Dr. Erin Hotchkiss,an Assistant Professor of Freshwater Ecology in the Department of Biological Sciences,recently received funding for two grants from the Swedish Research Council Formas.
Hotchkiss is a co-PI on the first grant: “Taking the pulse of Swedish rivers: Using metabolism to monitor ecosystem responses to environmental change”.
Project Goals: (1) determine how rates of ecosystem metabolism in Swedish rivers are shaped by regional climatic and anthropogenic gradients, (2) quantify the extent to which streams in the Swedish landscape degrade terrestrial organic carbon and contribute to greenhouse gas evasion, and (3) advance the use of metabolism as a tool for environmental monitoring programs.
Hotchkiss is also a collaborator on a second grant: “Changing ice-cover regimes in a warmer climate: Effects on emissions and metabolism of carbon in northern aquatic ecosystems”.
Project Goals: (1) examine seasonal shifts in aquatic carbon metabolism, (2) assess how a shorter ice-covered period will affect whole-system productivity and aquatic CO2 and CH4 emissions on an annual scale, and (3) increase public awareness about climate change effects in northern aquatic ecosystems.
These grants will fund some of Erin’s future research and provide exchange opportunities for students between Umeå and Blacksburg. For more information, including proposal summaries, visit the Hotchkiss Lab website: https://sites.google.com/site/ehotchkiss/news.
By this point in the school year, I hope that you have heard of NCSE’s Scientist in the Classroom program. But if not, please check it out!
In designing the program, we wanted to be sure that scientists and teachers were able to work together to come up with a hands-on activity that fit in with what was going on in the classroom as opposed to a prescribed activity. A really neat result of this design is that all of the pairs have a unique experience with the program.
Here I am featuring one pair that participated in the program during our pilot year, NCSEteacher and NCSE advisory board member David Amidon and scientist Laura Schoenle.
David Amidon has been teaching eighth grade science in central New York for almost 20 years. In that time, he has taught all of the science disciplines at the middle school level, including chemistry, physics, and earth science. For the past five years, he has been teaching biology and life science with an emphasis on environmental science. David was recently awarded a 2016 Presidential Award for Environmental Educators, presented by the Environmental Protection Agency. This is a great recognition of David’s dedication to teaching students about human impacts on the environment. You can read more about his award here.
Last spring, David applied for NCSE’s Scientist in the Classroom program, and was matched with Laura, an ecophysiologist who studies the physiological and behavioral responses of animals to environmental challenges.
Laura Schoenle is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at Virginia Tech University and was a visiting graduate student at Cornell University when she was paired with David’s class.
For the first visit, Laura showed up with nets, tags and the other instruments of her trade and and demonstrated what scientists do when they are out bird collecting. Students then watched videos of animals engaging in unknown behaviors and began formulating their own hypotheses as to what was going on—a first-hand experience of how science works.
Later in the semester, Laura returned to the classroom to help David with an activity exploring allele frequency of sickle cell anemia and malaria resistance. Laura also stuck around to discuss her career path with many students after school.
David’s students really enjoyed working with Laura. He noted that “students were able to see a future in science, which was helpful, especially for girls.”
As for Laura, she said, “I was really surprised by the fact that the students did envision scientists as all older, white men who worked over bubbling test tubes. I’d thought that things have come a bit further than that. After working with the students, I believe they had a better sense of the diversity of people in science and gained perspective on the range of activities scientists engage in.”
NCSE created the Scientist in the Classroom project because teachers told us that it would help them teach evolution and climate change with more confidence. We hoped that the program would also provide students with access to scientific role models. In this case, it looks like both goals were met!
We have 36 teacher-scientist partnerships under way this semester, so I will soon have many more stories to tell. If you are interested in participating in this program, please apply here.
Sydney Hope, a Ph.D. student in the Hopkins Lab, visited Franklin County High School on Friday, November 4, 2016 to speak about her research and experience as a scientist as part of the school’s “Moment of Science” program. The “Moment of Science” takes place during the activity period on select days and the school brings speakers in to talk about different aspects of science. All students from grades 9-12 are invited to attend.
Sydney spoke about her research on how incubation temperature affects the behavior of Wood Duck ducklings. She talked about how environmental changes and human disturbances, such as scaring birds off of their nests, may lead to lower egg incubation temperatures. Then, she explained how her results showed that ducklings incubated at lower temperatures are less successful at performing the ‘nest exodus’ behavior. Wood Ducks nest in trees and the duckling must climb up out of the nest and jump down to their mother once they hatch; this is called ‘nest exodus’. Watching the videos of ducklings jumping out of nest boxes was one of the highlights of the presentation for the students.
Students were asked to write down at least one thing that they learned. Some responses included “Ducklings get out better when they’re warmer incubated” and “I didn’t know ducks could be adapted for such a far fall.” Sydney also spoke about her experiences as a graduate student and answered questions about how she made it to the point she is now. Another great lesson learned: “A good reason to be a scientist is that there are many unanswered questions in the world.” Agreed!
Sydney was invited to visit Franklin County High School by Alicia Lowe, a teacher who participated in the NSF funded Research Experience for Teachers (RET) program at Virginia Tech. Alicia worked with Sydney to carry out an independent research project studying how incubation temperature affected Wood Duck duckling calling behavior. Sydney was excited to visit Alicia after their great RET experience, and hopes that she can visit again!
The EEB Seminar on November 3, 2016 featuredDr. Jill Welter, an ecosystem scientist from St. Catherine University in Minnesota. Dr. Welter’s work focuses on understanding how environmental change, including climate warming and eutrophication, influences species interactions and nutrient cycling in stream ecosystems. Her seminar talk was titled:
“Start seeing nitrogen fixation: the potential impact of cyanobacteria on river ecosystems in a changing world.”
During her visit, Dr. Welter led a brownbag discussion for fellows in the Interfaces of Global Change Program where they discussed alternative careers in academia. She also visited the Carey Lab’s Falling Creek Reservoir research site for a hands-on demonstration of water quality research techniques.
Dr. Welter’s visit to Virginia Tech was hosted by Cayelan Carey and graduate students in the Carey Lab.
Nov. 3, 2016 | Coastal cities are critical to the global economy and frequently exposed to hurricanes, flooding, sea level rise, and other natural disasters.
When infrastructure — water, energy, sewer, and transportation systems — as well as the built environment is compromised, the residents’ safety is also jeopardized. Emergency plans outline how coastal cities can endure and recover from natural disasters, but often do not contain a comprehensive strategy for infrastructure.
Virginia Tech’s Walid Saad, assistant professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering and Anamaria Bukvic, research assistant professor in the Department of Geography and a Global Change Center faculty affiliate, in collaboration with civil engineers from the University of Miami, received a two-year, $500,000 National Science Foundation grant to design new computational, mathematical, and simulation frameworks to protect the critical infrastructure of coastal cities against natural disasters.
The project, supported by the foundation initiative, Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP) program, is entitled “Collaborative Research: A Human-Centered Computational Framework for Urban and Community Design of Resilient Coastal Cities.” The award is one of two collaborative NSF CRISP research grants awarded to Virginia Tech.
“Resilience paradigms need to explicitly account for the complex, large-scale physical and social systems of a coastal city’s infrastructure,” said Saad, the Steven O. Lane Junior Faculty Fellow. “Although there has been a surge in literature that assesses the physical and economic damage of climate change in coastal regions, these works remain largely qualitative and are restricted to each infrastructure in isolation.”
Saad, principal investigator on the project, and his multidisciplinary team will work to fill in that gap by creating frameworks for “anticipatory resilience” — meaning the designs will be tailored to and directly installed in the built environment of coastal cities. In collaboration with the cities of Miami and Miami Beach, the researchers will be testing the frameworks on site, furthering the direct and tangible societal impact.
The meta-models will account for urban and community design as well as the socio-economic characteristics of each city. By coupling the meta-models with a computational framework, the researchers will build an advanced simulation and optimization framework for enhancing the resilience of a coastal city’s critical infrastructure systems.
Last year, Saad and his research team were awarded a $1.1 million NSF grant in support of the CRSIP program to focus on smart city infrastructure. The group was tasked with creating a framework and combining techniques from network science, operations research and economics, machine learning, wireless communications, power systems, and psychology in order to develop processes that can give smart city systems the resiliency to recover from such failures.
Written by Kelly Izlar.
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Photo by By D Ramey Logan (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons
