In a BBC Nature article, entomologist and sustainability scientist Quentin Wheeler talks about the possibility of a new species of swimming cave cricket recently discovered in a remote Venezuelan tepui, a type of table-top mountain.
“Places like small islands and mountain tops and caves are really new exciting laboratories of genetic experimentation,” Wheeler says.
It was a BBC film crew that spotted the new species of cricket.
"You can't really as a biologist, put into words how it feels to see something, to film something that's never been named," says Dr. George McGavin, biologist and film presenter.
Conservation biologists call places like this hotspots - areas inhabited by a high number of endemic species that cannot be found anywhere else.
The International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University collates information about newly discovered species, in part because of its value in the study of evolutionary history but also out of a concern for bio-diversity and conservation.
They record around 18,000 new species a year but Professor Wheeler said that they are not about to run out of discoveries.
In an Arizona Republic article, sustainability scientist Harvey Bryan and Energize Phoenix project manager Mick Dalrymple comment on energy conservation recently reported from state agencies.
"Only two areas can be measured: water and energy consumption. Energy is the one you can take to the bank," Bryan says.
New Energy Star buildings for Arizona's Department of Environmental Quality, Department of Administration, and Department of Health Services reduced energy use by 22.5 percent, exceeding each building's 2011 goal of 15 percent. The Governor's Office of Energy Policy hopes to increase the number of Energy Star building certifications after investing $3.5 million in federal stimulus funds into increasing the energy efficiency of state buildings over the past 18 months. The investments included retrofitting 10 of the 12 large state buildings with a more efficient compact fluorescent lighting.
"Lighting is by far the single most cost-effective retrofit that someone can do," says Dalrymple.
The article stresses the importance of individual actions towards more sustainable behavior.
AzCATI continues to be a crucial forefront of innovation in biofuels, bio-product research, and commercialization of algae-based goods. The research hub has taken significant strides in their mission to serve as a national test bed to accelerate the advancement of algae technology for the future. Although there are many goals that have been accomplished, a primary focus today at AzCATI is to continue research in producing a low-cost and efficient feedstock for biofuel production. Peter Zemke, technical lead of photobioreactors at AzCATI, chatted with me last week on some progress taking place to pursue this goal.
When ordering seafood, the options are many and so are some of the things you might consider in what you order. Is your fish healthy? Is it safe? Is it harvested responsibly?
While there are many services and rankings offered to help you decide – there’s even an iPhone app – a group of researchers have found a simple rule of thumb applies.
“If the fish is sustainable, then it is likely to be healthy to eat too,” says Leah Gerber, an associate professor and senior sustainability scientist at Arizona State University.
Gerber and colleagues ran an analysis of existing literature on fish to see which choices are consistently healthier and which are high in mercury or overfished. Their findings are published in today’s early online version of the Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, a publication of the Ecological Society of America.
On the fortieth anniversary of the Clean Water Act this paper reports the first quantitative assessment of the aggregate trends in water quality in the U.S. using a single standard over the years 1975 to 2011. The analysis suggests that fresh water lakes for the nation as a whole are about at the same quality levels as they were in 1975. In short, viewed in the aggregate, nothing has changed. An assessment of the factors influencing the aggregates also suggests that water quality appears to be affected by the business cycle. This result calls into question the simple descriptions of the change in environmental quality with economic growth that are associated with the Environmental Kuznets Curve. Download the paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Droughts are more than simply climate phenomena. They can have profound social, environmental and economic impacts, and can also be a major threat to food security throughout the world. Though much progress has been made in monitoring droughts and understanding their causes, there is still a strong need for better precision in both the monitoring and forecasting of droughts.
A team led by Arizona State University researchers seeks to enable the move from a reactive to a more proactive approach to droughts, by developing new capabilities to conduct global drought monitoring using satellite detection of water stress and hydrologic models applied at regional scales.
Under the direction of ASU hydrologist and DCDC researcher Enrique Vivoni, a contingent of ASU researchers is leading a group from NASA Ames, California State University at Monterey Bay, and a nonprofit research and development organization, known as Planetary Skin Institute (PSI), in integrating multi-resolution, remote sensing-based drought indices into an online, cloud computing-based visualization platform.
Vivoni’s research group was selected for a NASA project in the Earth Science Applications: Water Resources competition, which specifically sought projects able to leverage NASA capabilities to advance their skill to monitor, identify, assess, predict and respond to water resource deficits. The NASA project led by the ASU team will build on a concept prototype seeded by PSI.
"ASU’s portfolio of earth and space research has enabled us to compete at NASA for new efforts in the application of hydrologic remote sensing and informatics," explains Vivoni, an associate professor in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. "We are really excited to be leading a multi-institutional project to develop drought monitoring tools. These will have applications in semiarid regions with large agricultural regions across the world, including in Arizona.
"We have selected to use a water stress index to conduct drought monitoring specifically in drought-prone areas of northwest Mexico and northeast Brazil given their critical importance," adds Vivoni. "To do so, we will expand the capabilities of a cloud-based geospatial platform to incorporate drought products using remote sensing data and hydrologic model outputs. We hypothesize that the cloud-based platform will be a game-changing approach for drought monitoring, assessment and prediction at a range of scales."
Teji Abraham, chief development officer for PSI, considers "the drought products from this project very complementary and important for the Open Innovation program that PSI is partnering with Brazil's Ministry of Science, Technology, & Innovation – especially for timely risk management given the propensity of drought in northeast Brazil. In collaboration with this group of partners, PSI also intends to extend this new approach in the future to other countries in Asia and Africa that are particularly susceptible to drought."
Drought products
The drought products will be spatial maps provided approximately every two weeks that will show drought severity over the two countries of interest (Brazil and Mexico) at high resolution (4 to 8 kilometers) and over the globe at lower resolution (16 to 32 km). The drought maps will be derived from satellite remote sensing observations, specifically the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor on board the Earth Observing System Aqua and Terra satellites. These will be complemented with auxiliary data such as irrigation sectors, river basins, stream networks, reservoirs, political boundaries, temperature and precipitation, among others.
This data will be integrated into a cloud-based platform, called Drought ALERTS (short for Automated Land change Evaluation, Reporting and Tracking System). This global visualization system will overlay standard maps with scientific products related to natural resources management for near real-time global detection of water stress at multiple resolutions.
Targeted at national water managers, irrigation districts, policymakers and scientific communities, Drought ALERTS is designed to engage stakeholders and decision-makers in local to regional problems concerned with natural resources and risk management and will provide timely detection of drought events on a global basis with a high degree of accuracy.
"This innovative platform will utilize remote sensing products from low-Earth orbiting satellites to produce drought indices. It will help form the basis for resource allocation decisions and it will be refined over time as we find ways to make it better reflect the needs of decision-makers and others who use the information," says Vivoni.
"PSI sees this as an important step forward in globally scaling drought monitoring capabilities. In partnership with PSI’s regional partners, we expect this project to help bridge the gap between scientists and decision makers by integrating drought data products into a decision planning environment that enables the data to be analyzed in context for making holistic decisions," adds Abraham.
Current drought monitors, such as the US drought monitor, rely on assembling precipitation data from rain gauges throughout a region about once every week. The US drought monitor is a great resource that has improved US-based efforts with respect to what was available even five years ago; however, this can lead to large errors in developing countries as instrument networks there are sparse or inconsistent. Remote sensing products provide an alternative view of drought by making inferences based on vegetation status and land surface temperature.
Drought ALERTS, and similar products, could serve as the backbone of national drought monitoring in many developing countries to improve drought detection, awareness and decision-making capabilities. For example, the study areas in northwest Mexico and northeast Brazil are currently undergoing severe multi-year droughts affecting agricultural production. These advances can yield significant cost savings through reduced risks across several water demand sectors including food production and security, hydropower generation, and natural ecosystem services.
End users
The end users will range from local- to country-level decision-makers that are involved in water, land and natural resources management. Vivoni and his collaborators have partnered with a large irrigation district in Mexico and a federal emergency management agency in Brazil that are interested in drought forecasts.
"The Yaqui Valley Irrigation District in Sonora, Mexico is a major producer of wheat. The Center for Monitoring of Natural Disasters in Brazil is a new agency in charge of nation-wide alerts. Both of these institutions – and others that will join as the program develops – will have access to tailored scientific products related to drought," explains Vivoni.
Users will be able to query, visualize and plot metrics that explore the different dimensions of drought, including the precipitation and temperature forcing and the vegetation response. Summary statistics, such as drought duration and intensity, will be provided to help them gauge the level of the threat.
Drought monitoring is but the first step in a larger vision. Vivoni intends to expand this drought effort into a hydrological risk monitoring platform that also deals with floods, landslides, erosion potential, etc. to provide a more complete picture of global water excess and water limitations.
"Eventually, the drought monitor will also help our undergraduate and graduate students interact, query and explore real-time remote sensing data that describe changes in the hydrological cycle over their regions of interest. By bringing research products into classroom activities, our student learning experiences will be enriched," adds Vivoni.
Note:ASU and Phoenix have collaborated on numerous big projects through the years, including development of the ASU campus in the heart of downtown. More recently, ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability and Phoenix teamed up to win a $25 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to launch Energize Phoenix, a sustainable energy efficiency program that creates green jobs and reduces carbon emissions while transforming energy use in diverse neighborhoods along a 10-mile stretch of the Metro light rail.
Sustainability is what turns big cities into great cities. It’s a transformation that starts with good leadership and collaboration, then takes off with visionary thinking and long-term planning. Great cities thrive when sustainability permeates decisions, strategies, and operations.
Phoenix has long benefited from visionary leaders with long-term outlooks. These leaders provided the ideas and groundwork that made it possible to create a major city in a vast desert. They secured a multidimensional water supply that is one of the most reliable in the country. They established strong economic foundations for us in information technology, biotechnology, and other high-value industries that are at the core of a sustainable economy. And they set aside vast natural wonders as preserves for future generations.
Thus, Phoenix has paved the way and has become the sixth most populous city in the nation with 1.4 million people across almost 520square miles. More than that, Phoenix is the beating heart of a vibrant metropolitan region that encompasses more than 4 million people. It is also the capital of a huge and diverse state that is home to 6 million residents.
California has reason to be optimistic that the state's proposed high-speed rail project, due to begin construction next year, can prove to be a viable transportation alternative from environmental and sustainability standpoints.
New research by Mikhail Chester, an assistant professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment and Arpad Horvath, a University of California, Berkeley engineer compared the future sustainability of a high-speed rail with that of competing modes of transportation, namely automobiles and air travel.
They determined that in terms of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, a mature high-speed rail system wins out when it deploys state-of-the-art trains powered by greener electricity. This was true even after accounting for the emergence of more fuel-efficient airplanes and automobiles.
ASU team FlashFood is developing a mobile-phone application to help establish networks that would connect restaurants, hotels, catering and banquet services with teams of people who would collect leftover food and transport it to community centers, churches, and other neighborhood gathering places where it would be distributed to people in need.
The app is designed to send out a text message to subscribers to the service in local communities to inform them where and when food will be delivered. “This is a huge component of our service that makes us stand out from similar types of services,” says team member Jake Irvin, a recent marketing and sustainability graduate.
The FlashFood idea brought the team a first-place finish last spring at the MicroSoft Imagine Cup U.S. Finals and earned them a spot in the Imagine Cup World Finals.
Though much progress has been made in monitoring droughts and understanding their causes, there is still a strong need for better precision in both the monitoring and forecasting of droughts. A team lead by Arizona State University researchers seeks to enable the move from a reactive to a more proactive approach to droughts by developing new capabilities to conduct global drought monitoring using satellite detection of water stress and hydrologic models applied at regional scales.
Under the direction of ASU hydrologist and Sustainability Scientist Enrique Vivoni, a contingent of ASU researchers is leading a group from NASA Ames, California State University at Monterey Bay and a non-profit research and development organization known as Planetary Skin Institute (PSI) in integrating multi-resolution, remote sensing-based drought indices into an online, cloud computing-based visualization platform.
Vivoni intends to expand this drought effort into a hydrological risk monitoring platform that also deals with floods, landslides, erosion potential, etc. to provide a more complete picture of global water excess and water limitations.
“Eventually, the drought monitor will also help our undergraduate and graduate students interact, query and explore real-time remote sensing data that describe changes in the hydrological cycle over their regions of interest. By bringing research products into classroom activities, our student learning experiences will be enriched,” adds Vivoni.
Nicole Darnall, a senior sustainability scholar with ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability, spoke with a writer for National Geographic Daily News about some of the findings in the 2012 Greendex survey, which was released this month.
Greendex, a worldwide tracking survey produced by National Geographic and GlobeScan, measured consumer behavior in 65 areas related to housing, transportation, food and consumer goods in 17 countries.
In the story “Americans Least Green – And Feel Least Guilt, Survey Suggests,” writer Ker Than noted that the survey showed “when asked what proportion of their fellow citizens were green, most people responded 20 to 40 percent. Yet when asked if they themselves were green, more than half said they are.”
Arizona State University, in coordination with Leuphana University in Germany, has launched an educational pilot project that will lay the groundwork for an intensive institutional collaboration in undergraduate education. Sustainability Scientist Manfred Laubichler will lead the project with input from numerous other sustainability scientists from across ASU.
Funded by a $900,000 award from the Mercator Foundation, the ASU-Leuphana program will focus on the topic “Sustainable Cities: Contradiction of Terms?” The program will utilize virtual conferencing using the technology of Vidyo, a revolutionary video conferencing platform; intensive writing assignments and student writing workshops; online exhibits; peer-to-peer mentoring and in-person international exchange.
"We asked, ‘what if as we teach about sustainability, conservation biology, science, humanities and culture, we have students from Europe, South America, China, and the U.S. all talking together?’” said ASU vice provost Robert Page. “There would be differing views and the sharing of those views might allow students to develop solutions to challenges that none could have conceived of individually. And so was born the concept of a global classroom.”
Some of the weather extremes bedeviling people around the world have become far more likely because of human-induced global warming, researchers reported on Tuesday. Yet they ruled it out as a cause of last year’s devastating floods in Thailand, one of the most striking weather events of recent years.
A new study found that global warming made the severe heat wave that afflicted Texas last year 20 times as likely as it would have been in the 1960s. The extremely warm temperatures in Britain last November were 62 times as likely because of global warming, it said.
The findings, especially the specific numbers attached to some extreme events, represent an increased effort by scientists to respond to a public clamor for information about what is happening to the earth’s climate. Studies seeking to discern any human influence on weather extremes have usually taken years, but in this case, researchers around the world managed to study six events from 2011 and publish the results in six months.
Some of the researchers acknowledged that given the haste of the work, the conclusions must be regarded as tentative.
Arizona State University professor James Elser has received the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award, the most prestigious global award in the aquatic sciences, at the July 2012 Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) meeting on the shores of ancient Lake Biwa, Otsu, Shiga, Japan. The Hutchinson Award is presented annually to recognize a scientist’s previous five to 10 years of excellence in limnology (the study of inland waters) or oceanography.
In addition, the organization has elected Elser as its next president. The largest international freshwater and ocean science professional society in the world, ASLO serves more than 4,000 members, including practicing scientists, engineers, and educators. Elser will serve a six-year term, beginning with two years as president-elect. He will spend the following two years as president, and two more years as past-president.
Vanessa Davis has been interested in sustainability ever since she was a child. In elementary school, she held environmental-related positions in student government and encouraged fellow students and administrators to recycle.
Davis is now an intern within the Criminal Investigation Division of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA CID). She earned her associate’s degree in justice studies and crime scene technology in 2006. Davis is currently working towards another degree at ASU, studying sociology and sustainability.
Davis also works full-time as executive assistant to Rob Melnick, executive dean of the Global Institute of Sustainability. She lends her time to the EPA internship as interesting or appropriately matched cases arise.
Christopher Sanchez, a University of Miami undergraduate student, has been working with CAP scientist Dan Childers for the last two summers on a project in the Tres Rios constructed wetlands. Both have been involved in the Society of Wetland Scientists mentoring program and were recently featured in a video describing the mentoring process.
Christopher is not the first undergraduate to participate in CAP research. Since 2003, CAP has funded 34 undergraduate students to work with scientists through the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program.
This year marked several significant milestones in leadership and administration for Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC). In a planned transition phased in over the past year and a half, Dave White assumes the role of Principal Investigator and Director. Dave has been with DCDC since its inception; first as senior project personnel in DCDC I, then as co-PI and Associate Director for DCDC II.
Founding Director and PI Patricia Gober stepped down to assume a new position as Professor, Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan. Gober, however, maintains a research faculty appointment with Arizona State University and continues to contribute to DCDC as senior project personnel.
Charles Redman, Founding Director of the School of Sustainability, continues his role as co-PI and co-Director, positions he has held since DCDC was established.
Additionally, Kerry Smith, Regents Professor, W. P. School of Business, and Kelli Larson, Associate Professor, School of Sustainability and School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, have been added to the Executive Committee, which also includes, along with White and Redman, co-PIs Margaret Nelson, Associate Dean at Barrett, The Honors College, and Craig Kirkwood, Professor Emeritus, W. P. Carey School of Business.
Dave White is Associate Professor of Community Resources and Development at Arizona State University. He is also co-director of the Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC), Senior Sustainability Scientist with the Global Institute of Sustainability, and affiliate faculty with the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes.
His work focuses on understanding and enhancing the linkages between science and policy for environmental decision making. He has developed and studied processes, outcomes, and institutional forms of boundary organizations for the co-production of knowledge and decisions; identified divergent perspectives between stakeholder groups at the science-policy nexus; and tested competing methods for gathering information on sensitive topics from decision makers. This work has contributed to the development and refinement of new tools and techniques for collaborative environmental decision making such as the DCDC WaterSim model. White is the author of more than two dozen articles about the interactions of science and society published in journals including Science and Public Policy, Environmental Science and Policy, Environment and Behavior, and Society and Natural Resources. He is a recipient of the ASU President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness. White received his PhD in Forestry from Virginia Tech in 2002.
In 1994, the United Nations General Assembly declared the 17th of June the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought to promote public awareness of the issue, and the implementation of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in those countries experiencing serious drought and/or desertification, with particular emphasis on Africa.
Working with editors and authors, Routledge Taylor & Francis has compiled a list of over 80 leading articles from 50 academic journals to support this United Nations World Day.
One of the articles chosen for the collection on drought is a 2010 paper published by DCDC researchers and colleagues from the City of Phoenix Water Service Department: Pat Gober, Anthony J. Brazel, Ray Quay, Soe Myint, Susanne Grossman-Clarke, Adam Miller, and Steve Rossi. Using watered landscapes to manipulate urban heat island effects: How much water will it take to cool Phoenix? Journal of the American Planning Association 76(1):109-121.
Colorado River Sustainability Requires Balancing Supply and Demand for Water Resources and Responsible Hydropower
via American Rivers
By Matt Niemerski
Director, Western Water Policy
June 15, 2012
Thirty million people in the Southwest use the Colorado River's water for their material sustenance; millions more use the river itself for recreation and spiritual enjoyment. The river quenches our thirst, feeds our souls, and enlivens our senses.
We are not the only inhabitants using this river. Its waters and canyons provide a vibrant but deeply threatened ecosystem for untold numbers of plant and animal species. These competing demands make the Colorado River one of the most contested and controlled rivers on Earth. Over the last decade, humans have drained all of the river's water - all 5 trillion gallons - before it reaches the Sea of Cortez.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is the second-largest producer of hydropower in the United States. Last week, Reclamation Commissioner Michael Connor discussed regulatory and policy hurdles facing hydropower and how the Bureau of Reclamation is planning for a possible water crisis.
States in the Western U.S., and particularly in the Colorado River Basin, will face an unprecedented water supply crisis in the coming decades. Extended drought, climate change, and increasing population have created competition for water supplies. Water scarcity is further compounded by declining availability of fresh water in aquifers across the West based on historic use.
Note:ASU and Henkel have a long relationship on issues of sustainability, beginning with ASU’s collaboration with the Dial Corporation, now a Henkel company. More recently, Rob Melnick, executive dean of the Global Institute of Sustainability and the School of Sustainability, was an advisor to Henkel in the development of the company’s current sustainability strategy.
The Earth’s resources are finite – the faster we expand, the faster we use them up. This idea was central to the prescient 1972 study, “Limits to Growth,” commissioned by the Club of Rome.
Forty years later, it is now obvious that human consumption is exceeding these limits. Our population of more than seven billion people devours many resources more quickly than they can be renewed.
What will happen in another 40 years when the world’s population expands to a predicted nine billion people? Consumption and resource demand could grow faster than ever before. Will the people on this planet willingly forego a higher quality of life and the level of consumption that goes with it? Not likely.
In a BBC Nature article, entomologist and sustainability scientist Quentin Wheeler talks about the possibility of a new species of swimming cave cricket recently discovered in a remote Venezuelan tepui, a type of table-top mountain.
When ordering seafood, the options are many and so are some of the things you might consider in what you order. Is your fish healthy? Is it safe? Is it harvested responsibly?
Droughts are more than simply climate phenomena. They can have profound social, environmental and economic impacts, and can also be a major threat to food security throughout the world. Though much progress has been made in monitoring droughts and understanding their causes, there is still a strong need for better precision in both the monitoring and forecasting of droughts.
California has reason to be optimistic that the state's proposed high-speed rail project, due to begin construction next year, can prove to be a viable transportation alternative from environmental and sustainability standpoints.
ASU team FlashFood is developing a mobile-phone application to help establish networks that would connect restaurants, hotels, catering and banquet services with teams of people who would collect leftover food and transport it to community centers, churches, and other neighborhood gathering places where it would be distributed to people in need.
This year marked several significant milestones in leadership and administration for Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC). In a planned transition phased in over the past year and a half, Dave White assumes the role of Principal Investigator and Director. Dave has been with DCDC since its inception; first as senior project personnel in DCDC I, then as co-PI and Associate Director for DCDC II.
Thirty million people in the Southwest use the Colorado River's water for their material sustenance; millions more use the river itself for recreation and spiritual enjoyment. The river quenches our thirst, feeds our souls, and enlivens our senses.