On the hillsides and in the forests of Southern California, the effects of drought are obvious to the eye: bone-dry vegetation and trees withered and dying—potential fuel for wildfires. But the real story, at least for scientists, is what’s going on within. It is there that these plants tell their stories of resilience or desolation, triumph over nature or surrender to it.
At California State University, Bakersfield, that story and scores of others are being told now, thanks to a micro-computer-assisted tomography system, which has opened a world of discovery at the university since its arrival in 2017.
So rare is the micro-scanner that samples from as far away as Spain are sent to Bakersfield for analyses. Teams from research-focused institutions such as UC Riverside, Santa Cruz, Davis and Berkeley, to name a few, have come to study at CSUB to collaborate using the scanner.
But the most promising research, with real-time application, is happening in the university’s backyard, in the fields that grow the nation’s crops and industries that power our economy:
- Nut growers are using the scanner to understand drought tolerance.
- U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers have sent grapevine samples in the fight against Pierce’s Disease, a mysterious bacterial infection that decimates grapes.
- Local industries use the scanner to understand how their products improve crop productivity.