As wildfires continue to blaze across California, one UC Davis group is aiming to learn more about the fires‘ potential effects on the ecosystem of the Lake Tahoe basin.

The UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center, a group of professors, researchers and graduate students studying sustainable use of the lake, recently installed a fourth air sampler designed to provide detailed analyses of the compounds and toxic materials resulting from forest wildfires.

“The new sampler is designed to collect organic fallout from the small particles in smoke,” said Charles R. Goldman, professor of limnology and director of the Tahoe Research Group. “We expect to determine more precisely the nutrient and light-altering impact that these fires are having on Tahoe lake water quality.“

One such effect could be on the water clarity of the lake, which has seen improvement in recent years. In results published from 2007 clarity tests, researchers found that for the first time since they began measuring Lake Tahoe’s water clarity over 40 years ago, the rate of decline in the lake’s clarity has begun to slow, according to the center’s website.

“From 1968 to 2000 there was a near-continuous decline in lake clarity,” said Geoffrey Schladow, director of the Tahoe Research Center. “But since 2001, we have had seven years in which the clarity has consistently been better than the long-term trend would have predicted. This is unprecedented.“

Lake clarity is determined by a number of factors, including runoff from nearby roads, climate change and forest wildfires similar to the recent ones this summer, all of which have adverse effects on water clarity.

Fallout from the wildfires also appears to have a fertilizing impact on the lake, Goldman said.

“[The Tahoe Research Group] started sampling air quality and especially fallout over a decade ago,” he said. “It was then that we discovered that most of the nitrogen loading of the lake, a potent fertilizer, was coming from atmospheric fallout. For example, the 1985 hot brush fires in California contributed significant fertilization to the lake from nutrients contained in the small particles of ash transported to the basin as smoke.“

The new air sampler could also help researchers learn more about the effects of different types of forest wildfires.

“In the past we learned the great impact that the hot brush fires from Southern California were having, but also found that the coniferous pine forest fires did not appear to be as fertilizing to the lake as the brush fires from the south,” Goldman said. “This work needs further verification and the new sampling of the current smoky situation should bring further clarity to the question.“

ERICA LEE can be reached at campus@californiaaggie.com.

UC Davis experts along with the Public Policy Institute of California concluded that a peripheral canal is the best solution to support both the economic and ecological value of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

“The bottom line is, [keeping] business as usual in the delta is not sustainable,” said co-author of the report Jeff Mount, UC Davis professor of geology and director of the Center for Watershed Sciences. “Forces against export from the delta are immutable and will lead to crisis in the delta.“

The report, released July 10, researched four possible options to restore the delta – leaving the delta as it is, building a peripheral canal, ending water exports in the delta, or building a dual facility where some of the water is taken as usual and some is diverted to a peripheral canal.

All four options had to be framed under the proposed policy expressed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s Vision Delta Task Force, which aims to equally protect both the economical and ecological interests of the delta.

“We interpreted it as fish versus water supply proxy; one option is to keep going and do poorly for fish or to wean the state off the delta, which will perform well for fish and perform poorly economically,” Mount said. “We found that a peripheral canal performs better than any of the other alternatives.“

Currently, water flows from the Sacramento River into the delta where it is sucked through large pumps and distributed to the Bay Area. The canal would reroute some water from the Sacramento River before it enters the delta and divert it to Southern California. The theory is that changing the flow of the delta would lower the killing of fish and provide much higher quality water.

Opponents voiced concern that a peripheral canal will cause the delta to lose water and destroy the ecosystem of the area, damaging the farms and economy of the growing population of 500,000 surrounding the delta.

“The canal will destroy all the agriculture and tourism in the area and end recreational activities people partake in such as fishing, boating and hunting,” said Bill Wells, director of the California Delta Chambers and Bureau. “It will be an economical loss in the billions.“

Northern California has shown strong opposition to the canal in the past with the defeat of a 1982 measure to build the peripheral canal, which was viewed by some as a “water grab” by Southern California.

Wells cited past failed attempts as reason for the current doubt that a canal will be successful.

“The Sacramento River provides most of the water to the delta, so if you run off 50 percent of the water, 50 percent of the delta will dry off,” Wells said. “The San Joaquin River, Owens ‘Dry Lake‘ and the Colorado River Delta water have had water rerouted out of them and it has been a disaster.“

There is also concern over the engineering of the canal and how water quality and delta fisheries can be preserved.

“I can talk an hour about the problems with the report,” said Barbara Barrigan-Parilla, director of Restore the Delta, a coalition of farm and environmental groups. “The proposed canal is so shallow the water will evaporate anyway. There is no cost analysis of the fish screen [that would be needed] in the Sacramento River; it will need to be the length of six football fields.“

“Also, the report absolutely failed to work with the people in the community of the delta,” she said.

One thousand homes and farms have already been surveyed for workability for a feasible canal. The canal is estimated to cost between $7 billon and $9 billion and would take 10 years to build.

Mount emphasized that the peripheral canal is a recommendation of the best solution to an inevitable future problem. “The Bay Area is now more dependent on the delta than anywhere else, and since the time of the peripheral canal defeat, Southern California has diversified their portfolio [in water resources].“

The study was conducted in five months and was funded by the Davis Lucille Packard Foundation and a direct gift from Stephen D. Bechtel, son of the founder of engineering company Bechtel Corp.

WENDY WANG can be reached at campus@californiaaggie.com.

University of California President Mark Yudof announced the creation of an accountability program designed to assess UC’s performance on multiple levels and generate reports available to the public. The first report is expected to be released this fall.

The report is intended to make the university more transparent and accessible to the public, aid in future strategic planning efforts for the University of California Board of Regents and assist in managing budgeting issues.

In a speech to the UC Board of Regents Long Range Planning Committee last month, Yudof described the program as “a routine publication that sets forth measures of performance … in terms of access and affordability, in terms of student success, in terms of research impact and funding, in terms of faculty diversity and staff diversity.“

The annual report will be available to the public on the Internet and will outline issues including affordability, diversity, research success and graduation rates.

“This is a way of bringing the many assessments that are conducted across the UCs together into one comprehensive report,” said Daniel Greenstein, vice provost of the Department of Academic Affairs in the Office of the President.

The assessment will analyze and compare the performance of individual campuses as well as at a systemwide level. UC campuses will be compared to the “peer 8,“ a group of universities the UC system uses as a standard for comparison – Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, University of Virginia and SUNY Buffalo.

“Accountability has been an issue growing in prominence across the nation in higher education,” said UC spokesperson Brad Hayward.

In his speech to the regents, UC President Yudof cited a growing desire for accountability as being prompted by events such as the Enron scandal, Sarbanes-Oxley and the sub-prime mortgages crisis.

“The public, the taxpayers, the legislature, the parents, the students, the employees, they have a right to know what is going on in the institution,“ Yudof said.

The report will be conducted at both graduate and undergraduate levels and is intended to be a resource for the people of California, the board of regents as well as prospective students.

“We’re trying to give a reasonable person a fairly good and accurate overall idea of what the university is all about,” Greenstein said.

Yudof is also planning to introduce narrower and more detailed sub-reports on specific areas such as research funding or scholarship availability.

“I believe that this will be a topic of great personal focus for President Yudof,” Hayward said. “[Accountability] is something that we’re building at the university and we want to be as aggressive as we can in getting all the info we can out to the public.“

CHARLES HINRIKSSON can be reached at campus@californiaaggie.com.

UC Davis Medical Center was named among the nation’s top 50 “Best Hospitals“ for the 16th consecutive year by U.S. News & World Report in its annual survey of over 5,000 national hospitals. The results were made public July 10 online.

U.S. News & World Report ranked hospitals and medical centers this year according to 16 specialty rankings including cancer, heart disease and urology. The rankings are based on the magazine’s analysis of a hospital’s number of Medicare patients, advanced technology, patient mortality rates and patient care-related factors such as nurse staffing and patient volume.

This year, UC Davis Medical Center (UCDMC) ranked 40th in orthopedics.

“It’s not the definitive word for gauging performance, but it is certainly appropriate,” said Charles Casey, senior public information officer of the UC Davis Health System in an e-mail interview. “What makes the UC Davis orthopedic surgery department impressive is that it combines the best in clinical care, research, education and community outreach.“

The department handled more than 6,000 surgical cases in 2007, he said.

The orthopedic department offers clinical care to both adults and children, as well as areas of specialty focus such as spine, trauma and sports medicine. The department helped UC Davis open its new Spine Center and will be adding tumor oncology and enhancing its foot specialty by bringing in a new chief of service Aug. 1.

“The combination of clinical care and research expertise enables the department to be one of the best in the nation,” Casey said. “Our research facilities include an 8,000 square-foot center that houses a materials testing laboratory, cell and molecular biology laboratory, tissue culture facilities, [etc.]”

Because UCDMC is an academic medical center, it not only combines a professional staff with numerous outpatient clinics, but also offers a wide range of training programs for medical specialists, residents and medical students.

Nosherwan Jan, UC Davis junior and neurobiology, physiology and behavior major, is a volunteer at the UCDMC cardiac rehabilitation center. For the last two quarters, he has worked with patients recovering from heart surgery, performing various tasks such as monitoring the patients‘ machines to regulate their exercises and taking the patients‘ blood pressure.

“It’s interesting working here, and the staff and nurses are really nice,” Jan said. “In the future, they are giving us a chance to view open heart surgery, which is really cool.“

The Med Center is the leading referral center in the region for the most seriously injured or ill patients and the most medically complex cases – covering 33 counties, more than 65,000 square miles and 6 million residents, according to the UCDMC website. UC Davis operates inland Northern California‘s only Level 1 trauma center, with comprehensive adult and pediatric emergency departments.

UCDMC has also won the Consumer Choice Award for the ninth time in a row for best overall quality and reputation among all hospitals in the Sacramento region, based on National Research Corporation consumer surveys.

WENDY WANG can be reached at campus@californiaaggie.com.

An Alameda County Superior Court judge ruled Tuesday to lift a February 2007 injunction against UC Berkeley that prevented the building of a new athletic training facility next to Memorial Stadium.

The controversy over the new facility centers on its location. In order to build the structure next to the stadium, the university plans to clear 44 trees from a grove of about 80 oaks, redwoods and other trees. The university has met with opposition from the city of Berkeley as well as the California Oak Foundation and the Panoramic Hills Association, who claim the project violates state environmental and earthquake regulations.

In addition to the opposition inside the courtroom, the university has also faced resistance from protestors who have taken up residence in various trees throughout the grove for the past 19 months. Over 150 “tree sitters” have rotated through the oak grove, but the number dropped substantially after the university erected barriers preventing supporters from supplying the protestors with food and water.

The university has since come to an agreement with the protestors stipulating that their supporters may deliver one bag of food per day in addition to the energy bars and water supplied by the university.

Though the protestors are illegally trespassing on campus property, university officials have been hesitant in the use of force to remove any of the individuals, said Dan Mogulof, spokesperson for UC Berkeley.

“The arborists hired to dismantle the protestors‘ structures were told not to remove any of the protestors themselves unless it was absolutely necessary,“ Mogulof said. “So far, there has only been one incident where we had to physically remove a protestor and this was after the individual attacked one of the arborists.“

Though the judge ruled that UC Berkeley can commence with construction, the university still has some barriers to face before the new facility can become a reality. On Friday, both the California Oak Foundation and the Panoramic Hills Association filed for an appeal to put a new injunction in place. The decision concerning whether a new injunction will be implemented will likely be announced in the next few weeks, Mogulof said.

Meanwhile, the four remaining tree-top protestors say that despite the outcome of the ruling, they will continue their presence in the grove.

“Our response is the same as it was on day one,” said an individual named Ayr, a spokesperson for the protestors, in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. “We‘ll leave after the university signs something legally binding to protect the trees in perpetuity. [The remaining protestors] are not coming down until this sacred and beautiful grove is protected.“

Mogulof declined to comment on what specific action will be taken to remove the protestors if they continue in their refusal to leave the grove, but he said officials are looking at several different options. The removal of the protestors is in the best interest of everyone, he said.

“These protestors have voluntarily put themselves in a very dangerous situation,“ Mogulof said. “Already, at least two protestors have been injured after falling from a tree. The protestors are not protecting ancient, irreplaceable trees. These trees were planted by the university and the university intends to replace each tree it cuts with three more in its place. It is not worth anybody getting hurt.“

ERICA LEE can be reached at campus@californiaaggie.com.

In the July 28 issue of The California Aggie, the article “UC to open two new medical schools” stated that the UC regents granted approval for the opening of a medical school on the UC Merced campus. The article should have stated that UC Merced has received approval to plan a new medical school. The Aggie regrets the error.