Search: Environmental News, Water Quality and Management

We are extremely pleased that KQED QUEST has put together a piece on the HydroWatch Project funded by the W.M. Keck Foundation. The theme of HydroWatch is water in motion. A center piece is David Culler's microclimate motes, deployed at a mini-watershed of a UC Natural Reserve. The Keck HydroWatch Story focusing on the work being done at the Angelo Coast Range Reserve is scheduled to air on KQED Quest on July 22 at 7:30 pm. The story will be available on the Quest website on July 21.

At the second annual UC Berkeley Sustainability Summit, held last Thursday, the campus honored the green-minded among us and awarded grants to six campus units through the Chancellor’s Green Campus Fund. It also unveiled hot-off-the-press copies of the “UC Berkeley Campus Sustainability Assessment,” a 122-page environmental report card on diverse campus systems, ranging from water use in toilets to the fuel efficiency of campus vehicles.

Death rates from lung and bladder cancer remained high decades after residents in northern Chile were exposed to high levels of arsenic in their drinking water, according to a new study by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago.

UC Berkeley students turned out in force for the campus's spring cleanup of Strawberry Creek.

Now that organophosphate pesticides have been phased out for homeowner use in California, pyrethroid pesticide use is increasing in urban areas. A new study shows that these pesticides are already showing up in urban streams at levels toxic to organisms that live in the stream-bottom sediment. The likely cause is overuse of these pesticides on lawns and around buildings.

Weather satellites do a great job of tracking storms, but what happens to the water after it falls? An ambitious new project funded by the Keck Foundation aims to track the invisible and hidden water in the plants, soil and streams of two UC reserves.

The rapid urbanization of flood-prone lands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta -- the water supply for nearly 23 million Californians and habitat for more than 30 fish species -- will be the focus of an upcoming conference at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Mountains to Mouths," a 2007 wall calendar produced jointly by the campus's Water Resources Center Archives and Harmer E. Davis Transportation Library, illustrates the historical development of the intricate network of dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, and pumping stations that delivers high-quality water to millions of thirsty people in the San Francisco Bay Area.

UC Berkeley's Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies on Tuesday announced the selection of its first field projects — the East Africa Healthcare Initiative and the Initiative on Safe Water and Sanitation. Both projects address poor health status, which is both a leading cause and a debilitating impact of global poverty.