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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.

A new research endeavor involving multiple institutions, including UC Santa Barbara, will explore the possibility that frogs’ ability to survive certain infections can help enhance understanding of how to help humans do the same.

There’s evidence of a large cosmic airburst, close to this city called Tall el-Hammam. The shock of the explosion over Tall el-Hammam was enough to level the city.

Fish do require oxygen to breathe; it’s just that they get what they need from the oxygen dissolved in water rather than in the air. Unfortunately, oxygen concentrations are dropping throughout the oceans. A new study out of UC Santa Barbara and University of South Carolina is the first to document more than a dozen species moving to shallower water in response to low oxygen conditions.

The “use it or lose it” is a stipulation common to many of the laws governing public resources in the U.S. and around the world: You can’t lease public resources with the intent to leave them be. A group of scientists, economists and lawyers at several universities, including UC Santa Barbara, say it’s time for this requirement to go. The authors argue their case for creating a free market in an article featured in the prestigious journal Science.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara with expertise ranging from energy systems and policy analysis to ornithology and marine life offer their take on how offshore wind capacity fits into the country’s energy portfolio, as well as the effect it may have on humans and wildlife.

Reef fish have pooped on coral since time immemorial. While it’s a normal part of the coral reef ecosystem, a recent study out of UC Santa Barbara suggests that changing environmental conditions could be throwing this dynamic off kilter.

A forest canopy performs many functions. It forms habitat, creates microclimates, provides food and much more.

In a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers demonstrate the effectiveness of eDNA analysis in the measurement of beta diversity in aquatic environments.

Oak. Elm. Rowan. Ash. Willow. Hazel. Forests of these trees used to cover Ireland, but now its landscape is home to towering, upright conifers of the American Pacific Northwest. Sitka spruce for example, constitute slightly more than half of Ireland’s tree cover.

Hippopotamus offered UC Santa Barbara ecologist Keenan Stears a window into the progression of an anthrax outbreak that struck Ruaha National Park, Tanzania, in the dry season of 2017.

What will the Earth be like for our children and grandchildren, as temperatures continue to rise?