- [Narrator] On this edition of "Bay Area Bountiful," we look at some of the many contributions science and scientists make to our society.

We'll visit San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences where vital research is being conducted on the coronavirus pandemic.

We'll take a virtual dive in the Monterey Bay Aquarium to explore kelp forests.

And we'll learn about the important works Sonoma County climate activists are doing to help save our planet.

Science to the Rescue is coming up next on "Bay Area Bountiful."

(gentle upbeat music) - [Narrator] "Bay Area Bountiful," is made possible in part by Rocky, the free range chicken and Rosie the original organic chicken.

The Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space district, Made Local Magazine and Sonoma County Go local.

And through the generous support of Sonoma Water.

Cultivate, Celebrate, Connect.

(gentle upbeat music) (dramatic upbeat music) - [Narrator] By March of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic was fast descending on the San Francisco Bay Area.

Laurel Allen recalls March 12th, 2020.

- That morning we got the news that the Academy would close in a matter of hours.

and we scrambled.

- [Narrator] Laurel is the Senior Digital Engagement and Community Manager at the California Academy of Sciences.

- We knew that what we were feeling, which was just shock that things were actually closing, that it was actually this bad, that this was really happening, was also what all these millions of people who followed us were feeling as well.

We knew people were scared, we knew they wanted answers.

- [Narrator] Laurel and her team quickly set up a live stream video Q and A with the Academy's Chief of Science, virologist Dr. Shannon Bennett.

- [Laurel] Our first question comes from Scott via Twitter.

What animal actually started coronavirus?

I've heard bats, pangolin, rats, and others.

- That's a great question.

You could almost answer that humans started it because it was probably human activities that brought us in contact with the non-human animal host of this virus.

- We just literally tracked her down in the building and found her and set everything up and did it.

And right after we did it everybody packed up and went home.

- [Narrator] The live stream became the first of a series of virtual Q and A's conducted with Academy scientists during the pandemic.

- I think science can and does and has for a long time come to the rescue.

Now we're at a point where almost people need to come to science as rescue.

Also, that's really the challenge now.

(beeps) - (indistinct) - [Narrator] In an age when social media has often been used to spread misinformation, the role of science communicators is more important now than ever.

- [Laurel] Every time I shared anything about space, it was basically an invitation to all the people who think that the moon landing was fake.

- [Man] Okay, let's track them through these procedures.

- There are a thousand reasons why people are convinced of things that are not true.

We have to be empathetic and just start with, tell me why you think that.

(gentle soft music) - [Narrator] While the Academy is closed to the public due to the pandemic, its social media channels remain a vital bridge with the community.

- Whether we're talking about the viruses or whether we're talking about losing coral reef all over the world or at the state of the rainforest or any of these other big, crazy, depressing, difficult things to wade through or deal with, things that are so hard that you don't even want people to tell you about them half the time.

There are people in those areas that know what to do next.

- [Narrator] Virologist Dr. Shannon Bennett is among the scientists around the world who have focused on the coronavirus since the pandemic began.

- In the case of pandemics like coronavirus, there's really no question that we would be completely incapable of responding to this pandemic without solid science.

And science that's more powerful today than ever before.

So many new technologies are emerging, because of a long history of supporting science.

- [Narrator] Dr. Bennett's work involves tracking the sequences of the virus as it travels and mutates.

- Specifically what scientists do, and what I'm doing is taking virus sequences that are posted publicly and then looking at how they're related to other known viruses that are also posted publicly.

And then you put them in a kind of a family tree just like you might accumulate for your uncles and aunts and cousins and brothers and sisters.

And that tells you who is most related to whom.

And so with the coronaviruses, I'm specifically just working with a group of state surveillance laboratories.

We have a group called COVID-Net, where we meet every other week to look at the emerging sequences coming out of California and ask questions like, how might major urban centers be connected?

- [Narrator] This work is vital as we seek to contain the virus and emerge from the pandemic.

- Today's science is very collaborative, and it's exciting actually, to be a scientist today especially because all the information is being shared openly, whether it's sequences from China from the very beginning of the epidemic to even today ongoing.

These sequences are available to everybody to look at and to collaborate over.

- [Narrator] Our relationship with nature can impact our risk of facing pandemics.

- In a diverse system that includes humans, we don't face an onslaught of pathogens and pandemics at the scale that we're facing now.

It's not to say that we need to pave nature or eliminate nature or stay away from nature or disinclude ourselves from nature, we actually need to connect with nature.

We need to be a part of the diverse natural system that forms our planet.

Not exploiting it, not pulling from it and degrading it.

We know now, like we've never known before that we're all interconnected and we all share common ancestry with all forms of life.

Think of it as your extended family especially in COVID where you can't see your family.

Your family is out there all around you in this rich natural system.

- [Narrator] The Sonoma Ecology Center has created a community science program at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park.

Toni Passentino is the center's Education Program Manager.

- We can tell people information, but it's so much more valuable if the people of the community themselves are out in the field at Sugarloaf conducting the research alongside us.

We have the privilege at Sugarloaf to really guide people on a journey to get to the answers themselves and have that aha moment.

And that's where you really get things to sink in permanently, as opposed to me telling them and then just believing me on the basis of, I'm standing and I've got a uniform on.

- [Narrator] The community science project is collecting data on the recent fires that have burned through the area.

- There are still percentage of people who do not believe in climate change.

With the wildfires and with the droughts, and also with the flooding, we're clearly seeing the effects of global warming and climate change.

And though we can't prove climate change with our independent study at Sugarloaf Park, we can definitely show evidence of climate changing in our Valley through that.

(gentle dramatic music) - [Narrator] The Monterey Bay Aquarium has continued to expand its online presence during the pandemic.

Patrick Webster works on the social media content creation team.

- The ocean is the defining characteristic of our planet.

If you are getting directions in the solar system asking how do I find the earth?

The aliens are gonna say, "Oh, find the one with the water on it."

(soft gentle music) - [Narrator] The aquarium's live streaming cams have attracted online viewers from near and far.

- There's always different ways of measuring your impact on social and on your website with your numbers and metrics.

But I think often the things that are even more impactful I think for us to understand what these cameras are doing for the world is when people feature them in big installations or in different venues.

We've had our moon jelly cam projected up on the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.

Our jelly cam was used in Australia by the city of Melbourne and featured in a few different public spaces for people to just enjoy jellies over in Australia.

- [Narrator] Engaging people with this content can be the first Step in achieving bigger conservation goals.

- People can't help us with the ocean if they don't love the ocean if they don't care about the ocean, if they don't have a connection to the ocean, if they don't know somebody who talks about the ocean who makes them feel good about what's going on.

All those things have to be met until you can tell somebody, "Hey, here's this piece "of legislation that we need you to tell folks "not to vote for."

They'll be like, "Hey, you know what Aquarium, "you had my back with the jelly cam, "I'll write that email."

As a society We need to rethink our relationship with science.

It's not a superhero that comes in and saves the day all the time.

It's not an ethereal thing that occurs away from you, that you're a part of science by being a part of a society that has built itself up with its innovations, and that's every culture around the world.

- [Narrator] The Monterey Bay Aquarium loaned one of its ultra cold freezers to the Natividad Medical Center, so that the hospital would be able to store the first Pfizer Biointech vaccine shipments.

- Science is out there and operating this zoom call.

It's making sure that the pumps are functioning at the aquarium.

It's making sure that the vaccines are being stored at the adequate temperature and distributed.

That's a whole bunch of science.

(upbeat music) (children singing folk song) - [Narrator] The Monterey Bay Aquarium has been closed to the public since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

Do the fish in the aquarium notice the empty hallways?

Do they wonder where the people have gone?

(children singing folk song) During the closure, the aquarium has been taking the public on live virtual dives in the kelp forest exhibit.

Social media content creator and diver Patrick Webster, has agreed to take me with him on a virtual dive to explore the kelp forest.

- The thing here Josh about the California six event is that it's just like a forest on land, except it's underwater.

- When you're a diver, you can actually look up at the kelp forest and you get this view that most people never see, is it possible to capture that?

- Oh yeah, you can do it right now.

(children singing folk song) So this right here is often what we all call the kelp cathedral or you just have these columns that are reaching up to the surface.

This is like being in a Redwood Forest Star, and they're very tall Monterey pine grove here in the Area.

And just to have this vertical component of this giant algae reaching all the way to the surface then spreading out on the top as a canopy, blocking out the sun, making it harder for other organisms to compete with it, and then creating all that food for different organisms, but also creating the structure as it's known for fish to hide in the mud and also substrate for other animals to live on.

What you don't have on a giant kelp plant are roots, where you have is studs what's known hold fast.

Kelp forest are some of the most productive brilliant ecosystems on the planet.

They produce billions of tons worldwide of kelp, and that's a lot of carbon that's been taken from the atmosphere brought down into the ocean then sunk away.

So these kelp forests are really crucial as well as we think about what we need to do to talk about climate change, try and preserve our systems.

(children singing folk song) - [Narrator] Kelp forest ecosystems also provide crucial habitat for animals like sea otters and gray wells.

(children singing folk song) But in recent years scientists have observed a significant decline in California's kelp forest.

- [Patrick] We can see here, these are some outwardly massive red sea urchins.

When I put my hand up to them, you'll see just how much bigger they are than your typical urchin.

And you might see these animals might live over 200 years, and they're really the perfect counterpart to the prodigious growth ability of the kelp.

When everything's balanced out, there's enough kelp to sustain the herbivores but the rewards don't get too hungry and come out and mow down everything when things got out of balance.

If there's too many urchins showing up with non-predators around, you go into situations where the urchins crawling out here on top of the reef and end up trying to eat all of the kelp.

That's pretty much what's known as an urchin barren.

- [Narrator] Endangered sea otters eat sea urchins.

- You had all the different players playing their positions on the fetal for the environment to do the best that they can, and so that's why we work here at the aquarium to think about rescuing baby sea otters, that don't have a home range and then releasing them out into the wild, into zones where they used to live historically but have the been a several hundred years.

Being able to build up that resilience of the kelp forest by having more of the animals are supposed to be there interacting with each other.

(soft Mexican guitar music) - Has diving and spending all this time under water changed the way you think?

- Once you start seeing all this life, all this diversity, things that look so completely different from you living out in existence longer than yours, like that sea urchin hanging out in the same spot for over 200 years, you start realizing that there's this entire other world that lives on the exact same planet.

We fundamentally are descendants of organisms that went from the ocean onto the land.

We never should have named this planet earth, it was always planet ocean.

(children singing folk song) - [Narrator ] I asked Dr. Rebecca Albright, a coral biologist at the California Academy of Sciences.

"What does it feel like to dive on a coral reef?"

- [Rebecca] It's quiet, you're immersed under the water, you're weightless.

You see this life that you didn't see from the service.

You have this window into this alternate world that you're just so lucky to be like a visitor to.

It's just, it's incredible.

It's the most special thing.

- [Narrator] Dr.Albright developed a love for choral, while diving on Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

But her first diving lessons were in the Midwest.

- I was always drawn to water, I got certified to dive when I was 17 in the middle of a limestone quarry in Ohio, where the instructions for navigation dive were, swim till we hit the sunken refrigerator and then turn left until you hit the sunken school bus.

(children singing folk song) - [Narrator] Threatened by a host of problems, including ocean acidification and climate change, coral reefs throughout the world are endangered.

- [Rebecca] Coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor, but they host 30% of biodiversity.

And a lot of biodiversity hasn't even been explored yet.

We don't even fully understand the complete biodiversity that we're losing in these areas.

- [Narrator] Dr. Albright's work has focused on coral spawning.

- [Rebecca] Because we think there's somewhere between 600 and 800 different coral species worldwide.

And we think about 75% of those reproduce sexually once a year through a mass spawning event.

They only have one shot we think, at sexual reproduction.

They will reproduce asexually, but you're not gaining any genetic diversity.

And in a time when there's rapid environmental change, you need as much diversity as possible.

(children singing folk song) - [Narrator] Dr. Albright and her colleagues were the first scientists within the United States, to successfully spawn coral in a lab setting.

- [Rebecca] This spawning event usually happens in late summer after a full moon after sunset.

And it varies a little bit depending on the species of dunes.

And in order to simulate that in a lab, you have to provide them year-round with temperature cues that mimic a summer and a winter.

You have to provide them with lunar cues that mimic full moons and new moons.

You have to provide them with different frequencies and wavelengths of light and intensities to mimic sunrises and sunsets.

And it's really quite sophisticated and quite challenging, and it only happens once a year.

So, you wait a year, see if you did it and if you didn't, tweak it and wait another year.

(reverberating soft music) - [Narrator] During the first months of the pandemic in 2020, there was another breakthrough when the coral spawned for a second consecutive year in the lab.

- These are corals we sourced from plough in 2019, they spawned in 2019 at the same time as their native populations.

We kept them for the whole year on that ploughing cycle this experienced summer, winter, and then they respawned at the same time as their native populations.

And now, I mean it was just champagne...

It was just so exciting.

(choir sings in foreign language) - [Narrator] Scientists hope this work will aid with coral research, conservation and restoration efforts.

- [Rebecca] Science has amazing capacity to rescue, come up with solutions and come up with creative ideas that can take corals into conservation breeding efforts.

We can create super corals.

We can restore corals at mass but it's still not gonna address the societal issue that you have 7.6 billion of us.

And we need a lot of people to care about this issue and then act in meaningful and responsible ways.

(children singing folk song) (soft soothing music) - Hi, I like to describe the Sunrise here in Sonoma County, it's agitators.

They're mostly moved by the actions that we have taken from attending city council meetings, doing art such as banner drops and just really like bring more awareness to the injustices of the climate crisis.

So we really like to make some noise.

- This is the climate crisis, power outages and wildfires are the new normal, but they shouldn't be.

We need politicians to wake up and pass a green new deal.

To address the cause of the climate crisis.

We need to modernize the entire energy grid, to put the needs of vulnerable communities first.

♪ I hear the voice of my great grand daughters ♪ ♪ they keep hitting the ground ♪ Sunrise is a youth-led movement to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process.

We mainly focus on climate change policies and electing leaders who are willing to stand up for the health and wellbeing of all people.

I actually got really sick and tired of the wildfires here in Sonoma County.

So, I found the Sunrise Movement, I had learned about it and it turned out that there was a hub here, in Sonoma County.

So, I was just ready to take action and really get out there.

- Right now, a lot of what we're focusing on, is getting countywide and citywide climate plans pass.

Climate plans that are actually good, and that will actually be implemented.

Because we do have climate emergency acts here in Sonoma County and various cities.

Some of them are really just not up to a good standard and they're not really being implemented.

So that's our main thing on the local level.

- Before the pandemic hit, we were working on an Earth Day strike.

We were ready to mobilize the whole County, our allies, we've put countless hours of brainstorming into this.

How are we gonna do this?

How are we gonna get every person in Sonoma County out in the streets?

- I have these amazing plans from my high school.

We were gonna have a three-day lockdown.

like shut down our school.

I was so excited, and then all of a sudden, all we could do was like a webinar.

It was a good webinar, but it was nothing in comparison.

- So, it was just a matter of taking this big concept still celebrating Earth Day, still getting people involved and then doing that via Zoom.

Right when everyone else was doing things via Zoom and it was definitely a learning curve, and it still is.

- Welcome so much to this space.

I'm really excited to have you here with us.

- In these workshops will hopefully like fill you with hope for a better world, a better future can look like in our County.

- We plan to call on our supervisors, follow through on their stated commitments that we're passing 2019. climate emergency resolutions, acknowledging the reality of the climate emergency and pledging to take action.

As a youth-led movement, we were really targeting high schools and going to in-person events and tabling and things like that.

But with high school happening online, asking people to, after eight hours of high school on Zoom to be like, Okay, here's another like two hours of organizing online.

It's hard.

- Our youth, I really care about the climate crisis.

Even though that they have faced challenges on their own, as virtual learning, they're still showing up.

- Virtual school has been pretty hard for me.

I'm not gonna lie.

But I do think that interestingly, the community organizing virtually has actually made sunrise more accessible in some ways for people, because you don't have to drive halfway across the County just to meet up.

And I would guess that after the pandemic, we're gonna continue to meet virtually, way more often than we used to.

But I really miss just being with people, at Sunrise, we love to sing.

I really miss all of those aspects of Sunrise.

- Even in our darkest hour, we know that we will be able to sing, and keep hope alive.

During protests too, singing can be one of the most powerful tools.

So right now, I'm gonna play you a song called "American Tune," which was written by Paul Simon, the night that Nixon was elected.

♪ Many's the time I've been mistaken ♪ ♪ And many times confused ♪ ♪ Yes, and often felt forsaken ♪ - It's complex because, for something that's like COVID-19 which is very much real and happening right now, the climate crisis is also real and happening right now, but a lot of the bigger major effects of it are not gonna happen for another few years or decades.

So when it's a problem, that's kind of far out of reach for people, they're less likely to act upon it.

But even though we're having an issue right now that is very real and happening right now in this moment, and you still have people not acting upon it.

It gives me pores, it makes me feel like if we can't get our stuff together now for this, how are we going to save the planet.

- With the pandemic and the climate crisis, it continues to really affect the most vulnerable people.

And by vulnerable people, I mean the communities of color.

Here in Sonoma County, we are continuously seeing how the Latino community continues to be the most affected by the pandemic, and by the yearly wildfires that we have had.

- Climate justice, is nothing without racial justice.

And that is why we're here today.

(crowd applauding and cheering ) We all know about environmental racism and how...

It's usually in communities of color that are impacted the most from climate change, and that's what we work towards.

We're working towards a future where we don't have that where everyone has the right to breathe clean air and has the right to clean water.

(crowd sings and cheers) ♪ We have to be fill the mountain ♪ ♪ This I know, this I know ♪ - So, to tackle both these crisis, the COVID-19 crisis and the climate crisis, it's really all about having good, effective leadership.

So, when you have people in power who are actively not doing anything or denying it, that's where the problems lie.

And from a personal perspective and a Sunrise perspective, the way you fix these issues, something like climate change, something like COVID-19, you get those people out of office, and you get the right people in office.

You get the people in office who will take the issue seriously, get people who actually believe the science and who will actually enact policies to get the issues fixed.

♪ Sound the people have found ♪ - The youth-led aspect of Sunrise is one of the best things about it.

It's really really amazing.

I think that's what gives it so much of the energy that it has in it.

As a high school student I feel much more empowered and I feel like I have really a strong voice.

Where as in other groups in the past that haven't been youth-led, I feel like my voice is less adequate, or my experience can sometimes feel less adequate than those who are older than me, but not at Sunrise.

♪ We will rise we will rise we will rise ♪