The CAP LTER Poster Symposium on January 13^th featured 23 posters with graduate and undergraduate student authors, which a panel judged during the Symposium. Congratulations to Melanie Banville and co-author Heather Bateman for their winning poster, Herpetofauna and microhabitat characteristics of urban and wildland reaches along the Salt River, Arizona. Runners-up were Brian Sovik, A spatial-temporal representation of land subsidence in the northwest Phoenix valley, Arizona and J. Mac Gifford and Paul Westerhoff, Making biofuel renewable: Recovering phosphorus from residual biomass

Copies of all symposium posters can be found on the CAP LTER website.

Quick riddle: what’s necessary, varied and sumptuous?  Answer: food!

If you’ve been overcome with questions about the origin of your daily vittles portions (or are slightly more than apathetic about the topic), you’re in luck.  From February 11-13, United Students for Fair Trade (USFT) and the Real Food Challenge (RFC) Southwest Regional Chapters are partnering to bring you a weekend full of fair trade and sustainable food activism.

The inexpensive conference will include workshops, lectures and panels about the intersection of food and sustainability.  The topics will include local produce, urban agriculture, grassroots organizing, fair trade, labor and immigration, access and poverty, and workers’ rights in the food system.  Speakers will vary from student leaders to professors, entrepreneurs, producers, and seasoned activists.  We’ve designed the conference to be all-inclusive.  Whether you want to take up gardening or discuss the implications of globalization on national food systems, we’ll provide a forum.

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The local ABC News affiliate interviewed CAP LTER scientists Tony Brazel and Darren Ruddell for a story on the impact of climate change on Arizona’s cities, deserts, and forests. Their comments focused on the exacerbation of the urban heat island and the impacts of this on human health and well-being.

The Fall 2010 edition of the Network News is now available online.

TEMPE, Ariz. - In 1986, Marc Reisner published "Cadillac Desert: The American West and its disappearing water," a foundational work about the long-term environmental costs of U.S. western state's water projects and land development. It sounded an alarm about the direction of the American West and how it was using its most precious resource. Now it all appears to becoming true.

Researchers applying modern scientific tools and mapping technologies, unavailable during Reisner's time, find his conclusions for the most part to be accurate and scientifically correct. As a result, current water practices are not sustainable and many dramatic initiatives will be needed to correct the current unsustainable path the West is on.

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TEMPE, Ariz. - Enormous uncertainty. These two words describe the condition of Phoenix's climate and water supply in the 21st century. Reservoirs have dipped to their lowest levels, continuous drought has plagued the state and forecasts for even warmer summers are predicted. Despite this uncertainty, professors at Arizona State University say there's no need to be fearful because positive impacts can be made.

ASU professors Patricia Gober and Craig Kirkwood working in conjunction with Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC), which specializes in decision making under uncertainty, assessed the climate's affect on water shortage in Phoenix. Their results were published in the Dec. 14, 2010 issue of the Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A special section in this PNAS issue focuses on what the 21st century climate in the Southwest will mean in terms of sustainability.

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Good news!  ASU is offering a brand new Professional Science Master’s (PSM) degree in Solar Energy Engineering and Commercialization.  This graduate degree offers advanced, interdisciplinary education in solar energy to students with backgrounds in science, technology, engineering or mathematics.  The objective is to enable graduate students to pursue careers in industry, government or the nonprofit sector that involve solar energy and its utilization within various social and political settings.

The PSM is a relatively new type of graduate program aimed at students interested in graduate studies, but who are not necessarily interested in a PhD or an MBA.  Such students strive for an integrated understanding of both technical and nontechnical aspects to their graduate education.  Students select from courses spanning a number of academic programs and schools.  Opportunities exist for engagement with the solar industry and/or government policymakers, including a trip to Washington DC to focus on policy issues affecting the solar industry.   Coursework leads to a culminating applied research project.

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CAP LTER will hold its Thirteenth Annual Poster Symposium and All Scientists Meeting on January 12-13, 2011 in the Arizona Ballroom of the Memorial Union on the Arizona State University Tempe campus. For a detailed agenda, please click here.

Mexico is one of the most biodiverse regions of our planet. In number of species, it currently ranks first in reptiles and amphibians, third in mammals, and fourth in plants.

To help protect this legacy, ecology experts from Mexico’s largest university met with ASU sustainability faculty and staff on Nov. 18-19 to collaboratively design a new international master’s degree in sustainability that will train the next generation of Mexican ecological practitioners and policymakers.

The two-day workshop is a key part of a collaboration between ASU’s School of Sustainability and the Institute of Ecology of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (IE-UNAM), one of Latin America’s most prominent university systems. It was co-organized by School of Sustainability faculty members Hallie Eakin, who also manages the project, and Arnim Wiek, one of the project’s principal investigators.

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Kristin K. Mayes, an Arizona Corporation Commissioner who has helped Arizona become a national model for energy innovation, has been chosen to head the new Program on Law and Sustainability at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.

Mayes will serve as Professor of Practice and Faculty Director of the new program, created in partnership with ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability, where Mayes will be Senior Sustainability Scientist.

“Kris Mayes is a major national innovator in developing new paradigms for how utility companies and utility regulators will need to operate in the coming decades,” said College of Law Dean Paul Schiff Berman. “Kris joins Dan Bodansky, hired last year, and together they immediately will catapult this new program to a position of international leadership in an area of law and policy that is crucial both to our nation's economic future and our planet’s long-term survival.”

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The Gila River Indian Community is a member community in the Sustainable Cities Network, a Global Institute of Sustainability project to help local governments tap into ASU research and expertise while sharing sustainability knowledge and best practices among peers. Speaking on behalf of the Gila River Indian Community are Joseph Manuel and Casey Turgeon.

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Natalie Fleming, a junior majoring in sustainability, is one of about 200 ASU students living in Sustainability House at Barrett (SHAB), the sustainable-living community at Barrett, the Honors College. Her push for the environment extends campuswide, however, as she organizes events and leads a team for the student-led Center for Student Sustainability Initiatives, which she helped found.

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 The Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research Project (CAP LTER) is hosting its Thirteenth Annual All Scientists Meeting (Poster Symposium) to discuss current research and promote future research on urban socio-ecological systems. It will be held in the Memorial Union at the Arizona State University Tempe campus on Wednesday, January 12 and Thursday, January 13, 2011. Thursday, January 13^th will be the date of the poster presentations.

We are particularly interested in posters that present interdisciplinary approaches to understanding urban systems and posters that represent university-community partnerships. We encourage our community partners, faculty, staff and students to participate by presenting posters and attending the symposium.

Please submit your abstract electronically by December 3, 2010 to Cindy Zisner. The abstract should be single-spaced, 12-point font size, no more than 250 words in length, and in Word or WordPerfect format (no pdfs please). Final posters will need to be provided electronically for the CAP LTER web site. Posters need not be submitted by the abstract deadline but should be submitted as close to the Symposium as possible. Posters often are sized 3 x 5 ft (h x w), but the primary space consideration will be that the final product fits on a 4 x 8 ft (h x w) tack board.

This year, poster presenters will be expected to make short, < 5 minute presentations to the symposium audience before their poster session commences. More details on this will be circulated in advance of the symposium.

We award prizes to the best student posters in the symposium. Indicate on your abstract if the lead author is a student. Please provide all of your authors' names and addresses so that these can be included in the program. For more information contact Marcia Nation.

Happy 'America Recycles Day' readers! Conveniently, this day happens to correlate with waste day of "No Impact" week. (http://noimpactproject.org/experiment/) This week everyone is strongly encouraged to take a magnifying glass to their every day practices and critically analyze if it's worth it or not. Basically, do you really need to accept that throw away cup every day at the coffee shop? Or could you slim down your waste contribution by mindfully toting a mug each day?

As part of the experiment, citizens are encouraged to document the waste they generated for the day. So, I snapped a quick photo of my waste footprint! Hopefully you will observe the dirty napkin, tooth picks and stir stick are all biodegradable. They still have an impact, but at least they recycle readily in my compost bin. The cup is of course reusable but the little red decorative plastic things that adorn my tooth picks? Fail! Luckily, this can be easily remidied if we apply a little pressure on the restaraunt and catering indisutries to abandon such tom foolery. Then I can almost get a perfect score on "America Recycles Day"!!!

Thirsty for more? Check out the radio interview with our very own Bonny Bentizin, Director of Sustainability Practices right here at ASU. http://sustainability.asu.edu/news/gios-news/no-impact-week-encourages-students-to-live-greener

By Jehnifer Niklas

"Great things are done by a series of small things brought together."

-- Vincent Van Gogh

Arizona State University kicked off its No Impact Week on Sunday, November 14. The eight-day initiative, sponsored by the Global Institute of Sustainability, encourages students on the Tempe campus to live greener through daily themes including: consumption, waste, transportation, food, energy, and water.

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Were you faced with the conundrum of purchasing ASU's new transit card this year? Since I now find myself working as a full-time Program Coordinator for ASU, I no longer can reap the benefits of the deeply discounted ASU U-Pass for students. As an employee, I receive a nifty little Platinum Pass for $390. For those of you unfamiliar with the pass, both the U-Pass and Platinum Pass allows you unlimited rides both on Valley Metro buses and METRO light rail. So is this pass really a bargain? Let’s bust out our calculation skills (or machine, in my case) and play along.

I know what you are thinking. "You have a car, don't you? Why bother!?" Yes, I do have a car. Do I like driving it every day? No! Is the weather currently a blistering 400 degrees outside? Yes. Ok, not really, but…it will be. I have about 35 work weeks left in the academic year and will use the card for weekends and evening activities too. If I were to take my car everywhere, I would use about a tank a week, which costs me about $35 to fill up. Because the Platinum Pass is prorated, the pass would cost me about $310 for the remaining 35 weeks I have to use it. This comes out to a whopping $8.86 per week! $310 verse $1225 ($915 in savings) is looking good now isn’t it? By taking full advantage of the academic year would yield you even bigger savings – at $390 for the pass that is $7.50 per week! For students, the U-Pass is $80 for nine months of unlimited riding; coming out to $2.22 per week! (I did not even factor in auto insurance savings…)

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Elisabeth Knight Larson: Water and Nitrogen in Designed Ecosystems: Biogeochemical and Economic Consequences, November 10^th, 8:30 am, Room L1-04, Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University at the Tempe Campus.  Abstract

Christofer Bang Jr.:  Effects of Urbanization on Arthropod Diversity, Community Structure and Trophic Dynamics,  November 15^th, 8:30 am, Room 481, Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University at the Tempe Campus.  Abstract

 H. Bobby Fokidis: From the Brain to the Barrio: Energy and Stress Interact to Facilitate the Urbanization of Sonoran Desert Birds, November 18^th, 8:45 am, Room 481, Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University at the Tempe Campus.  Abstract

Kristin Joan Gade: Plant Migration along Freeways In and Around an Arid Urban Area: Phoenix, Arizona, November 22^nd, 3:30 pm, Room 481, Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University at the Tempe Campus. Abstract

The week of October 11 several ASU employees, including myself had the amazing opportunity to attend the 2010 Association for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) Conference in Denver with other sustainability-forward representatives from universities all over the world.  There was a wonderful diversity in attendees ranging from students, faculty, Facilities Management to food service professionals and housing representatives.

Many members of our ASU community submitted abstracts about their various sustainability projects and were able to present at this prestigious conference.  Our very own Director of University Sustainability Practices, Bonny Bentzin presented multiple sessions about the status of ASU’s efforts. We also heard from two of our project developers and one of our program coordinators; Alex, Eric and Betty. They presented field reports about successes in waste diversion during the last two years of ASU Move-in and Move-out and a bike share pilot program that was unveiled at GIOS earlier this year in partnership with the Cannon Leadership Program.

The conference was packed with universities of all sorts sharing all types of sustainability ideas.  I heard a myriad of presentations ranging from implementing water bottle bans  to campus energy auditing. As it turns out, many unique ramifications surround all of these policy changes and then some. For instance, a possible consequence of a water bottle ban could be lost revenue for campus dining or even an increased consumption of soda, There were also multiple presentations about the success of on-campus stores that sell items collected at the end of the year to returning and incoming students in the fall. How cool would it be if ASU had a “reduce, reuse” program like that on campus??The conference, which was a zero-waste event, served all compostable items during lunches (including utensils), had preplanned sending their remaining food to homeless shelters, and offered great vegetarian meals.  A large reception was held for the attendees where members of the three Arizona Universities and other state schools, such as Rio Salado and Scottsdale Community College, sat together to network and collaborate. Many people from the different universities are already in partnership tackling and solving sustainability issues common for colleges and for Arizona.  I enjoyed meeting the students from U of A and NAU.  At NAU, students work on campus sustainability issues through a masters degree program, so the students I met were very specialized, informed, and motivated.

Everyone came away from the conference inspired, excited, proud of ASU, and probably a bit tired.  It was a great opportunity to expose everyone to new ideas relating to all aspects of our university and sustainability in general as it pertains to higher education.

By Beth Magerman

The city of Phoenix began accepting funding applications Tuesday from multi-family housing owners along a 10-mile stretch of the Phoenix light rail corridor. $25 million in grants are available under the Energize Phoenix program, a joint public-private program that seeks to provide energy efficiency measures for about 2,000 homes and more than 30 million square feet of commercial and industrial space.

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Riverine systems are altered by flooding and drought. CAP scientist John Sabo and colleagues have examined the impacts of these alterations on food-chain lengths. Their findings, published recently in Science Express, indicate that large-bodied fishes are particularly vulnerable during droughts, which in effect shorten the food chain. Sabo and colleagues also comment on the effects of land-use and climate change on riverine systems. More …