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EESA Faculty Scientist Tapped to Discuss Climate Change and Wildfire Risk Before California State Senate2 min read

by Christina Procopiou on May 4, 2018

Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division Climate Sciences Department Uncategorized

Jeff Chambers, faculty scientist within the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab, provided testimony relevant to the impact of climate change on wildfire risk. The subject was the focus of the first informational joint hearing of the California State Assembly Subcommittee on Resources and Transportation and the Joint Legislative Committee on Emergency Management. California lawmakers convened at the state capitol building in Sacramento for an informational hearing held in February while counties across the state still struggled to regain their footing in the wake of 2017’s 9,000 wildfires.

The greatest threat to California’s 33 million acres of forest are catastrophic events such as large wildfires, according to experts at the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Chambers, who has been studying the damage done to forested ecosystems throughout the Americas for nearly 30 years, is regularly called upon to share his expertise on how tree mortality affects the ability of old-growth tropical forests to sequester carbon. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Chambers led a team of researchers who estimated that more than 300 million Gulf Coast trees had died or suffered severe damage as a result of the storm.  More recently, Chambers and colleagues used satellite images of Puerto Rico and image processing techniques to draw similar conclusions about the damage inflicted on the island’s trees by Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017.

At the February hearing in Sacramento, Chambers addressed state legislators about the potential for using similar tools to determine how California wildfires affect tree health and mortality. The ecologist referenced what he’d learned from contributing to a UC Berkeley-led effort to assess the impact of extreme drought on tree mortality during the years 2013 through 2016.

Chambers says that it was clear during the informational hearing that lawmakers were deeply concerned about the effect’s the state’s many wildfires could have on California forests. “The hearing itself focused mainly on the fires,” says Chambers. “But the lawmakers present seemed to also take an interest in the additional factors – like drought and climate change  – that could impact the state’s forests.”

News & Events

EGD Postdoc Fellow Receives Young Researcher Presenter Award1 min read

January 21, 2021

Pramod Bhuvankar, an EGD postdoctoral fellow working with research scientist Abdullah Cihan, received a Young Researcher Presenter Award during the 2020 Computational Methods in Water Resources conference in December. His presentation, “Pore-scale simulations of permeability decline in porous media due to fines migration,” described a pore-scale CFD study of clay mobilization in porous media due…

Berkeley Lab Partners with International Collaborators in Geothermal Energy Research1 min read

January 20, 2021

  Scientists from the Energy Geosciences Division have begun working with European partners on three new geothermal research projects through the Department of Energy’s membership in GEOTHERMICA, a transnational consortium that combines the in-country financial resources and research expertise of 15 participating countries to demonstrate and validate novel concepts in geothermal energy use. This marks the…

EESA Senior Scientist Talks Earthquake Building Resilience1 min read

Berkeley Lab senior scientist David McCallen leads a subproject called Earthquake Sim, or EQSIM, for the DOE’s Energy Exascale Computing Project. He is also professor and director of the Center for Civil Engineering Earthquake Research in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno. McCallen recently spoke with Scott Gibson of…

EESA Scientist Coauthors New Comprehensive Guide on Removing CO2 from the Atmosphere2 min read

January 18, 2021

Berkeley Lab researchers are working on ways to sequester more carbon in soil, including through agricultural practices. (Credit: Berkeley Lab) Scientists say that any serious plan to address climate change should include carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies and policies, which makes the newly launched CDR Primer an especially vital resource, says Berkeley Lab scientist Margaret Torn, one…

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