Posts tagged environment
NCAR Air, Planet, People
Nov 18th
At the National Center for Atmospheric Research, they don’t forecast the weather. They get inside the weather, climate, and surrounding environment to understand it better. Collaborating with researchers all over the country and all over the world to study the thin layer of air that surrounds our planet and connects all of us to each other. They study the Sun, air chemistry, how the atmosphere interacts with the land and oceans, and how we change and are changed by weather and climate.
CU project: Degraded military lands to get ecological boost
Nov 15th
Some arid lands in the American West degraded by military exercises that date back to General George Patton’s Word War II maneuvers in the Mojave Desert should get a boost from an innovative research project led by the University of Colorado Boulder.
Headed up by CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Nichole Barger, the research team is focused on developing methods to restore biological soil crusts — microbial communities primarily concentrated on soil surfaces critical to decreasing erosion and increasing water retention and soil fertility. Such biological soil crusts, known as “biocrusts,” can cover up to 70 percent of the ground in some arid ecosystems and are dominated by cyanobacteria, lichens, mosses, fungi and bacteria, she said.
The project is aimed at restoring fragile habitats in desert areas that have been affected by the movement of U.S. military vehicles, including tanks, as well as high foot traffic, said Barger, a faculty member in CU-Boulder’s ecology and environmental biology department. The team has two U.S. Department of Defense study sites — Fort Bliss, which straddles southern Texas and New Mexico and is located in a hot desert environment, and the Dugway Proving Ground in northwest Utah, seated in a cool desert environment.
“Biocrusts often are associated with increased soil nutrients and water retention, but their most important task is to stabilize soil surfaces against wind and water erosion,” Barger said. “While most biocrusts are relatively resilient to wind and water erosion, they are highly susceptible to compressional forces like those generated by foot and vehicle traffic associated with ground-based military activities.”
At military installations like Fort Bliss, the Dugway Proving Ground and in the California/Arizona Maneuver Area in the Mojave Desert used by Patton’s troops, scars of past military activity still are evident, said Barger. “You can go to these places and see that the biocrusts in the old tank tracks, for example, are completely different than nearby biocrusts undisturbed by military activity.”
The project is being funded by a five-year, $2.3 million grant from the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, the U.S. Department of Defense environmental science and technology program that partners with the U.S. Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency. The research team also includes Jayne Belnap, Michael Duniway and Sasha Reed from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Biological Resources Division in Moab, Utah and Ferran Garcia-Pichel of Arizona State University in Tempe.
The first step of the program will be to grow biocrusts in laboratories at ASU, said Barger. “Our approach will be to expose laboratory biocrusts over time to a physiological ‘boot camp’ that includes increasing stressors like heat, light and dryness,” she said. “By doing that, we believe the biocrusts we eventually transplant into the study areas will have a higher probability of survival.”
The lab-grown biocrust products will be dried, bagged and transported to field test sites at each respective military installation and sprinkled on soil surfaces, said Barger.
Once in the field, the stress-adapted biocrusts developed in the lab nurseries for both hot desert and cool desert environments will be combined with other soil stabilization strategies, she said. The team, for example, will also experiment with adding polyacrylamide — a soil-stabilizing compound shown to increase soil porosity and reduce erosion, compaction, dustiness and water run-off — to the mix.
The researchers will evaluate the effectiveness of such soil “inoculations” and determine the optimum dosage for the test sites. Following the assisted recovery of the local biocrusts at Fort Bliss and the Dugway Proving Ground, the team will begin a series of seeding trials to develop strategies for native plant re-establishment, Barger said.
The last step of the project will involve a series of rainfall simulations and wind tunnel experiments combined with broad-scale soil erosion modeling to evaluate the influence of biocrust and native plant restoration in terms of precipitation and soil erosion.
While DOD military installations cover nearly 30 million acres — 70 percent of which are located in arid regions of the West — Barger said the research also could aid in the effective management of other federal lands. “We think our work on biocrusts also will be of interest to land managers at agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service,” Barger said.
The adaptation of biocrusts to extreme environments likely will come into play even more as climate change continues to heat and dry the West, she said. “We expect the drought in the Southwest to intensify as a result of climate change, and this project should tell us more about how adaptive these biocrusts are under shifting environmental conditions.”
The research project also has health implications, said Barger, since the disturbance of biocrusts can trigger the release of significant amounts of atmospheric dust, a dominant pollutant in some desert metropolitan areas. “There is a broad societal interest in stabilizing dryland soils in order to protect not only the functioning of local ecosystems but also human populations that reside in surrounding communities.”
“In terms of tackling an important environmental issue, this is by far the most exciting research project that I have been involved in,” said Barger, who has worked in Hawaii, Central America, South America, China and South Africa.
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Vote Obama – Government Oversight Critical By Scott Hatfield
Oct 31st
Vote Obama – Government Oversight of Corporate Abuse Critical to Make Americans Safe
By Scott Hatfield
By Scott Hatfield
With serious differences on corporate and government accountability and the concentration of wealth and power at the very top, folks should be feeling compelled to vote for Obama. Here in Boulder, most people will vote and vote democratic. However, there are some compelling reasons to vote for Obama if you are a Green, moderate Republican, unmotivated, or middle of the road.
With Ruth Bader Ginsburg planning to retire in 2015, her replacement by a far right corporatist would have serious consequences for decades on a wide variety of issues. Whether it is a woman’s right to choose, global warming, campaign finance, toxic waste, voter intimidation and suppression, public lands extraction, public health, or civil liberties, cementing right wing control would be a blow to the rights of all Americans. With the appointments of Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayer, the President has shown appropriate and reasonable judgment.
Government oversight and regulation of large powerful corporations plays a critical role in protecting the safety of the American people. For a wide variety of issues, the Republicans keep repeating that regulations are the problem. We need to act to prevent a corporate free for all. The top issue on regulations has been health care reform. Privatizing Medicare through a voucher system while removing oversight would raise premiums while unleashing corporate profits at the expense of the sick and wounded. Health care needs to be about healing people rather than absolving accountability for the powerful. The argument against Obamacare is the same as the argument against oversight of toxic material. With cancer overtaking heart disease as the nation’s top killer, the purpose of collusion between these disparate but connected industries reflects a self perpetuating cycle of disease as a top priority, not safety in the homeland. A lack of regard for corporate accountability pervades the Romney agenda across the board on environmental issues so important to Boulder and the quality of life everywhere be it water (#1 in CO), CO2, endangered species, public lands extraction, exploding chemical plants, or wilderness.
Most of the stated opposition to corporate accountability boils down to the economic burden on the rich and powerful corporate elite. This is especially glaring in the financial and economic sectors. For Romney, it is not a matter of the economy; it is a matter of whose economy. Republicans are all too happy to see larger and larger proportions of Americans living in poverty and despair. Again a complete lack of accountability is the mantra for the financial sector abuses that got us into this economic quagmire in the first place. Meaningful reform will not occur without oversight. Too many people have lost their homes, retirement funds, and jobs. The Wall Street giants have made their intentions clear. A regulatory regime on these bloated bankers is critical for an economy that provides a level playing field. We need a financial system capable of promoting the interests of a majority of Americans, not just those at the top. “Drill, baby, drill!’ will not get us out of the mess that Wall Street created, just ask the Frankenstorm Sandy.
Across the board, replacing any meaningful policy analysis with sound bites about burdensome regulations on large corporations will not solve our nation’s problems. If you want to get out of a hole, stop digging. While fighting multiple wars abroad under the guise of keeping the American people safe, the serious erosion of corporate responsibility at home on issues such as health care, toxic exposure and the environment, and the financial sector will do more to damage homeland safety than enemies abroad could ever hope for.
Scott Hatfield has been a member of the Central Committee of the Colorado Democratic Party and the Executive Committee of the Boulder Democratic Party since 1996.
