News

UC Berkeley's student-run newspaper interviews faculty co-director Fernando Pérez about our recent commentary in Nature.

In a new commentary in Nature Schmidt DSE faculty & researchers posit that open source AI models, which tend to be far more energy efficient than their commercial counterparts and run for free, offer an outside-the-box approach to meeting demands for use.

Faculty co-director Douglas McCauley co-authored this study that builds on DSE's ongoing engagement on the United Nations' Global Plastics Treaty. To ensure a strong treaty to end global plastic pollution, the authors recommend strategies to strengthen data reporting.

In collaboration with the Secretariat of the Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol (MLF), today DSE announced publication of Kigali Sim in the Journal of Open Source Software. The milestone marks a new chapter for the free, open-source modeling tool that helps policymakers worldwide assess strategies to reduce emissions from hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are some of the most potent greenhouse gases, under the Montreal Protocol’s Kigali Amendment. The paper is co-authored by DSE and MLF. “This publication validates Kigali Sim’s technical foundation and makes it...

Today the Ecological Society of America (ESA) announced Alejandra Echeverri, Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and DSE faculty advisor, is a recipient of the 2026 Sustainability Science Award. The award honors “ Biocultural vulnerability of traditional crops in the Indian Trans-Himalaya," which was published in Science Advances last year. According to ESA, this research "makes the greatest contribution to the emerging science of ecosystem and regional sustainability through the integration of ecological and social sciences." Authors include...

Maya Zomer, postdoctoral researcher, is the lead author of a new paper in Tree Physiology examining whether elevated atmospheric CO₂ can protect post-fire seedlings against drought stress in Mediterranean shrublands. Her research was completed as part of her dissertation at the Desertification Research Center (CIDE-CSIC) in Valencia, Spain. The Study In fire-prone Mediterranean landscapes, many plants rely on germinating from a seed bank after fire, which is known as post-fire seeding. In their first summer, these seedlings face high risk of drought mortality. As climate change intensifies...

Postdoctoral researcher Kristin Davis and a team of researchers and land managers published a pair of scientific papers that used advanced population modeling and decision analysis to address a long-time ecological mystery for the American kestrel ( Falco sparverius), and a collaborative process to chart a path forward. The researchers and land managers are affiliated with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), one Tribal and multiple state governments, multiple universities, and NGOs. “It was really inspiring to work on a common but declining species like...

In a new publication, Faculty Advisor Alejandra Echeverri and her colleagues mapped how to assess nature's societal benefits.