News

Seven Days
Climate Gathering in Middlebury Preps Activists for March
Seven Days
The Lake Champlain basin will grow hotter and hotter as the century progresses, according to the forecast offered by UVM engineering graduate student Justin Guilbert, with support from plant biology professor Brian Beckage. Average temperatures will ...

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BURLINGTON, Vt. - A new study released by the University of Vermont says climate change is likely to result in more precipitation, and higher temperatures, around the Green Mountain State by century's end.

Mind the Climate Gap
UVM News
... Brian Beckage, University of Vermont Department of Plant Biology; Jonathan Winter, Dartmouth College; Radley Horton, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Timothy Perkins, University of Vermont Department of Plant Biology; and Arne Bomblies, ...

September 8th 2014 informational meeting for the Track 1 Proposal Process. held at 4-5 PM at the University of Vermont.

Given the substantial investment in physical and human infrastructure in the current Track-1 project on the Lake Champlain Basin, the Vermont EPSCoR State Board is soliciting new ideas for the next Track-1 proposal that utilize and build upon these investments. The Track-1 Research on Adaptation to Climate Change in the Lake Champlain Basin: New Understanding Through Complex systems Modeling has laid important ground work over the first three years of a five year award that should serve as a basis for the next round of research in Vermont.
Vermont EPSCoR has with UVM and Middlebury College invested in sensor infrastructure in the Lake and watershed; established water quality laboratories at Johnson State College, Saint Michael's College and the Rubenstein Ecosystem Science Laboratory; developed many models (climate, hydrologic, agent based), that are used in an integrative assessment model; created a laboratory for experimental economics; and joined with Saint Michael's College to create a Center for Workforce Development and Diversity. To see more about the investments and progress of the current Track-1 program, please go to the Vermont EPSCoR website: www.uvm.edu~epscor

Spatial Discounting, Place Attachment and Environmental Concern: Toward an Ambit-Based Theory of Sense of Place

Sense of Place (SOP) theory can connect environmental discourse across disciplines, provided it is supported by an adequate suite of conceptual tools. Sense of place encompasses both objectivist notions of spatial discounting, generally advanced by economists and geographers, and the subjectivist, phenomenological and psychometric aspects of place attachment emphasized by environmental psychologists. This paper introduces ambit as an integrative tool for developing theories about sense of place that include both subjective and objective aspects of human activity. Signifying the spatial extent of activity over time, the human ambit anchors spatial dimensions of environmental concern to alternative theories about sense of place. We conceptualize ambit as the focal level of a tri-level hierarchy stratifying mechanisms, behavior, and reflexivity associated with place. After developing the observable ambit as integral to a hierarchical theory of place-based behavior, we explore its use in providing a more empirical understanding of human behavior in space–time.
http://epscor.w3.uvm.edu/2/node/2259

Professional News: Aug. 27, 2014
UVM News
Following her Scholar-in-Residence appointment at Goddard College in August, geography professor Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux has been named the school's commencement speaker. Dupigny-Giroux gave a public presentation during her residency, ...

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A radical alternative to a carbon tax
Barre Montpelier Times Argus
So what are we waiting for? As usual, true leadership. Our leaders are waiting to see whether public opinion will support them if they act. Alan Betts is a leading climate scientist and a past president of the Vermont Academy of Science and Engineering.

13 NEWRnet interns working at the University of Delaware, the University of Vermont, Salve Regina University and University of Rhode Island have spent the summer investigating the drivers of local and regional water quality using advanced water sensors to acquire real-time, high-frequency water quality data, and using the fields of experimental economics and agent-based modeling to determine how stakeholders respond to this new technology.

Diving Into Big Data
UVM News
UVM professor of engineering Donna Rizzo knows how messy problems of groundwater pollution can be brought into a tidy framework. She's developed mathematical techniques to cleverly probe and connect bucket loads of data collected from, say, ...

Seven Days
Public Water Systems Watch for Toxic Algae in Lake Champlain
Seven Days
"I've lived in Bedford since 2004, and it happens every summer," said Aleksandra Drizo, a research fellow at the University of Vermont and the CEO of PhosphorEduc, a company that creates and markets technology for removing phosphorous from water.

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VT EPSCoR Research on Adaptation to Climate Change (RACC) held their annual state meeting on August 5th 2014 at the Hilton Burlington Hotel in Burlington Vermont.

Visitors from the National Science Foundation, Congressional Offices, State and Local Agencies, Researchers, Private Sector, Graduate and Undergraduate Students were present to share progress and provide updates on the third year of the Adaptation to Climate Change in the Lake Champlain Basin: New Understanding through Complex Systems (RACC) project.

Four RACC interns, Jaclyn Guz, Annanelya Levine, Luke Perry, and Iliansherry Santiago, are spending the summer working with Dr. Stephanie Hurley (UVM Plant and Soil Science - Stormwater Management & Landscape Design) and graduate student Amanda Cording (Plant and Soil Science - Sustainable Landscape) at the UVM Bioretenetion Laboratory.

This summer Kateri Bisceglio, Chelsea Cole, Dalton Gomez, Joshua Hunt, Todd Lantery, and Laura Orvis have been working with Dr. Robert Genter and Saul Blocher at Johnson State College on microbial source tracking and water quality in tributaries of the Lamoille River.

The interns are monitoring 19 stream sites in the Lamoille River basin for sources of E. coli from warm-blooded animals. The goal is to identify the animal sources of E. coli in streams and relate that to the land-use practices surrounding the stream. They are also looking to link the land-use practices in the Lamoille River basin to the nutrients found in the stream (different forms of nitrogen and phosphorus).

On July 29th, six middle school students and their teacher from the Shader Croft School in Shelburne visited RACC researchers at Saint Michael's College. The Shader Croft program is a summer literacy program for young adolescents. This free choice learning program allows the students to identify a personal interest and embark on student generated, student organized and student led trips throughout the summer.

One young student, Zach, identified an interest in photographing insects and wanted to learn more about macrophotography from RACC researchers Dr. Declan McCabe and Katie Chang. The class visited campus to learn more about macroinvetebrates, techniques for taking digital photographs, and got to see some really neat bugs under the microscope!

RACC interns, Rachel Markey and Emily Whalen are spending the summer working with Dr. Carol Adair working on the Northern Forest Mesocosm (NForM) Climate Change Experiment.

As temperatures rise, the ability of forests to maintain, gain, or loose carbon (C) and nutrients has important consequences for climate change mitigation, soil fertility and water quality. The goal of the NForM experiment is to identify the mechanisms driving forest C, nutrient and water balances and to quantify how warming-driven changes in these mechanisms will alter forest health and function using in-field forest mesocosms (small simulated forest watersheds).

An article titled "From the Habit of Control to Institutional Enablement: Re-envisioning the Governance of Social-Ecological Systems from the Perspective of Complexity Sciences" was recently published in Complexity, Governance & Networks. Authors included members of the RACC IAM, Q3 and Q2 teams. This was a collaborative effort with reknowned complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman.

RACC intern Marissa Goodwin is working with Dr. Carol Adair (Rubenstein School - Climate Change Science) on a project involving Vermont Agricultural Resilience in a Changing Climate. This long-term, collaborative project seeks to work with farmers, agricultural service providers, researchers, and community organizations to address the impacts of climate change on agriculture in Vermont. The project focuses on evaluating and implementing on-farm climate change adaptation and mitigation practices.

RACC interns collect soil and water samples in upland and mountainous settings to help quantify the role of rural transportation networks on water quality degradation. Sampling occurs along stream corridors of the Missisquoi, Winooski, and Mad River watersheds to determine the gradient of phosphorus and nitrogen towards the stream banks and with depth in the soil profile.

RACC intern, Némesis Ortiz, and UVM intern, Bradley Roy, are working with Dr. Jason Stockwell to learn how several water quality parameters may have an impact on food webs in Shelburne Pond. Interns collect water samples at different depths using a peristaltic pump, and use different water quality sensors, including the Sonde (temperature, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, pH, turbidity, depth, chlorophyll and blue green algae concentration), a PAR sensor (Photosynthetically Active Radiation) and temperature sensors. Other methods include using the Secchi disk for turbidity measurements, weather data collection, and the preparation of water samples in the lab

When the fledgling ASCB held its big meeting in a down-at-the-heels hotel on the Chicago lakefront in 1961, it was something of a carnival of animals, lab animals. Peter Satir, who is now at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, NY, was present in Chicago. Fifty three years later when asked about the first scientific program, Satir couldn't help pointing out how many different organisms or parts thereof were being studied. There were papers using the rectal gland of the sucker shark, the salt gland of the herring gull, and the gas secreting epithelium of the Portuguese man-of-war. Many of today's common laboratory animal model systems were represented—Drosophila, Dictyostelium, Escherichia coli, and Saccharomyces. But there was only one HeLa presentation and Caenorhabditis elegans had yet to catch the eye of Sydney Brenner. In his first ASCB talk, Satir spoke on fine structure and motion in mussel gill cilia.