The Institute is currently facilitating teams of researchers within UCSC and regional partnerships to address scientific/social issues in three areas of national and international research priority:

• The effects of climate change
• Conservation of biodiversity
• Alterations in the earth's water systems

The effects of Climate Change

[text being updated 2/25/08]

Conservation of biodiversity

All the earth’s major ecosystems are undergoing rapid change in genetic diversity through global transport of species and changing global environments:

• Introduced plants, animals, and diseases cost the U.S. more than $100 billion annually.
• Rapid changes in the genetic diversity of ecosystems are making conservation and management efforts expensive.
• Solutions require new approaches on how best to manage the inevitable continued change in genetic diversity.

Coastal Biodiversity
The combination of intensive human use and linkages across physical and biological gradients makes coastal regions critical to human well-being and ecological health. Coastal regions provide human society with food, water, temperate zones for cities, access to river and ocean transportation, recreation, and connections with spiritual and cultural practices. Many of these benefits and services in turn rely on diverse, complex ecosystems the cross the land-sea interface. These environments, however, are changing quickly through introduction of invasive species and rapid genetic change in native species. Threats to ecosystem health may, through feedback effects, impact human uses of coastal regions. The STEPS Institute is facilitating connections among existing research programs in the natural and social sciences and engineering that are characterizing large scale patterns in the genetic diversity of coastal environments and seeking solutions to the many challenges of coastal management. The goal of these studies is to draw on new approaches in ecological science, molecular technology, sensor engineering, and social science to provide better assessments of ongoing change and better management approaches.

Biodiversity Networks
The network structure of biodiversity is changing rapidly in all ecosystems worldwide through alteration of ecosystem processes, loss and fragmentation of habitats, redistribution of species across continents and oceans, climate and atmospheric change, and selective addition or removal of taxa. These changes affect all efforts to conserve and manage ecosystem services. Part of the long-term goal of STEPS is the development of a predictive science of how rapid environmental change is altering species interactions in terrestrial and marine environments. These interactions include those between predators and prey, parasites and hosts, competing species, and mutualists (such as interactions between pollinators and plants). We are concentrating many of our efforts on analyses of how interactions are changing at the interface of contrasting environments-for example, land/sea and reserve/non-reserve.

Core Facility: Molecular Ecology and Evolutionary Genetics (MEEG) Facility

California Central Coast Biodiversity Database

STEPS-funded Collaborations:

Santa Lucia Gradient Study

Movement of Top Predators

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Climate, Precipitation and Rivers
We are combining regional climate modeling expertise with statistical modeling, ecological research, and policy analysis to link academic research with policy needs. Working directly with public agency decision-makers, we are co-defining research priorities and developing work plans. Our research focus is on the practical needs of government and industry to understand and adapt to climate change.

Those planning needs are mediated through our use of rivers.
Rivers are among the most crucial and contended elements of the landscape. Changing and growing demands on rivers as suppliers of water and nutrition; providers of recreation, solitude, and habitat; transporters of both goods and wastes; embodiments of cultural heritage; and generators of energy make river regulation a central focus of public concern. Our research on rivers construes regulation in its broadest sense – from geomorphological controls on water chemistry to strategic links between farming and restoration in riparian corridors. Only through a broad, interdisciplinary understanding of rivers in general, and of particular rivers, can effective use and management strategies emerge.

Core Facility: UCSC Climate Change and Impacts Laboratory (CCIL)

STEPS-funded Collaborations:

Regional Climate Change and Precipitation

Nutrient Flow in Coastal Rivers

Sacramento River Restoration

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