News

The CWDD hosted its annual High School Training Week from June 21 to June 25, 2021 using an online platform, making this the CWDD's first remote training week.

Middle school teacher, Martha Quatt, lead approximately 85 seventh- and eight-grade students through an intensive macroinvertebrate study in Allen Brook near Williston Central School in Chittenden County, Vermont with the help of CWDD’s Janel Roberge. Quatt and her students used Vermont EPSCoR equipment and teaching samples to prepare for and complete stream sampling. The use of the equipment enabled students to discover more diverse and sensitive species than ever before, allowing them to draw a correlation between overall macroinvertebrate abundance and stream temperature in the form of canopy cover.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 88 small satellites blasted off Wednesday from Florida. The propulsion systems on three of those satellites that were deployed were made by Benchmark Space Systems. The Burlington company was co-founded by Ryan McDevitt in 2017 and stemmed from his graduate work at the University of Vermont. Their systems allow satellites to move around once they’re in orbit. Greater control allows the satellite’s owner to extend its lifespan and bring it back down once it’s done. These are the first of their satellites to go to space.

Essex High School science classrooms experienced authentic stakeholder exercises over the course of four days (June 10th, 11th, 14th, and 15th). CWDD Outreach Professional, Janel Roberge, instructed students on how to complete surveys regarding their preferences for the health of Lake Champlain. Students also role-played various individuals and organizations that have a vested interested in keeping Lake Champlain clean. The exercise gave students a broader understanding of the various stakeholders invested in the health of the lake and provided an opportunity to engage in thought-provoking conversations about the complicated issues surrounding waterbody governance.

CWDD Operations Manager Janel Roberge traveled to NewBrook School in Newfane, VT to lead 14 fifth-graders through a Stated Choice Activity on May 3, 2021. The young scientists grappled with the complex issues surrounding waterbody governance, gaining a deeper understanding of the current state of Lake Champlain and the numerous organizations invested in ensuring a clean and healthy lake.

Over the past decade, Vermont dairy farmers have taken steps to become more sustainable through on-farm practices like cover cropping, conservation tillage and other soil health management strategies. Now, a team of University of Vermont researchers has joined a nationwide effort to quantify the impact of these practices and evaluate the potential for the U.S. dairy industry to reach net zero environmental goals by 2050.

Vermont students heard, first-hand, from VT EPSCoR graduate students and post-doctoral associates, about what it is like to be a scientist. The “Real Scientist Series” places graduate research assistants or post-doctoral associates with students to discuss their career paths as researchers and answer their questions.

A new study led by UVM researcher Jesse Gourevitch explores the benefits of phosphorus reduction on tourism, real estate, and human health in Lake Champlain (Photo: Andy Duback).

Scientists at Stony Brook University, the University of Vermont and Dartmouth College have been studying mercury uptake into the food chain during the winter, and how mercury uptake may change in the future, as climate conditions change.

Middlebury College’s Center for Community Engagement (CCE) has created a new website that aims to boost collaboration between organizations with ties to their local communities and faculty and their students. In this photo, UVM Research Assistant Professor Kristen Underwood speaks with Middlebury College students about the New Haven River’s watershed as part of their environmental studies course in fall 2019. Working with Underwood, EPSCoR Fellow Elizabeth Doran, and Vermont Family Forests, the students conducted research on how individual forest landowner management decisions impact water quality in the Lake Champlain Basin.

Vermont EPSCoR's CWDD program presented to attendees at the Northeast Natural History Conference on April 16, 2021. Declan McCabe, PhD moderated the conference's Citizen Science Oral Presentation Session. During that session, CWDD Operations Manager Janel Roberge presented on the Vermont EPSCoR High School Research Program and the success the CWDD has had training citizen scientists to collect viable data that can then be added to the Streams Database.

BREE Graduate Research Assistant Jesse Gourevitch and Ecological Systems Team Member Beverley Wemple, PhD are among the authors on a new paper, "Improving flood hazard datasets using a low-complexity, probabilistic floodplain mapping approach." The article, whose authors also include Rebecca Diehl, PhD of the UVM Department of Geography and Stephanie Drago of the UVM Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, represents the first effort in Vermont to map the distribution of natural capital that provides important flood mitigation and water quality benefits. In doing so, it captures the range of variability in flooding in the Lake Champlain Basin.

The Spring 2021 VT EPSCoR magazine features:

• VT EPSCoR Research at the Heart of Vermont's New Clean Waters Management Program
• Virtual Policy and Techinical Advisory Comittee (PTAC) Meeting
• Lake Champlain Basin Water Quality Data Dashboards Open for Stakeholders and Broader Public

The Burlington, Vermont-based company Precision Bioassay, Inc will receive a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for their proposal "‘Better Bioassays via Designs for Robots Analyses with Improved Model Selection and Similarity Bounds that Limit Potency Bias." The award represents the culmination of several years of research that was sparked in 2017 by funding from Vermont EPSCoR.

Mandar Dewoolkar, PhD, PE, FASCE, a Professor and Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Vermont and member of the BREE Ecological Systems Team, recently published a study examining the depiction and portrayal of engineers and engineering in US broadcast network television evening news. The study, "Portrayal of Engineers and Engineering in US Broadcast Network Television Evening News Media," was published in the Journal of Civil Engineering Education. Inspired by the Alan Alda Communicating Science Workshop that Dr. Dewoolkar attended, the research appears to be the first of its kind where portrayal and depiction of engineers and engineering in television news media was analyzed.

BREE Graduate Research Assistant Jesse Gourevitch presented a seminar and PhD defense titled "Evaluating the Distributional Equity of Ecosystem Services Under Alternative Land Use and Climate Change Scenarios" on March 8, 2021. Due to restrictions in place as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the seminar was presented remotely via Zoom.

Packetized Energy, a leading developer of software and smart devices that help utilities and consumers manage electricity demand, began at UVM eight years ago. The company was awarded a VT EPSCoR SBIR Phase (0) and SBIR Travel Award in addition to VT EPSCoR supported private sector partners, LaunchVT (second prize), and cc:econ Future Formula awards. Congratulations, Packetized!

Vermont EPSCoR hosted a virtual Alan Alda Communicating Science Workshop on January 26, 2021. The workshop, which had been held on the University of Vermont campus in previous years, went virtual this year due to restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Instructors from the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stonybrook University facilitated the half-day workshop, with exercises focused on learning strategies and techniques to better understand an individual’s personal writing process. Participants interacted in small and large groups to practice methods intended to help with their own scientific writing skills to convey information to a broad range of audiences. Participants included BREE team members, post-doctoral researchers, and graduate students from across colleges at the University of Vermont.

From January through May 2021, Vermont PBS will re-air episodes of Emerging Science, a special series developed in partnership with Vermont EPSCoR. This engaging series focuses on Vermont researchers performing cutting-edge scientific inquiry including energy, transportation, and the technology of social sciences. Each episode of Emerging Science focuses specifically on Vermonters within a field and their contributions to innovations that affect the global scientific community. Emerging Science was recognized with a Boston/New England Emmy Award in 2009 for the multi-platform approach and a National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA) for Content Production/Series Award in 2010. Curriculum Guides are available on line.

CWDD Operations Manager Janel Roberge paid a virtual visit to fifth and sixth grade students from Wardsboro School in Wardsboro, VT (Windham County) in December 2020. The visit represented the culmination of several weeks of preparation with teacher Samatha Bovat, who had not previously worked with Vermont EPSCoR. The outreach established a connection with a new school and helped the teacher incorporate science into a multidisciplinary curriculum.