Terrestrial restoration has a long tradition of engaging the general public on issues relating to ecosystem decline, to the point where large swaths of the community can participate in restoration, e.g., Arbor Day planting millions of trees worldwide. To date, marine restoration, is primarily carried out through professional scientists and resource managers with very little involvement from the lay community.

The research team is particularly motivated to investigate and advance the understanding of how to design, assess and disseminate XR contents and experiences to facilitate active learning in introductory STEM courses at both 4-year and 2-year Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs).

This project will connect physiological and novel remote sensing tools to better understand the effects of wildfire and fuels management on forested ecosystems in California under a changing climate. This will integrate Dr. Bentley’s long-term research and education goals related to the responses of forests to environmental change using terrestrial laser scanning, metabolic scaling ecology, modeling and virtual reality based outreach.

This project will quantify forest structure changes in post-fire (Sonoma County) and managed stands (Mendocino County) via LiDAR voxel metrics. Data will be collected using a LiDAR handheld mobile laser scanner, and validated using limited destructive sampling. This study will add to the relatively new and growing body of work on LiDAR remote sensing to measure forest structure as a component of forest health.

This project seeks to expand upon the research conducted by the Bentley Lab at Sonoma State University and the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station Fire Science Lab by integrating terrestrial laser scanning data with a physics-based model framework to estimate fire effects on biomass, forest structure, and tree mortality in a wildfire affected oak-woodland and managed conifer forest in California.

The Family Nurse Practitioner Program at SSU offers a Master of Science as well as a Post Masters Certificate Program with a full and part-time option.  The mission of our program is to serve the underserved populations in Northern California. With the help of grant funding we are able to provide an opportunity for Advance Practice Nurses in rural areas to become nurse practitioners while staying in their community to provide the care to those patients in need.

This one-time funding will provide stipends to MESA students and partnering faculty at Sonoma State University. The stipends will support students and faculty in the MESA Honors Program, MESA Mentorship Program and the MESA Summer Research Program.

Ingenuity Mars helicopter is history’s first aircraft to operate from the surface of another planet. It will support a ground rover’s exploration of the Jezero Crater to search for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars. The helicopter's battery has to be reserved to keep equipment within allowable temperature during cold Mars nights. The helicopter is not able to recharge from the MMRTG on the rover. Hence, the helicopter has to take off at a specific time frame in the day to avoid risk of losing reserve battery. This significantly limits the exploration flights of this aerial vehicle.

This project will assess the effectiveness of forest health treatments for coastal California forests and identify agency characteristics that influence scaling to landscape levels. This work seeks to identify cost-benefit tradeoffs of competing forest health treatments, determine the threat posed by biologically-driven fuels accumulation, assess effectiveness of a set of contrasting forest treatments aimed at controlling fuels and mitigating disease impacts, and identify agency capacity to apply treatments at scale.

This project aims to have student led mapping products of eruptive basalts in two areas of the Springerville Volcanic Field (SVF), the Blue Ridge Mountain shield volcano, and arguably some of the youngest flows in the southeast region of the field. The SVF is a well-mapped monogenetic volcanic field, with the two aforementioned areas notable missing pieces as they provide a view of a rare polygenetic eruptive vent and some of the flows that are petrogenetically at the end of the fields lifespan.