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

Mike McCoy, ICE Co-director will address the New York Metropolitan Transportation Commission on Thursday May 1st on the topic of integrated transportation land use modeling. The New York Metropolitan Transportation Commission notes that “A million more people are expected to live in New York City by 2030, two million more when Long Island and the lower Hudson Valley are included, and four million more in the twenty-eight county, tri-state metropolitan region as a whole. This growth will undoubtedly lead to more congested roadways, buses, trains, and even sidewalks.

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.

Spatial Technologies Seminar
Advanced Computing in Geography
GEO 298, Fall 2007
CRN #56951, 2 Units

1137 PES (GIS Teaching Lab)
Mondays 4-7pm

Prerequisites: 1 Geographic Information System course, and one computer programming course or equivalent experience. (Space may be available for an experienced undergraduate by instructor consent)

Course Description: A review of modern GIS tools through hands on GIS, GPS and Web development in a team programming environment. Possible topics include cartography tools, ArcGIS extensions, GPS processing, Geo-Statistics and web mapping applications from a programming environment perspective.

Bob Meese, an ICE ecologist, has been working with tricolored blackbirds, a California near-endemic songbird and species of special concern, for over three years. Bob worked with the late Bill Hamilton, an emeritus professor in the Department of Environmental Science & Policy, and continues the work begun by Professor Hamilton 15 years ago to better understand the causes for, and suggest solutions to, the species decline. Once the most numerous songbird in coastal California, the tricolor has been extirpated as a coastal breeder and is largely confined to the Central Valley and southern California. Bob works under contract to the U.S.

The Information Center for the Environment and the Geography 297 Seminar are proud host Dr. Ramesh Sharma at UC Davis. He will be speaking in the Geography Seminar Series, Wednesday at 4:10pm, in Wellman 230 on the topic of the "Impact of Global Warming on Himalayan Ecosystems"

On Thursday at noon in 2124 Wickson Hall he will be making another address titled: "Restoration of Mountain Fluvial Aquatic Environment Degraded by Transportation Network in Garhwal Himalayas."

Both presentations are open to the university community and the public. Feel free to distribute this announcement to any who may be interested.

Biographic sketch of Dr. Ramesh Sharma:

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.

The Geography Seminar Series features weekly speakers on the application of geographic information to public policy. Planned speakers for Spring 2007 are

April 4: Quinn Hart and Roger Kunkel (UCDavis, CSTARS and the California Resources Agency ) -- "GIS Web services in practice"

April 11: Marco Trombetti (CSTARS_ -- "Using Artificial Neural networks to estimate vegetation canopy water content from MODIS data"

April 4: Mark Nechodom (U.S. Forest Service, Sierra Nevada Research Center) -- "Public Costs and Benefits from the Use of Wildland Biomass for Energy Production: A Life Cycle Assessment Approach to Quantifying Public Goods"

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-criter...).

ICE is hosting the once every three year statewide meeting of California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) biologists from 27 February - 1 March at the Walter A. Buehler Alumni & Visitors Center. This three day meeting will provide a forum for Caltrans biologists to exchange information and experiences related to fish passage, wildlife corridors, mitigation, interagency collaboration, the development and use of GIS predictive models, and related issues.

Nat Seavy, currently with the USGS at the University of Hawaii, Hilo, has been awarded a prestigious CALFED Fellowship to conduct research on bird conservation biology with ICE and PRBO Conservation Science.

ICE graduate student Christine Meynard received her Ph.D. in Ecology for her studies on species distributions and local richness patterns: from simulations with artificial species to conservation planning for birds of the Chilean forests.

She will give a final seminar in 2124 Wickson Hall on September 7, and will begin a prestigious postdoctoral appointment in her native Chile in October.

Congratulations!