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East Bay Science Cafe: Making Red Wine “Green” | Berkeley

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Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm | Cost: FREE
La Peña Cultural Center | 3105 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA

Event Details

CANCELLED: East Bay Science Cafe | Albany

> EVENT UPDATE: This event is no longer taking place.

The East Bay Science Cafe is an informal forum for discussing interesting and relevant scientific issues and is held on the first Wednesday of every month at Cafe Valparaiso in Albany.

Join a casual evening of conversation with members of the scientific community presenting different topics each time and encouraging audience questions during and after the event.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Making Red Wine "Green" | CANCELLED: East Bay Science Cafe | Albany

Making Red Wine Green: Using biodiversity to reduce pesticide use in vineyards | June 5, 2013

Houston Wilson, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley, will provide an overview of the progress made to date as well as highlight a number of the challenges and opportunities of conducting participatory on-farm research – from learning how to handle one of the world’s smallest known parasitoids to kicking clods around with grape growers.

Over the past 6 years, the Altieri lab at UC Berkeley has been collaborating with commercial wine grape growers in Napa and Sonoma County to develop ecologically-based pest management practices. These are methods by which growers can reduce pesticide use by planting habitat that attracts beneficial insects who then keep pest populations in check. But this isn’t as straight forward as you might think. There is so much we still don’t know about the ecology of these insects, much less how to utilize that information to manipulate them into doing the things we humans want, like specifically attacking the pests we’re concerned about. Now layer onto that the many challenges of conducting this work almost exclusively in commercial vineyards in direct collaboration with 20+ wine grape growers and you’ve got a research project that involves far more than just counting insects.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.


Cost: FREE
Categories: East Bay, Geek Event, Lectures & Workshops
Address: 3105 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA