While walking in the woods, you’ve likely encountered a dead log engraved with maze-like squiggles. These natural carvings are known as beetle galleries, and the grooves are munched out by the larvae of bark beetles in the subfamily Scolytinae.

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While walking in the woods, you’ve likely encountered a dead log engraved with maze-like squiggles. These natural carvings are known as beetle galleries, and the grooves are munched out by the larvae of bark beetles in the subfamily Scolytinae.
Bits of DNA linger on the forest floor, in the ocean, and even in the air—and these strands have stories to tell, back at the lab. Here’s how environmental DNA (aka ‘eDNA’) is starting to transform how ecologists work in the Bay Area and beyond.
Visitors can now witness the response of this burned forest—one of nature’s least understood and most dynamically changing habitats.
Eucalyptus trees on Albany Hill are wasting away from blight. Some people may cheer—but these trees are also home to endangered monarchs.
Private landowners in California hold a huge amount of forest that’s primed to burn.
With Bay of Life, Frans Lanting and Christine Eckstrom wanted to go past Monterey Bay’s natural beauty to explore its past, present and possible futures.
As fire risk rises, is it time to consider managed retreat? Three environmental design and sustainability experts explore the options.
Big Basin State Park is not the lush, shady ancient forest it once was. In August 2020, 97 percent of the old-growth forest nestled in the heart of the Santa Cruz Mountains burned in the devastating CZU Lightning Complex fire. … Read more
Nine of the 20 largest wildfires in California in the last 110 years were started by lightning strikes, including the devastating Lightning Complex fires in August 2020 that burned more than 750,000 acres in and around the Bay Area. Between … Read more
Scientists estimate that California needs to burn one million acres a year to prevent catastrophic wildfires. That’s more than a single agency can
manage, but if you teach one million people to burn one acre each …