Eye on Earth

Unusual Species Spotted at IonE

2012-05-18T11:02:45Z

BY FRED ROSE

On Friday, May 4, IonE was happy to host a species seldom seen in an environmental center, a venture capitalist!

Paul Matteucci, General Partner at U.S. Venture Partners in Silicon Valley, stopped by to talk to the IonE community about venture capital, and specifically, Paul's interest in the global food market.

Venture capitialists are important players in the whole innovation ecosystem. Most people probably think of them as investing in some young geeks in Silicon Valley, but they operate in many markets and industries and supply an important source of capital for new businesses. Paul, a self-described foodie, has interest rethinking the global industrial food system. He says, "The demographic models point to a peaking of the world's population below 10 billion by 2050. Getting from here to there without massive starvation and environmental damage is a major challenge for governments and businesses. But it is also an enormous opportunity for entrepreneurs, with creative ideas, to build valuable companies that address this issue."

You can understand why he was at IonE. In addition to his common interest in the global food system, he wanted to talk to faculty and graduate students about the kinds of opportunities VCs look to for new investments. It's not a path many in this part of the University always think about as an outlet for their research, so Paul wanted to plant the seed in people's mind of these kinds of investments as a way to scale some of their ideas. He talked about the types of ideas venture capitalists like - for example businesses that have the opportunity to scale. Facebook has 900 million users globally. That's interesting to an investor. A social media network scalable to just your neighborhood, not so much.

Paul also said venture capital investments are all about failure. The well known metric is that only one in 10 investments makes money. Even if that one in 10 makes a LOT of money, a couple more may do OK, and the rest don't return their original investment. And that's just the ones they invest in. There are hundreds of other plans considered and rejected for every investment made. And if you do get funding and fail, that's OK. Entrepreneurs learn from their failures (although you can't fail ALL the time). All investments have some risk. That's why the federal government is a terrible VC (see the fuss about Solyndra). Failure doesn't look good in a political setting.

Stay tuned to hear more about some other activities Paul is working on, collecting innovative ideas from across the globe around the topic of feeding 10 billion people. If you would like to read more about presenting to venture capitalists, these lecture notes from a recent talk by a VC at Stanford are interesting (a little sarcastic but interesting).

Photo courtesy of U.S. Venture Partners

A Tale of Two Institutes

2012-05-16T11:49:56Z

It's not unusual for university faculty to have multiple affiliations. Less common is to have them 9,000 miles away from each other.

Institute on the Environment resident fellow Peter Reich, a Regents professor and Distinguished McKnight University professor in the University of Minnesota's Department of Forest Resources, recently added a joint affiliation as founding director of the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment (HIE) of the University of Western Sydney (yes, as in Sydney, Australia) to his list of titles. For Reich, the distance involved is worth every inch for the opportunity it offers to connect scientists around the globe in the search for knowledge of what we must do to help our planet survive and thrive in the face of human-induced change.

The Hawkesbury institute, which opened last month, is one of the world's most advanced research sites for studying how terrestrial ecosystems respond to environmental change. Reich is helping guide, with two full-time onsite co-directors, the new institute as it grows and develops. His primary role is to "stir the pot" science-wise and cultivate a culture of collaborative team science. He will also use his international connections to draw researchers to HIE for short-term collaboration, permanent employment and everything in between. Research taking place at HIE builds on, complements, and will link with work at University of Minnesota field stations such as Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve and Cloquet Forest Center focused on exploring how ecosystems respond to variations in the composition of the atmosphere.

The logistics of having two offices half a world away from each other may be a bit complicated, but Reich says Skype calls at all hours of night and day help bridge the distance. Moreover, benefits abound in the synergies and insights to be gained as the two institutes work together to understand and mitigate the impacts of global change.

"This is an ambitious, challenging goal," Reich said, "but a crucial one at a time in history when the largest challenges facing society involve learning how to adapt to a warming planet, while at the same time figuring out how to turn down the heat."

To learn more about HIE's research, check out this just-published BBC story and watch the short video here:

Fun With Frontiers

2012-05-10T15:54:45Z

The lilacs are blooming, dandelions are turning to fluff ... many Minnesotans are even stowing their snow shovels. Can summer be far behind?

If you're among those who like a little brain food along with the sun and fun, may I suggest Frontiers video archives? Over the past nine months, the Institute on the Environment hosted a bucketload of ~30-minute talks on a wide range of environmental topics, from Air Pollution to Zeolite. All were videotaped, which means you can watch them at your leisure.

Videos of all 22 presentations from our 2011-12 season are available at the links below. Enjoy! And be sure to check back in September for our fall lineup.

Frontiers on GM Crops

2012-05-02T13:07:51Z

BY EMILY DOMBECK

Genetically modified crops are attracting a lot of attention these days. They are a lightning rod for controversy, with people debating their possible health, economic and environmental repercussions. They are also touted as a panacea for global food insecurity. How does the average consumer parse the conflicting information and trade-offs to form an educated opinion? Enter the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a nonprofit, nongovernment consumer advocacy and education organization focused on food and nutrition. Gregory Jaffe, the director of the CSPI's Biotechnology Project, discussed these issues at the final Frontiers in the Environment lecture of the semester April 25.

The CSPI holds the position that GM crops currently grown and sold in the U.S. are safe to eat. But the organization is also quick to caution that each new product must be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Jaffe discussed the advantages and risks of GM crops, acknowledging that while GM crops can increase yields, reduce pesticide use and increase grower income, they can also cause allergies, harm nontarget species, and have negative impacts on biodiversity.

So are GM crops sustainable? Jaffe was frank during his discussion of the major issue surrounding GM crops: the development of insect and weed resistance. If trends continue as they have during the past several years, we could see massive amounts of insect and weed resistance emerge in GM crops. This could lead to declining crop yields, or even crop failures.

New technology is needed to stay ahead of the game. One innovation is "stacking" - introducing multiple herbicide tolerance or multiple pest resistance. This may be a good solution for herbicide resistant crops, but pests can still develop resistance using this method. According to Jaffe, a better solution for pest management is "refuge in a bag" seed.

Regulations require farmers to plant a certain amount of non-GM seed as "refuges" - habitat where pests are free of selection pressure to develop resistance. Refuge-in-a-bag seed has some non-GM seed mixed in, allowing for natural refuges to grow throughout GM fields. This takes the complicated issue of farmer compliance out of the equation and gives better hope for maintaining pest control ability in the long term.

With over 395 million acres of GM crops grown globally each year - 170 million of those in the U.S. - Jaffe made a strong case for a robust regulatory system, better government oversight, and continued watchdogging by the CSPI in order to protect GM technologies for future farmers. He also stressed the need for innovation in GM crop technology in order to make their use sustainable and environmentally sound.

Interested in learning more? Watch the video of Jaffe's talk here.

Photo courtesy of John Bollwitt via Flickr

Do It for the Polar Bears

2012-04-26T19:07:48Z

BY BETH MERCER-TAYLOR

Institute on the Environment communications director Todd Reubold hates nothing more than bad PowerPoint presentations. Realizing that not everyone shares his strong feelings, Reubold began his recent Frontiers in the Environment presentation about communicating science with something he knew his audience would care passionately about. Rising sea levels caused by global warming reduce sea ice needed by polar bears. The electricity required for the estimated 30,000,000 slide presentations given each day around the world results in about 94 million kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions each year. If presentations induce audiences to sleep and fail to inspire them to respond to global climate change, then the energy used only hurts those polar bears. The bottom line, according to Reubold, is that slide presentations had better make an impact.

Since people remember just 10 percent of what they hear but 65 percent of what they see AND hear, the ubiquity of the slide deck makes sense. The beautiful and arresting photos that are part of Reubold's slide deck - of a still-smoking remnant of Amazon rainforest, an oil derrick against a blue horizon or a group of children rapt at story hour - illustrate the power of visual communication. Take a look at Reubold's own slides in "Fight the Power(point)" or peruse through the Frontiers in the Environment archives, which let you see both past presenters and their slide decks.

An audience member at Reubold's Frontiers talk asked whether crafting a good presentation requires professional staff or years of training. That helps, Reubold said - but added with a laugh that simply attending to some basic principles would go a long way toward saving those bears. Easy stuff.

Never, ever, use clip art
Focus on what you want your audience to learn from each slide
Use one main point per slide
Solid white, black, dark gray - that's all that you need
Let some of your emotion in
Think of a presentation as being on stage and move around

Above all, Reubold says, just simplify.

To learn more, download Presentation Best Practices, Reubold's list of tips and additional resources.

Photo courtesy Ansgar Walk via Wikimedia Commons

Can We Make Plastics Sustainable?

2012-04-25T02:49:22Z

Plastics are a vital part of our lives, but they also are rife with adverse environmental impacts. What to do? In this fast-paced three-minute video, IonE and the Center for Sustainable Polymers explore how we can enjoy the benefits of plastics and keep our planet healthy, too.

Have another three minutes? Check out these Big Question videos exploring solutions to other top environmental issues of our time:

Big Question: Feast or Famine?
Big Question: What is Nature Worth?
Big Question: Is Earth Past the Tipping Point?

Terra Populus

2012-04-18T21:12:22Z

For a health project she was working on, University of Minnesota sociologist Anne Meier needed to know the average elevation, temperature and rainfall by district in Ghana, Tanzania and Malawi. Tracy Kugler, a research associate at the Minnesota Population Center, was happy to oblige. After about 20 hours of gathering, organizing, integrating, and processing data from a half-dozen separate databases, she was able to hand over Meier the information she needed.

And that, Kugler says, is why she's spending much of the rest of her time helping to get a massive new population and environment database known as Terra Populus - TerraPop for short - up and running. If TerraPop had been in place, Meier not only could have gathered her own data, she could have done it in well under an hour.

TerraPop is a massive initiative of the Minnesota Population Center, the Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota Libraries, and faculty from the College of Liberal Arts and College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, along with collaborators from Columbia University and the University of Michigan. Funded by an $8 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the project is gathering land cover, land use, climate and census data from around the world and across two centuries into a common database that researchers anywhere can use to answer questions about complex relationships between people and their environment.

Perhaps the biggest challenge TerraPop faces is figuring out how to get data from many different places, gathered at many different scales, at many different times, for many different parameters, and in many different formats, together in a way that provides meaningful information.

Initially, the database will bring together individual- and household-level from selected countries, aggregated population data, and climate, and land use and land cover data. At later stages, the TerraPop team plans to expand the database to include census data from additional countries, additional environmental data, and additional dimensions of human data, such as economic and health data. A prototype system is scheduled to be available for beta-testing in spring 2013, and should be available to the public around the end of 2013.

"We expect that the system will be valuable to researchers in multiple disciplines, including sociology, demography, climatology, geography, environmental sciences, epidemiology, as well as cross-disciplinary research communities concerned with human-environment interactions, such as environmental justice, landscape ecology, hazards, sustainability, and health, and natural resources management," Kugler says. "Our overall goal is to lower the data acquisition and processing barriers involved in studying questions of how people interact with the environment."

Like to learn more about TerraPop, join the development community or be part of the beta test group? Check out TerraPop's website at www.terrapop.org.

Listen to a description of the TerraPop project here:

Image courtesy of Carlaarena

A Pioneer for the Planet

2012-04-12T15:25:44Z

The Institute on the Environment had the privilege this week of welcoming geographic information systems pioneer Jack Dangermond as its first Distinguished Visiting Fellow. A 1968 graduate of the University of Minnesota's architecture program, Dangermond is co-founder and president of the mapping software giant Esri.

As part of his visit, Dangermond gave a public presentation on the role of mapping and geographic analysis in collaboration and decision making. In it, he underscored the importance of geospatial systems in shaping our planet's future.

"We're living in a time that is unparalleled in the human history of the world," he told his audience at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. "It could go multiple ways. It could burn out. We could just blink away. Or we could become more conscious and look at our footprints and change the world." Geospatial systems, Dangermond said, can make a big difference in which trajectory we take because it allows us to see patterns, relationships and processes and derive from raw data the knowledge we need to make planet-saving decisions.

Dangermond said he sees exciting times ahead as map-making takes advantage of mobile media, crowdsourcing, 3D capabilities and other emerging technologies and trends.

"Geospatial information well told," he said, "I think can change the world."

Like to learn more about Dangermond's visionary approach to mapping and life? Check out the video of his presentation here.

2 Billion More Coming to Dinner

2012-04-09T15:04:15Z

BY JOHN GORDON 

Whether the planet is ready for it or not, by 2050 approximately 9 billion people will be living on Earth.

How can we expect to support 9 billion, when today we struggle to feed 7 billion?

There's not an easy answer to that question. But a Discovery Grant from the Institute on the Environment has made it possible for the Science Museum of Minnesota to at least break it down into an entertaining 9-minute film. 

 The issue of food production is complicated by the fact that we already use about 40 percent of Earth's land surface for agriculture, and there simply isn't much available arable land left. Increasing global cropland area would require clearing natural ecosystems and destroying the valuable services they provide. 

 Formatted for spherical displays (such as the Science on a Sphere and Magic Planet systems), the new film, "2 Billion More Coming to Dinner," features data sets developed by IonE's Global Landscapes Initiative, and presents challenges and potential solutions for our hungry planet.

How is global cropland distributed, and exactly how much does each area produce? With ideal fertilization and irrigation, how much could each area produce? Which regions show the greatest gap between current and potential production, and what would it take to close that gap, maximizing food production? Spherical visualizations and a conversational narrative style address each of these questions in the film. 

" 2 Billion More Coming to Dinner" also considers what kinds of food we eat. To support the animals that feed us, a significant amount of cropland is devoted to producing animal feed instead of human food. A "food vs. feed" GLI data set is visualized as a global map of who produces crops mostly for direct consumption by people, and whose cropland is largely used for growing animal feed. Without offering a direct course of action, the film allows viewers to consider the data and how it might apply to their behavior.   

How can you become one of these viewers? You'll soon be able to find "2 Billion More Coming to Dinner" at one of the world's 80 Science on a Sphere installations. Also, the film and its associated data sets will soon be available for free download from the Science Museum of Minnesota at sciencebuzz.org/earth. It's a fun showcase of a small part of IonE and GLI's work, and we hope people enjoy it!   

A Design Concept Whose Time Has Come?

2012-04-05T16:23:04Z

Manufacturing is often perceived as a downward-spiraling one-way street: Choose raw materials with little or no consideration of the environmental or health impacts; use energy to make products from them; use more energy to distribute, market and use the products; then throw everything - whether packaging or product - away when it's outlasted its usefulness.

Wrong, Chuck Bennett told a full house at this week's Frontiers in the Environment event: "We have a system problem - the cradle-to-grave industrial paradigm."

Vice president of Earth and community care at Aveda, an international personal care products company, Bennett believes in - and pursues - a better way, based on the principles and practices made famous a decade ago by Michael Braungart and Bill McDonough in their book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things.

The Cradle to Cradle approach, Bennett told his audience, is built on three premises:

Waste = Food

Use Current Solar Energy

Celebrate Diversity

Waste = food, Bennett said, is a matter of mimicking nature, where the products of one activity become the inputs for another. In nature's economy, he said, materials are continuously recycled; Cradle to Cradle brings this thinking to the industrial economy as well.
Using current solar energy is a matter of tapping the sun's resources now rather than relying on the limited supplies of fossil fuels. Celebrating diversity - a concept Bennett said is central to the Aveda brand - means valuing the richness inherent in biological, cultural and conceptual systems.

"All of this translates to a bigger vision for the company," Bennett said.

Like to learn more? Check out the video of Bennett's talk, "Cradle-to-Cradle: A Design Concept Whose Time Has Come?" here.

Are We Getting Enough Crop per Drop?

2012-04-03T17:03:56Z

Congratulations to IonE Global Landscapes Initiative postdoctoral fellow Kate Brauman, who won a Best Early Career Poster award at the Planet Under Pressure meeting in London last week. Attended by thousands of environmental scientists, policy makers and executives from around the world, Planet Under Pressure has been called the most important global environmental science conference in recent years.

The poster, entitled "Water Wise: Are We Getting Enough Crop per Drop?", describes Kate's work characterizing differences in agricultural water use with respect to location, climate and crop. Judges appreciated the poster's strong story, great graphics and limited amount of text as well as the pivotal message: We have tremendous opportunities to make better use of our water resources as we work to meet the growing demands of a growing global population.

The prize-winning poster earned Kate a ribbon, a book, a subscription to a sustainability journal, and a handshake from astronaut Piers Sellers.

To learn more about Kate's great work, watch a presentation on the topic she gave in February as part of IonE's Frontiers in the Environment not-your-usual lecture series.

Managing Ecosystems in the Face of Change

2012-03-29T12:36:33Z

BY KRIS JOHNSON

Minnesota's climate is changing. Not only are we experiencing a strangely warm and early spring, but the evidence from historical climate data is mounting and unmistakable: average annual temperatures are rising, average precipitation is increasing and storms, floods and droughts are becoming more common. The story the data tell is one of a future Minnesota that is hotter, wetter and with more unpredictable and variable weather.

Yet the data can't tell us everything we might want to know about Minnesota 50 or 100 years from now. How will the changing climate affect our state's beloved lakes and rivers? Will pines, spruce and fir fill the forests of the north woods - or will deciduous trees or grasses, better adapted to a warmer world, replace them in the decades or centuries to come? And will Minnesota's species, both common and rare, stay within our borders or flee as their native habitats are subjected to a changing climate, invasive species or other environmental or human pressures?

These questions and more were the focus of a meeting at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources last month, as the agency works to develop a Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment for Minnesota's native habitat types. The DNR manages 5.5 million acres of land across the state and is charged with ensuring the support of healthy wildlife populations as well. This responsibility is difficult enough in a context of competing interests and shrinking budgets, but the challenge will only increase as the agency tries to prepare Minnesota's natural resources for a changing climate.

To cope with the challenge of managing ecosystems in the face of climate change, the DNR asked for help from the Boreal Forest and Community Resilience Project, a Discovery Grant project at the Institute on the Environment. This project, led by Regents professor Peter Reich, was launched in 2010 to help build social and ecological resilience - to enhance the capacity of human communities and ecosystems to cope with stressors and adapt to change.

One way the Boreal Forest Project helps build resilience is by working with various stakeholders in Minnesota and beyond to incorporate thinking about uncertainty and complexity into decision-making. With the DNR, we are developing "systems mapping" workshops to accomplish rapid vulnerability assessments for key habitats and ecosystems in the state. Systems mapping is used to understand complex systems by revealing critical relationships, highlighting major uncertainties and identifying potential opportunities for action. For the DNR vulnerability assessments, scientists and experts familiar with Minnesota's ecosystems will work together to distinguish among the major factors that influence ecosystems in our state and assess how climate change and other stressors might affect these systems in the future.

Efforts like this are critically useful when scientific and technical analyses alone can't provide us with the answers we need to make good decisions. Although current data and models cannot give concrete guidance about how to manage our state's ecosystems in a changing climate, the DNR stills needs to prepare for a future shaped by climate change. With the help of the Boreal Project and the systems mapping workshops, the DNR will harness the best available scientific expertise to guide public land management and ensure our state's ecosystems are as resilient as possible to climate change.

Photo by smarzinske via Creative Commons

Health and the Environment in Africa

2012-03-20T13:04:50Z

BY DOMINIC TRAVIS

The Albertine Rift, the most biodiverse region of Africa in terms of vertebrates with 1,762 recorded species, is threatened by human activity and thus is a focus for biodiversity conservation for Uganda and the world. Uganda's economic and social development is highly dependent on its rich biodiversity and natural resources, with more than 90 percent of the population directly depending on natural resources for their livelihood and income. According to the Uganda National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan, the gross economic output attributable to biodiversity use is approximately $546.6 million per year, while indirect benefits from ecosystem services and functions that support and maintain production are estimated to be another $200 million per year.

The Ecosystem Health Initiative of the University of Minnesota's College of Veterinary Medicine and the Institute on the Environment is working with an international consortium of partners to improve understanding of the relationship among the environment, biodiversity, and the health of humans, livestock and wildlife in two demonstration sites in the Albertine Rift region of western Uganda. Entitled "Global Health and the Environment in Africa," the project also involves Makerere University, Conservation and Ecosystem Health Alliance, Ugandan Wildlife Authority, University of New Hampshire, Emory University, Robert Koch Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

One area of focus is Queen Elizabeth National Park, a Biosphere Reserve and Ramsar site in western Uganda. QENP is an incredibly diverse, largely savanna ecosystem plagued by deadly anthrax outbreaks that threaten wildlife, domestic animals and humans. Yet almost zero resources have been dedicated to understanding the ecology, management and control of this important and frightening disease. Margaret Driciru, a veterinarian and Ugandan Wildlife Authority research warden in QENP, is enrolled in a joint PhD program with Makerere University and the University of Minnesota to investigate the ecology and management of anthrax in QENP. A research consortium meeting is being planned for 2012-13 to prioritize further research and outreach needs related to ecosystem health in the area.

The second research site is in Hoima District, just south of Budongo Forest Reserve. Twenty four percent of Uganda's surface area is forested, with 70 percent of that on private or communal land. Uganda has one of the highest annual deforestation rates in Africa (2.2% in 2000-2005, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, most of it consisting of unsustainable harvesting, conversion to agriculture use and settlement by an increasing population). This loss has increasingly led to wildlife ranging outside their natural home range into agricultural fields and more frequent human-wildlife conflict. Baboons, bush pigs, elephants, monkeys and chimpanzees have all been implicated in crop raiding. This increased conflict has harmed conservation efforts and increased the risk of disease transmission among wildlife, domestic animals and humans.

Of particular concern is the ranging of nonhuman primates because they share many diseases with humans. To date, no research has studied the interactions among habitat use, primate demography and disease risk in this area. Lawrence Mugisha, adjunct professor of ecosystem health in the U of M College of Veterinary Medicine and head of the Conservation and Ecosystem Health Alliance, is working with the district government to address these issues. Primatologists are now mapping the natural resources and censusing the chimpanzee population in the area.

University of Minnesota work on this initiative is led by Meggan Craft, assistant professor and disease ecologist in the College of Veterinary Medicine and resident fellow in IonE; Innocent Rwego, assistant professor of ecosystem health; Mugisha; Dominic Travis, associate professor of epidemiology; and Katey Pelican, assistant professor and lead of the ecosystem health initiative and IonE resident fellow.

Photo of team members from the Ugandan Wildlife Authority, Makerere University, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and University of Minnesota courtesy of Dominic Travis

Beyond the Booth

2012-03-19T15:20:00Z

BY JOEY REID

If you are anything like me you may have a dim view of politics. I learned that voting was the core of democracy in my junior high and high school civics classes. I think I was lied to. Voting rarely results in any significant interaction with candidates, and even less opportunity for directly influencing public policies. Even if you do interact with a candidate on the campaign trail, well, we've all seen how campaign promises turn out.

Beyond the relatively limited influence of your vote, democracy seems to be off limits to the common people, while lobbyists and giant corporations guide the policy that politicians sign into law. As scientists, we rarely have the money to lobby our facts to improve public policy. So how is our science ever going to be relevant if we have no voice in policy making? After all, most of us aren't interested in settling for a few hundred citations in an academic journal (if we're lucky). We got into this because we wanted to make a difference in the world, to improve the lives of thousands, millions or even billions of people.

It turns out I was lied to, or at least misled. While voting is an important component of democracy, it's really only a small piece. At the Minnesota State Capitol last week I learned that there are a variety of underutilized ways to have a voice in policymaking. As part of a group of highly motivated graduate students and postdocs in the Institute on the Environment's Boreas Leadership Program, I met with state representatives Kate Knuth (DFL-50B) and Denny McNamara (R-57B). The key to democracy is to be an active participant. That means building a relationship with your representatives, communicating with them on issues that are important to you, and organizing others to support your position. While that sounds like a lot of work, both representatives emphasized that just a few personal emails or phone calls from constituents can guide their policy positions. If I feel like my representatives haven't done a good job of representing my needs and values, it could just be that I haven't told them what my needs are.

Your legislators are a great place to start if you want to influence policy, but you are still a single voice in a sea. Luckily, there are many levels of government, many nongovernment organizations and many ways to make a real difference. Get creative. Smaller, local organizations like environmental advisory committees or local watershed districts are often easier to participate in, and work to aggregate the voices of many people to more effectively affect public policy.

I honestly feel empowered after this workshop. And it's not just me: I know I can empower others with this same information. To help empower you, I've made this handy guide to contributing to policy making.

An Idiot's Guide to Contributing to Policy Making
(organized from least to most effort)

   1.   Vote. You can vote for people whose policy positions align well with your own, and let them make all the decisions for you. Also, if you vote in primaries, there's a decent chance your representative will get in touch with you, giving you a more direct voice.

   2.   Call or email your representative. This is really pretty easy. It gets much easier when you use a form provided by some sort of campaign, but form letters don't have as much weight with your legislator. It takes slightly more work, but if you use your own words and describe why you think it's an important issue, you are more likely to influence your representative.

   3.   Organize. Organizing can take a lot of different forms, but the key is that you are increasing the impact of your message by increasing the number of people behind it. You can organize a letter-writing campaign (but see the caveats above), or you can organize a fundraiser for your representative. Nothing talks like money, even if you're just the funnel for it.

   4.   Build a professional relationship with your representative. All representatives have a regular meeting time, and all should be able to schedule a meeting with you if you can't make their standard open houses. As they get to know you, they'll listen more closely, and may even call on you for your particular expertise.

   5.   Testify. As a scientist, you're an expert in something. If it's relevant, you can testify to a legislative committee. Good science is always needed, you can make sure it's available by testifying.

   6.   Serve on a local advisory committee. These committees meet infrequently and can help shape local policies.

   7.   Run for office. Do you like walking door to door, talking to people about what they love and what their concerns are? We need scientists in elected office, so if this fits into the demands of your career, go for it! Unless you're wealthy and want to be less effective, you're probably best off running for a more local office. To paraphrase Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, local government must work, otherwise sewage flows over pot-holed roads; national government rarely has such direct consequences, and therefore can afford the luxury of being ineffective.

Joey Reid is a teaching assistant with IonE's Boreas Leadership Program. Boreas photo by Jillian Stein.

Conserving Tropical Forests From the Ground Up

2012-03-14T21:46:13Z

TEXT AND PHOTOS BY MOANA MCCLELLAN

Most people have never heard of a "tropical dry forest." Ecologist Jennifer Powers has spent over a decade studying this biome. She gave a great presentation last week at IonE's Frontiers in the Environment seminar series to spread the word.

Tropical dry forests differ from wet forests in that they have a pronounced dry season and many unique fauna and flora that have adapted to deal with the seasonality. Although the tropical dry forest biome used to account for a significant portion of forested lands in the tropics, it is now the most endangered terrestrial ecosystem. Dry forests are less well known because, during the upsurge in the tropical conservation movement, a big chunk of the forest that remained in tropical regions were wet forest. So conservationists focused in on vast expanses and passed over dry forests because the small, scraggly fragments hardly looked worth saving; why would you want to put effort and money into saving a puddle when you could save a lake?

Tropical dry forests have been regenerating, however, and Powers' research has provided a baseline understanding of dry forest succession in two of Costa Rica's national parks - Area de Conservación Guanacaste and Palo Verde. Conservation science is well known for its dismal tones, but what she found might make you smile: Tropical dry forests are regrowing. With fire management, dry forests regenerate within 40 to 50 years, although biodiversity recovery takes longer.

In addition to basic research, Powers has a palpable commitment to connecting science to communities within the province where these forests grow. The communities have a wealth of biological diversity in their backyard; investigators come from all over the world to conduct research within park boundaries. Powers is converting some of that research into ways to engage with park visitors. For example, she's organized a coloring book project that focuses on connections between communities and the Area de Conservación Guanacaste Park. Powers developed this project in collaboration with the parks educational staff. Now when elementary school children from local schools visit Area de Conservación Guanacaste, they are given a coloring book filled with ecologicalillustrations and descriptions. In the same vein, but for a different audience, Powers spearheaded a botanical identification pamphlet for visitors who want to learn the plant species within the park.

Jennifer Powers' philosophy with respect to research and outreach is that place-based investigators have an ethical responsibility to engage with the communities surrounding the areas in which they work. She summed it up succinctly as "think locally, act locally."

Moana McClellan is a Ph.D. student in plant biology and an interdisciplinary doctoral fellow with the Institute on the Environment