Rebecca Hernandez, assistant professor in the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources at the University of California, Davis, will be the featured speaker at an upcoming School of Life Sciences seminar. Her talk is titled, "The Land-Energy-Ecology Nexus: Energy impacts on land-cover change, techno-egological synergies of solar energy, and the future energy landscape."

Landscape sustainability is characterized and throttled by complexity, manifested problems, gaps in implementation, and ecological privation. In this talk, Hernandez will discuss how conflicts emerge where goals for state-level renewable energy development spurring utility-scale solar energy development may pose trade-offs with local-scale arid land sustainability, protected area conservation, and food production. In contrast, techno-ecological synergies of solar energy across land, food, energy, water, and human-dominated systems can confer additional environmental co-benefits (e.g., a win-win scenario) beyond its immediate use as a low carbon energy source. Lastly, she will discuss the land requirement of different electricity sources and how the adoption of low-footprint and low-carbon sources like integrated PV, nuclear, and geothermal may achieve the dual goals of emissions reduction and land sparing.