Resilience isn’t just something ecosystems do — bending, recovering, adapting in the face of stress. It’s something people do too. For UC Davis Ph.D. candidates Elisabeth Sellinger and Karolina Zabinski, resilience shows up in sediment cores and microbial communities, in carbon storage and stress responses, and also in career pivots, broken funding pipelines, and the uncertainty that shadows early-career science today.
While the wettest storm season in California’s recorded history crushed roofs and swelled snowbanks in the Sierra Nevada, the state’s coastal communities suffered plenty of their own losses. The casualties included waterside businesses swamped by storm surges, fishing piers smashed by rising seas, and coastal roads collapsed by debris flows.
Healthy ocean environments provide vital life support for roughly 3 billion people living in coastal communities worldwide. These vibrant ecosystems deliver numerous benefits to coastal communities that often rely on ocean industries such as commercial fishing for sustenance and income.
John Largier has been collaborating with pathologists and wildlife health researchers in the UCD Vet School, producing a collection of papers on the transport of water-borne pathogens, including particle aggregation dynamics and plume dynamics. This information is critical for understanding how human and non-human pathogens are transported from land to the sea.
Ocean temperature and salinity has been recorded daily at Bodega Marine Laboratory for over 50 years, and for a couple of decades additional data on winds, chlorophyll, weather and currents have been collected. BML is a leading member of the national Integrated Ocean Observing System, and the regional association Central and Northern California Ocean Observing System (CeNCOOS). Data are displayed and available via the Bodega Ocean Observing Node (BOON).
