Water Resources

Is it possible to identify and stop a climate change disaster before it happens? Kimberley Rain Miner, a National Science Foundation Fellow and Department of Defense SMART Scholar, believes it might be with the proper predictions and preparations in a broad range of scenarios.

How can we how can we learn from communities to understand risk and support resilience planning? Kristen Goodrich brings a social ecological approach to characterizing natural hazards when developing flood modeling by studying the human experience with and response to flooding.

Over the past decade, more researchers have focused on the correlation between segregation and broad pollution exposure. Residents of a city like Memphis, they have found, are exposed to more pollution than those living in a city like Tampa, Fla., which is less racially divided.

Five interdisciplinary teams will receive Gund Catalyst Awards between $35,000 and $50,000 to establish new research projects seeking real-world solutions to critical environmental issues. The inaugural Catalyst Awards will accelerate new efforts on global climate modelling, renewable biofuels, climate impacts on mountain communities, nitrogen ‘trouble zones’ and sustainable agriculture.

Leslie Ferguson will receive the 2018 Ted Wellman Water Award from the Marin Conservation League on April 6th for her work preserving Marin and California's water resources.

Mohawk midwife Katsi Cook lives in Akwesasne, an indigenous community in upstate New York that is downwind and downstream from three Superfund sites. For years she witnessed elevated rates of miscarriages, birth defects, and cancer in her town, ultimately drawing connections between environmental contamination and these maladies. When she brought her findings to environmental health researchers, Cook sparked the United States’ first large-scale community-based participatory research project.

Fellows Jim Downing (Executive Editor) and Meredith Niles (Guest Editor) collaborated on a special issue of California Agriculture focused on the implications of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA, the package of bills signed into law by California Gov. Jerry Brown in September 2014. Niles and Fellow Esther Conrad also have articles in the issue.

Vermont has a problem. The state is $1.2 billion short of the funding it will need to meet federal targets for reducing pollution in state waterways. To solve that problem, Gov. Phil Scott suggested a creative solution last week in his budget address: Turning the pollutant into a commodity and selling it out of state. The pollutant is phosphorus, a primary ingredient of fertilizer, which is widely used in farming. ...