ICE News and Announcements

Outdoor California, the magazine of the California Department of Fish & Game, features a Special Report on cooperative conservation entitled "Finding the Perfect Balance".  The article, by freelance journalist Stephanie O'Neill, quotes and describes the field work of ICE ecologist Bob Meese, who has been working with tricolored blackbirds for 4 1/2 years and who serves as the scientific lead on the multi-agency Tricolored Blackbird Working Group.

Download the presentations from Steve Blum, Senior Staff Counsel for the State Water Resources Control Board.

Most of the world's population of tricolored blackbirds are found in the Central Valley of California, and in the past century their numbers have declined dramatically. Most tricolor nesting occurs in a few large, temporary colonies, and often these colonies are located in grain fields that are due to be harvested days before young tricolors leave the nest. ICE research biologist Bob Meese is leading the statewide efforts to document the changes in the blackbird populations and is working with a diverse group including farmers and other landowners to detect and monitor at-risk colonies and to conserve these colonies so that the birds' efforts to reproduce are successful. Dr. Meese's work is featured in the January 9 Sacramento Bee.

Professor Ramesh Sharma will give a talk entitled:

"Restoration of Mountain Fluvial Aquatic Environment Degraded by Transportation Network in Garhwal Himalayas."

at noon in 2124 Wickson Hall. UC Davis, sponsored by ICE and the Geography Graduate Group.

Ramesh Sharma is the professor and chairman of the Department of Environmental Sciences, H. N. B. Garhwal University, Srinagar-Garhwal, Uttaranchal, India and an internationally recognized leader in the study of long-term and large-scale environmental change in the Himalaya mountains. He has degrees in zoology, freshwater fishery biology and a doctor of science (D.Sc.) in environmental biology.

Thomson Scientific (http://scientific.thomson.com), a division of Thomson Corporation (http://thomson.com), publishes a wide variety of information retrieval applications, including BIOSIS, Current Contents, Zoological Record, and numerous others. The ICE Biological Inventories of the World's Protected Areas (http://ice.ucdavis.edu/bioinventory/bioinventory.html) was recently indexed in Thomson Scientific's Current Web Contents, a collection of scholarly web sites that meets well defined criteria (http://scientific.thomson.com/free/essays/selectionofmaterial/cwc-criteria/).