientists uncovered an entire network of gastrointestinal parasite sharing among 17 wild and domestic herbivore species.

UC Santa Barbara doctoral student Emily Lau and her co-advisor, Professor Todd Oakley, recently discovered that bioluminescence evolved independently at least 94 times across the tree of life. This makes it an excellent trait for investigating longstanding questions in evolution.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, an international collaboration of researchers takes a thorough look at the potential of a warming ocean to satisfy the growing global appetite.

UC Santa Barbara geochemist and geobiologist Morgan Raven is set to explore a lesser-known mechanism of ocean carbon sequestration — one that might become more conspicuous as the oceans warm.

Peter Alagona’s book “The Accidental Ecosystem” tells the story of how American cities filled with wildlife. It catalyzes a conversation about how to reimagine our cities as shared, multispecies habitats.

Some island foxes living along the coast have a taste for beach food, specifically the small cryptic animals that live around the piles of drift kelp on beaches, safely above the wave wash.

UC Santa Barbara professor Scott Hodges, doctoral student Zachary Cabin and their colleagues just have identified a case of a sudden evolutionary change.

Mae Rennick, a graduate student researcher in the Halley Froehlich Lab at UC Santa Barbara, has been selected to receive the 2022 Katherine S. McCarter Graduate Student Policy Award from the Ecological Society of America (ESA).

What factors drive the health, growth and productivity of giant kelp? There are several, but according to researchers at UC Santa Barbara and at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), what you see depends on the scale at which you’re observing.

Three UC Santa Barbara professors — Halley Froehlich, Eric Masanet and Lint Barrage — have been selected by the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) to serve as authors for the Fifth National Climate Assessment, or NCA5.

With help from citizen scientists, UC Santa Barbara biologist Georgia Titcomb and an international team of researchers discovered that parasite density is far higher around water sources than elsewhere in the landscape.

Professor Alyson Santoro is leading a team of researchers looking at a novel solution: using nature to help create biodegradable plastics.

A fish’s appetite can vary enormously with the temperature.

To better understand how temperature affects our finned friends, researchers at UC Santa Barbara studied opaleye fish under a variety of temperatures and diets.

A team at UC Santa Barbara and the National Forest Service have studied wildfire impacts on streams over the past five years in parts of the Los Padres National Forest.

Professor Santoro has a visionary approach to tackling the urgent need to understand how to find solutions to plastic pollution through cross-fertilization of ideas between scientists and engineers.

In a recent study published in the journal Oikos, UC Santa Barbara researchers reveal that giant kelp’s ability to take a temperature hit may come at the cost of its nutritional value.

An international team of researchers, led by professors at UC Santa Barbara, Deron Burkepile and Joshua Schimel, will investigate how elephants’ carcasses affect their ecosystems.

UCSB researchers Georgia Titcomb and Hillary Young gathered data on watering hole communities over the course of two years to investigate how herbivore activity affects vegetation on the savannas of central Kenya.