TEI Updates
Preview of our Spring 2010 Series
7th Annual WRRC Conference
April 8, 2010
The 7th Annual Water Resources Research Center Conference at the University of Massachusetts Amherst will address the needs for water monitoring, assessment, and management of water resources in New England in the face of variability due to changes in climate, land use, population, and other environmental stressors.
Data Needs Workshop: Monitoring and Responding to Climate Change Impacts on Water Resources in New England, September 30, 2009
The Massachusetts Water Resources Research Center convened a September 30, 2009 workshop -- with the support of EPA, Mass DEP, TEI, and NEIWPCC -- to bring together leading experts, senior scientists and researchers from federal and state government, academia, NGOs, and other stakeholders to discuss data needs for monitoring and responding to climate change impacts on water resources in New England. In plenary sessions and breakout groups throughout the day, the 80 participants identified and discussed data gaps and monitoring needs, prediction needs, and synthesis needs to effectively manage water resources in the face of climatic change in New England. A summary report is under development and will be available at a future date. Some of the identified needs will be further explored at the upcoming April 2010 Water Resources Research Center Conference. For more information contact Water Center Director Paula Rees at wrrc@tei.umass.edu.
Call for Abstracts
International Conference on Green Remediation: Environment ~ Energy ~ Economics will be held June 15-17, 2010 in Amherst, Massachusetts. The conference will address the full range of environmental, energy and economic aspects of green and sustainable remediation, taking into account the energy requirements of treatment systems, air emissions, water use requirements and impacts on water resources, land and ecosystem use and impacts, energy use and renewables, material consumption, reuse, and waste generation.
Profiles in Faculty Research
A collection of faculty research highlights from 2009. If you wish to download this PDF file please note that there are two links below. One is for viewing on screen and the other, considerably larger file, is for printing.
Profiles in Faculty Research 2009 (Screen)
Profiles in Faculty Research 2009 (Print)
Environmental Research2008
David Reckhow, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, works to ensure the safety of drinking water supplies across the country. “I’m involved with a lot of aspects of water treatment […] the purification of what we call raw drinking waters,” Reckhow says. Water contamination comes in many forms and Reckhow’s laboratory work determines the most efficient ways to clean contaminated water.Organic compounds such as polysaccharides and proteins are harmless products of terrestrial and aquatic plants. But when they interact with disinfecting agents, they are converted to compounds that have deleterious effects. These disinfection byproducts are associated with cancer, particularly of the bladder. Reckhow’s group examines exactly what these harmful compounds are and how to control them. (
Microscopic organisms make up more than half the biomass on Earth, and Klaus Nüsslein, Associate Professor of Microbiology, is investigating how they work. “They own this planet. There is more biomass in microbes than there is in plants,” says Nüsslein. The hundreds of thousands of microbe species live and work together. It is near impossible to find one species living on its own. “They live together in the amount of a billion in [a gram of] soil. So how is that possible?” Nüsslein is focusing on three major areas of study to understand how microbes function in their various ecosystems, with emphasis on stressful environments. (
William Manning, Professor of Plant Pathology in the Department of Plant, Soil and Insect Sciences, is not only asking what we can do for nature, but what nature can do for us. For the past thirty years, Manning has been examining the interaction of greenhouse gases and plant matter. “I’m just a natural scientist who wants to know what’s going on out there,” he says. “What does it mean?” Right now, by looking at injury and absorption, Manning is trying to decipher which plants are the best to cleanse the air or act as pollution markers. “If Tree A is better at taking up CO2 than Tree B, let’s use tree A if we can. If Tree Z is better at taking up NO2 than Tree Y, then we should use Z, but those criteria are not used,” Manning says. “So I’m trying to convince people that trees should really do something for us other than just be attractive.” (
Scott Auerbach, Professor of Chemistry, uses computers to search for “green” alternatives to the use of petroleum and coal, the largest contributors to the carbon emissions causing the human component of global warming. “I think we’ve now learned that energy and environment are inseparable, because when you use energy, you impact the environment in some way,” says Auerbach, who is also an Adjunct Professor in Chemical Engineering. Much of Auerbach’s work has focused on alternative fuels and fuel cells. (
Timothy Randhir, Associate Professor in the Department of Natural Resources Conservation, works with the most important molecule known to earth- H2O. From the amoeba to ourselves, everything needs water, and watersheds are the source of it. Watersheds, as Randhir will tell you, are not only bodies of water, but also “any mass of land that drains into the point itself.” The sheer scope of watersheds has contributed to Randhir’s wide-ranging research interests, which include watershed science, climate change impacts, ecological economics, and water quality and policies. (