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.
Along California’s coast, two ambitious efforts are reshaping how we approach restoration in a rapidly shifting world. The White Abalone Captive Breeding Program, led by Dr. Alyssa Frederick, and the Kelp RISES project, led by Dr. Marissa Baskett, working alongside a broad interdisciplinary team, are tackling ecological crises head-on.
