UC Berkeley Water Research and Opportunities Portal

This course is designed to introduce students to the major sampling systems used in natural resources and ecology. It also introduces students to important sampling and measurement concepts in grassland, forest, wildlife, insect, soil, and water resources. May be taken without laboratory course 102BL.

This course introduces the fundamental physical principles that are necessary to understand the distribution and dynamics of water near the Earth’s surface. A quantitative approach will provide mathematical descriptions of hydrolgical phenomena that will be used for a variety of hydrological applications to river flow hydraulics, flood frequency analysis, ecapotranspirtation from terrestrial ecosystems, groundwater flow, and ecohydrological dynamics. This course will provide an introduction to hydrological processes and data analysis. The purpose of the laboratory is to illustrate in an experimental setting the principles and applications introdcuted in lecture.

Environmental planning intersects with many other disciplines and incorporates a very wide array of sub disciplines. Ranging from city planning, land use planning, landscape architecture, forest management, waste water management, wilderness preservation, urban sustainability and many more.

Prof. Gerlein-Safdi is an ecohydrologist interested in understanding water-carbon relations within the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. She uses an array of methods, from satellite data to process-based modeling, from stable isotopes lab experiments to field measurements.

1) Satellite-based mapping of wetlands to improve methane emissions modeling
2) Understanding the effects of soil warming on vegetation water and carbon fluxes
3) Dew and fog as a water resource for vegetation

Steven Glaser focuses on laboratory earthquakes and nanoseismology, wireless sensors networks, snow water hydrology, internet of water, geophysics and wave propagation, geothermal energy, rock mechanics.

His projects include:
1) Forest hydrology of snow melt and water balance in the Sierra Nevada.
2) Berkeley Mote to monitor the seismic safety of wood-frame houses to measuring the seismic response of the Masada mountain in Israel
3) Environmental hazards at Chinese historical sites such as Dunhuang

Maggi Kelly’s lab group’s motto is “mapping for a changing California”, and they use a range of geospatial data and analytics – from spatial modeling, remote sensing, drones, lidar, historical archives, surveys, participatory mapping, and the field – to gain insights about how and why California landscapes are changing, and what that change means for those who live on, use, and manage our lands.

Todd Dawson focuses on the interface between plants and their environment. Specifically trying to use plant ecophysiology, ecohydrology, and stable isotope ecology to investigate how aspects of plant form and function combine to permit adaptation to environmental variation, whether naturally or anthropogenically imposed, and how plants and their unique traits influence the structure and function of the communities and ecosystems they compose.

His projects include:
1) Detecting changes in water and vegetation under rapid climatic challenges
2) The roles of plants in the critical zone
3) Coupling plant hydraulics to ecohydrological fluxes

Established in 1951, Sagehen Creek Field Station is a research and teaching facility of the University of California at Berkeley located in the Central Sierra Nevada north of Truckee, California.

The station is embedded within the 9,000-acre Sagehen Experimental Forest, which is cooperatively and collaboratively managed in a partnership between the University of California, the US Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station and the Tahoe National Forest.

Sagehen serves as the hub of a broader regional network of research areas known as the Central Sierra Field Research Stations. CSFRS also includes the Central Sierra Snow Lab, Onion Creek Experimental Forest, North Fork Association Lands and the Chickering American River Reserve.