Jacob Margolis
covers science, with a focus on environmental stories and disasters, as well as investigations and accountability.
Published August 1, 2023 7:26 AM
The Desert Museum Palo Verde doesn't provide as much shade as other trees, but it sure is beautiful.
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Topline:
L.A.’s urban forest was established during a time when water seemed plentiful and climate change was barely a footnote in scientific journals. Now, it’s being threatened.
The experiment: There’s an experimental plot at UC Riverside where trees are being tested for their resilience to hot and dry conditions so that we have a better idea of what might do well as climate change worsens.
The results: The tests are expected to continue another decade, but so far trees including the red push pistache, the desert willow and the honey mesquite appear to be doing well.
The failures: The Texas live oak’s not looking too good in scorching hot riverside, but is apparently doing well in test plots in the more temperate coastal areas.
On a recent triple digit summer day, I made my way out to a dusty field at UC Riverside, the research center of California’s citrus universe.
The UC Riverside Citrus Research Center is lined with row after row of citrus trees. It's also home to the Climate Ready Tree test plot.
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Row after row of tangerines, oranges and pomelos —11,000 in total — baked under a heat dome. Off in the distance, wildfire smoke passed in front of the San Bernardino Mountains, which had been covered in thick snow just a few months ago.
The dusty field is just one of the many plots that the university uses to trial new trees, grow budwood for distribution and come up with solutions for devastating problems like Huanglongbing, a bacteria driven greening disease that’s threatening trees world wide.
However, I was there to check out a block of 48 trees sitting along a fence that look nothing like the thousands of citrus around them. Inconsequential at first glance, you could easily imagine them along any road in Los Angeles, but that’s kind of the point. The trees are being tested to see if they can survive our hellishly hot and dry future driven by climate change.
Where, how and why these trees are being tested
There are 12 different types of trees and four of each at the UC Riverside test plot.
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It’s a collection of 12 different species — four of each — pulled from around the world and being run through the gauntlet by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Planted seven years ago, they were given supplemental water to help them get established, but since then they’ve had to survive on their own through record-setting heatwaves and drought years.
The Texas, or escarpment, live oak was struggling and nearly dead at the UC Riverside plot. It's reportedly doing better at a plot along the coast.
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The trees are being assessed for a number of factors including attractiveness, whether they provide good shade, how much work it takes to maintain them (less pruning means lower maintenance costs) and whether they can survive without much water.
The experiment is expected to run for at least 20 years, but visit the plot today and it's clear which trees are thriving. Surprisingly, just because a tree comes from a hot climate doesn’t mean it’s going to do well.
“What kind of choices are we going to be able to make in the future?,” said Natalie van Doorn, U.S. Forest Service scientist and co-creator of the experiment known as Climate Ready Trees. “Are we going to have enough water to make that decision that yes we want to keep watering our trees?”
If not, we’ve got to have viable candidates that we know will thrive and provide critical tree cover, which for residents, can be a matter of life or death.
Why L.A.'s hundreds of thousands of trees matter so much
Trees are an absolutely critical part of our infrastructure. They have a marked impact on human and ecosystem health.
The red push pistache had one of the densest canopies at the test site.
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Trees can:
Help drop temperatures in urban areas by as much as 45 degrees
Reduce energy use
Suppress noise
Improve air quality
Sequester water
Help provide homes to all sorts of creatures, all according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Which is why any sort of major threat to the more than 700,000 street trees planted across the city of L.A. is of major concern, and that's what climate change is doing.
Much of our urban forest, as it’s known, was planted over the past 100 years as the region developed. As people migrated from other parts of the country they often wanted to plant the trees that they were familiar with, though that could mean species from wetter climates.
The sweetgum tree, whose spiky seed balls you’ve likely stepped on while walking through a park, is a decent example. It’s originally from the eastern area of the country and doesn’t love drought conditions, thriving in the moist soils of the Mississippi Delta. More than 25,000 of them are planted across the city, according to a tree inventory.
A red pistache
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The flowers of the desert willow are a beautiful pink.
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“I think in general, many of urban forests contain what I would call legacy plantings that occurred after World War II, when people were building homes and moving in and planting trees. And so those trees now, maybe 40, 50, 60 years old, they were planted when water was abundant. They've grown accustomed to having water and of course they're not necessarily as well adapted to hot dry conditions,“ said Greg McPherson, retired research scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, and one of the creators of the experiment.
We were long able to satisfy a broad range of moisture requirements because we imported and dumped all but unlimited gallons of water all over our landscapes, often in an effort to keep our lawns green.
That is until this past decade, when drought and water cuts became the norm.
What happens to water-stressed trees
The flowers of the maverick mesquite.
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The flowers of the desert museum palo verde.
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Water-stressed trees are more susceptible to pathogens and insect attacks, and are, predictably, more likely to die than healthy happy trees. One only need look to the Sierra Nevada to understand how bad things can get. More than 100 million trees have died over the past decade in part due to drought stress.
There are no clear mortality estimates for LA’s urban forest over the past decade, so we can’t say whether extreme conditions have led to more tree deaths in our area. And unless we had a widespread, granular tree tracking program, it’s going to be tough to determine why an individual tree is lost.
There are hundreds of thousands of street trees across the city, and urban trees face all sorts of challenges trees in our forests don’t. Yard tools can damage them and lead to the introduction of disease, poor pruning practices can lessen tree resilience and sometimes people just cut them down because they want to redo their yards.
That said, conditions are becoming more challenging for our urban forest and we could be on the path to greater die off as a result. Longer, more sustained droughts are becoming more common, meaning less water for irrigated landscapes, and more extreme heat days mean trees require more water to survive.
While this palo blanco, originally from northern Mexico, was looking OK, another one was struggling substantially.
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Odds are we haven’t seen the worst of it. Even though we’ve had a handful of water cuts over the past decade, lawns are still green and trees still often getting supplemental irrigation.
Given how bad cuts got before this wet year, it’s easy to imagine a point where outdoor watering is limited to the point that lawns start to finally die off and the trees that rely on that same supplemental water start to die too.
“The roots of those trees are near the surface because turf is irrigated in frequent, but not heavy doses. So the water stays in the upper surface of the soil and that’s where the roots are,” McPherson said.
Depending on the variety, trees can take decades to become established and provide meaningful shade. If we’re planting something today with the expectation that it’ll survive in the lawn-less future we’re charging towards, it’s important to find species that can thrive on minimal supplemental inputs.
Our need for more resilient trees
McPherson’s efforts to find what the experiment is calling ‘climate-ready trees’ began about two decades ago, when he recognized what the existential threat of warming trends could mean for our urban forests.
The Desert Museum Palo Verde doesn't provide as much shade as the other trees, but it's nice to look at and likes hot weather.
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“I began in 1999 when I got a 18 wheeler full of desert trees from Arizona shipped up and planted them all around Sacramento and Davis, and really started evaluating their performance,” said McPherson.
Some, like the Palo Verde, even though it can thrive in hot climates, struggled.
“It just grew so fast that the top would outgrow the roots and it would blow over in our wind,” he said. “Some of them worked, some didn’t. But that led to the idea that we need to evaluate more species”
The rosewood tree had a sizable canopy that provided good shade.
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In 2015 he and van Doorn got a grant to begin trialing trees at a test site at UC Davis, and eventually along the coast in Irvine, and in the scorching hot environment of Riverside.
So which trees have been thriving?
Though the experiment still has a number of years to go, I made the trip to the Riverside plot because out of the two Southern California plots, I wanted to see which trees were doing the best in the most extreme conditions.
Many were thriving, but three stood out because they looked healthy, cast wonderful shade and were quite attractive. They’d be wonderful along any street.
The Red Push Pistache was the first to catch my eye in part because it had one of the thickest canopies and beautiful leaves. It’s originally from Arizona.
The red push pistache seemed to be thriving.
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The canopy of the rosewood, originally from India, rivaled the pistache and the Desert Willow, native to the southwest, put out gorgeous pink flowers.
A rosewood tree.
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The desert willow was thriving at the test plot.
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The Honey Mesquite, also native to the southwest, was covered in bright yellow flowers and teaming with so many bees that the whole tree appeared to vibrate.
The honey mesquite can be invasive in some environments.
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The ghost gum, a type of eucalyptus from Australia was also well established. However, because of their oil content eucalyptus tend to burn violently in wildfires. Maybe not the best choice for fire prone locations. And the tecate cypress is native to the region and looks like it could be trimmed into a hedge. It's struggled a bit at the plot.
The ghost gum is a type of eucalyptus from Australia.
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The Tecate Cypress is native to Southern California and could work well in a hedge.
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Then there were the ones that appeared to need more maintenance, like the Palo Verde, which I see planted in drought tolerant landscapes across the area. It can thrive in hot conditions, and with a bit of pruning it might’ve looked better. Problem is it didn’t provide much shade.
And, to me, the Texas Live Oak looked to be an outright failure, as they were close to dead. It's reportedly done better in cooler conditions at the team's other test site in Irvine.
A desert museum Palo Verde
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A live oak
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Go see the trees yourself
Each tree in the private research plot has a counterpart located in parks across the region, in an effort to help determine how they do when they’re not babied.
“If you were looking at reference versus park sites, the reference sites are doing better as far as survivorship and growth. In the park sites there just is a lot of variability,” said van Doorn.
Gab Chabrán
covers what's happening in food and culture for LAist.
Published February 8, 2026 8:15 PM
Bad Bunny celebrates Latino culture — and tacos — at the 6oth Super Bowl
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Topline:
Villa's Tacos founder Victor Villa appeared with his taco cart during Bad Bunny's Super Bowl LX halftime show, marking a rare moment of L.A. street food culture being showcased on one of the world's biggest stages.
Why it matters: The appearance was more than a cameo — it underscored the cultural significance of L.A.'s taquero tradition and immigrant entrepreneurship. Villa's journey from his grandmother's Highland Park front yard to the Super Bowl reflects the broader story of how Latino food vendors have shaped Los Angeles' culinary identity.
The backstory: Villa launched his business more than eight years ago, selling tacos from his grandmother's front yard in Highland Park. The operation has since expanded to brick-and-mortar locations in Highland Park and downtown Los Angeles, earning recognition as one of the city's standout taco spots.
What he said: "Villa's Tacos is a product of immigrants," Villa wrote on Instagram. "As a 1st generation Mexican-American born & raised in LA, it was an honor to represent my raza & all the taqueros of the world by bringing my taco cart to @badbunnypr's Super Bowl LX 2026 Halftime show."
The bigger picture: Villa dedicated the moment to immigrants who paved the way, emphasizing the performance as a celebration of Latino culture alongside Bad Bunny's shoutouts to Spanish-speaking countries worldwide.
Victor Villa brought his taco cart to Bad Bunny's Super Bowl Halftime performance.
Los Angeles residents likely know the name — Villa's Tacos is an award-winning taco business based in Highland Park. Villa began in his grandmother's front yard and now has brick-and-mortar locations in Highland Park, off Figueroa Avenue, and at Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles.
The restaurant has won L.A. Taco's Taco Madness championship three times (2021, 2022 and 2024) and earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand award for three consecutive years for its signature quesotacos. Villa previously appeared on LAist's AirTalk in August 2025.
A celebration of Latino culture
The entire performance was a celebration of Latin American culture's prominence in the United States, with Bad Bunny taking a moment to recognize Spanish-speaking countries worldwide.
Villa appeared during the opening number, "Tití me preguntó" from Bad Bunny's 2022 album "Un verano sin ti." In the sequence, Bad Bunny visits a piragüero cart — piraguas are iconic Puerto Rican shaved ice treats shaped like pyramids — before the camera pans to Villa and his cart, where Bad Bunny hands him the frozen treat. The moment bridges two beloved Latin American street food traditions: Puerto Rico's piraguas and L.A.'s taco culture.
After the performance aired, Villa took to Instagram to express his thanks and call it a historic moment, He traced his journey from selling his first taco more than eight years ago to the Super Bowl stage.
"I want to give a huge thank you to @badbunnypr for hand selecting me & allowing me to represent my people, my culture, my family & my business," Villa wrote on Instagram.
'A product of immigrants'
As a first-generation Mexican American, he dedicated the moment to the immigrants who made it possible, emphasizing that Villa's Tacos is a product of immigration and that he is honored to represent his culture and all taqueros and Latinos everywhere. The post closed with shoutouts to Puerto Rico, Mexico, and all Latinos.
In August last year, Villa appeared on a Food Friday segment on LAist 89.3's AirTalk, bringing his freshly cooked tacos for host Josie Huang.
Photo Courtesy of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife
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Topline:
A gray wolf was found in L.A. County for the first time in more than a century on Saturday morning.
Why now: The wolf, tagged as BEY03F, was spotted in the town of Neenach, near Lancaster, at 6 a.m.
The backstory: Last May, BEY03F was caught in Tulare County and fitted with a GPS tracking collar. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has been monitoring her movements since.
Howl about this for the history books? A wolf was found in L.A. County for the first time in a century on Saturday morning.
“It's the furthest south the gray wolves have been documented since their reintroduction into Yellowstone and Idaho just over 30 years ago,” said Axel Hunnicutt, the state gray wolf coordinator for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The wolf, tagged as BEY03F, was spotted in the town of Neenach, near Lancaster, at 6 a.m.
The three-year-old wolf was born in 2023 in Plumas County, north of Lake Tahoe, as part of the first litter of the Beyem Seyo pack.
“ We don't know what happened to her after that,” said Hunnicutt. “ We documented her through genetics when she was born.”
Last May, BEY03F was caught in Tulare County and fitted with a GPS tracking collar. The department has been monitoring her movements since. Hunnicut estimated that she has traveled more than 500 miles throughout the state.
The end of January marks the start of the breeding season for gray wolves, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. They will typically break from their pack to find a mate, sometimes traveling thousands of miles to establish a new pack.
There are no records of wolves in the San Gabriel or coastal regions, but the likelihood of her finding a mate is not impossible. Researchers were surprised to discover the pack that BEY03F belonged to in Northern California.
”No one expected a pack to pop up there,” Hunnicutt said. “And that's because two wolves wandered hundreds of miles, so it's possible that some other wolf is doing the same thing.”
The last gray wolf to make it into the Southern California region was in 2021, when the male wolf, OR93 traveled as far down as Ventura County. His journey was cut short later that year, after he was struck and killed by a vehicle along Interstate 5 in Kern County.
Hunnicut said that’s one of the main challenges for BEY03F in her search for a mate.
“ This morning she’s just east of Pyramid Lake,” said Hunnicutt. “Close to I-5, which is honestly just down the road from where [OR93] was killed on the highway.”
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Fiona Ng
is LAist's deputy managing editor and leads a team of reporters who explore food, culture, history, events and more.
Published February 8, 2026 11:53 AM
California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a bill signing ceremony in 2022.
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Topline:
On Saturday, Newsom posted on social media proclaiming today, Super Bowl Sunday, as "Bad Bunny Day" in California in an over-the-top tweet written in all caps.
The proclamation: "AS MANY PEOPLE KNOW, I AM A TREMENDOUS LOVER OF 'THE SPANISH'... THAT IS WHY I AM DECLARING TOMORROW IN CALIFORNIA AS “BAD BUNNY DAY” WHEN BAD BUNNY PERFORMS AT THE BIG GAME IN THE GOLDEN STATE WITH HIS SOOTHING, BEAUTIFUL VOICE, AND HIS VERY NICE LOOKS," reads the message tweeted out through Newsom's office.
We looked into it: The declaration was so extra, we decided to look into it. Read on to learn what we found.
Bad Bunny has fans the world over. One of them apparently is Gov. Gavin Newsom.
On Saturday, Newsom posted on social media proclaiming today, Super Bowl Sunday, as "Bad Bunny Day" in California in a rather tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top tweet written in all caps.
"AS MANY PEOPLE KNOW, I AM A TREMENDOUS LOVER OF 'THE SPANISH'... THAT IS WHY I AM DECLARING TOMORROW IN CALIFORNIA AS 'BAD BUNNY DAY' WHEN BAD BUNNY PERFORMS AT THE BIG GAME IN THE GOLDEN STATE WITH HIS SOOTHING, BEAUTIFUL VOICE, AND HIS VERY NICE LOOKS," reads the message tweeted out through Newsom's office.
AS MANY PEOPLE KNOW, I AM A TREMENDOUS LOVER OF “THE SPANISH.” IT IS A BEAUTIFUL LANGUAGE SPOKEN BY MANY BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE IN THE GREAT STATE OF CALIFORNIA AND ACROSS THE WORLD. I AM ALSO A HUGE FAN OF PUERRRRRRRTO RICO. THAT IS WHY I AM DECLARING TOMORROW IN CALIFORNIA AS “BAD…
— Governor Newsom Press Office (@GovPressOffice) February 7, 2026
"Obviously in this case, the governor is making light of the President's criticisms of Bad Bunny performing during today's Super Bowl halftime show," said Chris Micheli, an adjunct professor of law at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, as well as the author of a number of textbooks on California state government.
So, is the proclamation for real?
To answer that question, let's take a detour into the state proclamation process.
"The governor has a wide authority on proclamations," said Micheli, who also works as a lobbyist for groups like the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.
Proclamations generally fall into two categories, he said. One is official actions, such as states of emergency in the case of disasters, to direct resources for relief. The second is proclamations that are ceremonial and commemorative in nature, where the governor may designate a specific day, week or a period of time to recognize a person or an event — like Black History Month or Ronald Reagan Day.
The Bad Bunny Day proclamation, Micheli said, falls in the second category. But, he added, proclamations are signed by the governor and attested by the Secretary of State in written declarations. As such, it's easy to interpret the Bad Bunny Day tweet as done in jest.
Here's what the Governor told LAist
"The Governor declared Bad Bunny Day via tweet. Enjoy!" The governor's office told us in an email seeking confirmation on Sunday.
Micheli said that means the governor would likely follow up with an official written declaration.
Here's the thing with ceremonial proclamations, though. Micheli said they need to be re-upped every year by the governor — they don't automatically renew.
So yes, let's celebrate Bad Bunny Day on this Super Bowl Sunday. Let's hope to do it again next year, and the years after.
By Adriana Gallardo, A Martínez, Lilly Quiroz | NPR
Published February 8, 2026 6:12 AM
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Topline:
Bad Bunny is headlining today's Superbowl halftime show — a historic moment for some, a controversial choice for others.
The backstory: Bad Bunny, made history at the 2026 Grammy Awards when he became the first artist to win album of the year for a Spanish-language album. The artist has been vocal in his opposition to federal ICE raids.
Why now: But this Sunday, Bad Bunny will meet a larger and potentially more politically divided audience at the Super Bowl. Since late September when the NFL, Apple Music and Roc Nation announced their invitation to Bad Bunny, many took to social media to voice their indignation at the choice to platform an artist who has only released music in Spanish.
Puerto Rican superstar, Bad Bunny, made history at the 2026 Grammy Awards when he became the first artist to win album of the year for a Spanish-language project, with him winning for his album Debí Tirar Más Fotos. In addition to the top prize, Bad Bunny, whose given name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, took home the award for the best música urbana album and best global music performance for his song "EoO".
In his acceptance remarks, and not unlike other moments throughout his career, the artist used the spotlight to express his political views.
"Before I say thanks to God, I'm going to say ICE out," Bad Bunny said during his acceptance speech for best música urbana album. "We're not savages, we're not animals, we're not aliens — we're humans and we are Americans," he added in response to the ongoing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids across the country.
The crowd in Los Angeles, largely met his statements with applause and ovation.
But this Sunday, Bad Bunny will meet a larger and potentially more politically divided audience at the Super Bowl, where he is set to headline this year's halftime show. Since late September when the NFL, Apple Music and Roc Nation announced their invitation to Bad Bunny, many took to social media to voice their indignation at the choice to platform an artist who has only released music in Spanish.
To learn more about Bad Bunny's political history and what we might expect at the Super Bowl, Morning Edition host A Martinez spoke with Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, who chairs the American Studies Department at Wellesley College and the co-author, alongside Vanessa Díaz, of the new book, P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance. The two academics are also behind the Bad Bunny Syllabus, an online teaching resource based on Puerto Rican history and Bad Bunny's meteoric rise since 2016.
Below are three takeaways from the conversation.
Students come for Bad Bunny and stay for the history
Rivera-Rideau teaches "Bad Bunny: Race, Gender, and Empire in Reggaetón" at Wellesley and said the course uses Bad Bunny's work as a hook to get students into the seminar.
"But we really actually spend most of our time talking about Puerto Rican history and Puerto Rican history is part of U.S. history," she said. "And Bad Bunny music has consistently made references to this history."
Rivera-Rideau pointed to an example from 2018 when Bad Bunny debuted on a U.S. mainstream English language television show, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The artist opened with a critique of the Trump administration's handling of Hurricane Maria, which had devastated his island in 2017.
"After one year of the hurricane, there's still people without electricity in their homes. More than 3,000 people died and Trump is still in denial," Martínez Ocasio said.
Latinos remain "perpetually foreign" to some
Puerto Ricans are born U.S. citizens — but this has not always protected them from being caught in recent ICE operations.
"I think part of that has to do with the kind of racialization of Spanish and the racialization of Latino communities of which Puerto Ricans are a part," she said. "And I think what it indicates is that, to me, Latinos in the United States, many of whom have been here for generations, are often understood to be perpetually foreign as a group of people that just does not belong."
The Party is the Protest
Rivera-Rideau said if Apple Music's trailer for the Super Bowl halftime show — which features Bad Bunny dancing with a group representing a smattering of ages, faces and abilities — is any indication of what audiences can expect on Sunday's stage, the theme might be joy in the face of a difficult moment for immigrants and Latinos in the U.S.
"One of the things we talk about in our book is that Bad Bunny is part of resistance, he does engage in protests but it's often through joy," she said. "We have a chapter in our book called 'The Party is the Protest' and I actually feel like that's what I expect at the Superbowl, a party and a protest.
