environmental science

This project investigates an innovative strategy for storing carbon dioxide in a way that potentially is both effective and scalable. This research explores the potential of Azolla, a fast-growing aquatic fern, to support long-term carbon storage in soils. Unique among plants for its ability to fertilize itself by fixing nitrogen, Azolla grows rapidly and could serve as a renewable source of organic material that improves soil health while drawing down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The project investigates how Azolla-based soil amendments can contribute to climate mitigation by storing carbon, while also examining how these amendments affect soil life, including plants, bacteria, and earthworms. By focusing on a nature-based solution with minimal input requirements, the research aligns with sustainability goals. Additionally, by potentially integrating nutrient recovery from sources such as wastewater, it also supports the principles of a circular economy. The activity will provide significant educational opportunities through a course-based undergraduate research experience, engaging nearly 120 undergraduate students, graduate students, and a postdoctoral fellow. This will strengthen the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics workforce and promote public engagement with climate and environmental science.

Land grabbing is known to hasten deforestation in the Amazon, and narcotrafficking is thought to promote land grabbing. Yet, region-wide analyses of impact impacts from both narcotrafficking and land grabbing are lacking. By compiling georeferenced databases of land grabbing and narcotrafficking indicators such as cocaine seizures, I will estimate the deforestation impacts of these factors. Models will also estimate how trafficking responds to suppression by including counter- trafficking activities as predictors, and thus anticipate forest impacts from drug policy shifts. Thus, this project connects local forest outcomes to national policies, and transnational threats to human communities. Narcotrafficking is an understudied factor in environmental degradation and human rightsviolations across the Amazon. But despite its transnational scope, and links to forest loss and extractivism, it remains understudied. By analyzing narcotrafficking as a driver of deforestation via land grabbing and thereby generating predictive models, my project will contribute to strengthening human and environmental security.

We propose to explore Azolla as a solution to present-day scalable carbon capture by linking it with the Nitro-Oxidation Process (NOP) for sequestration. While the NOP has been found to be effective at producing nanocelluloses for application ranging from soil amendments to water filters, its potential for stabilizing carbon has yet to be evaluated. Because the NOP separates carbon in cellulose from effluents that contain remaining elements, this process can enable efficient phosphorus (and other nutrient element) recycling. This dual potential for carbon storage and nutrient recovery, however, remains to be tested. Demonstrating maximal carbon capture rates, and the suitability of the NOP to both stabilize Azolla biomass and reuse nutrients will make this project competitive with a diverse suite of potential funders.

In nature, encounters between humans and wildlife correlate with greater viral burdens in wildlife and therefore with higher risk of new viral pathogens spilling over into human populations. Yet, the factors contributing to this risk remain poorly understood, especially among highly mobile, but tightly packed populations of animals, such as cave-dwelling bats. Using the Egyptian fruitbat as a study system, this project seeks to understand how factors such as access to food, overall animal health, and responses to immune challenges influence each other in the wild to control the degree of viral infection in populations experiencing variable exposure to humans. The project will use highly integrative approaches to illuminate the fundamental biology of disease risk and to enhance the capacity to predict risks of viral spillover from bats to other wildlife or to humans. The project will also have broader impact on education and training by implementing an innovative active-learning experience, called “From the Bat Cave – Integrative Disease Research for Undergraduates”, in which postdoctoral researchers will learn to apply integrative research and mentoring methods to involve cohorts of undergraduate students in research and peer-peer mentoring through GBatNet, a NSF-funded international network of bat research groups.

Bats play critical roles in ecosystems globally. However, key aspects of bat biology, from the causes and consequences of population declines to their ability to transmit viruses to people, remain poorly understood. This AccelNet project establishes the Global Union of Bat Diversity Networks (GBatNet) to fill key knowledge gaps and create an international structure to accelerate discoveries across disciplines and borders. The network of networks fosters new avenues for global research exchange through coordination of joint research, education, and outreach. GBatNet links 14 regional and global networks with a shared vision to address pressing questions in bat biology of direct relevance to ecosystem and human health.

Why are bats so likely to carry coronaviruses, yet seem little affected by them? Many studies have focused on their immune system, but there is much to learn about the cells viruses attack upon entry.

In support of RA Kristjan Mets. While scientific reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic has been swift, the risk of SARS-CoV-2 spilling back into native North American wildlife and feral domestic animals remains underexplored. Experimental infections of a variety of hosts, serological analyses of the cats in Wuhan, and cases of COVID-19 among tigers and lions in the Bronx Zoo, all have shown transmission back to wildlife and feral cats is highly probable. Tools are urgently needed to determine which of these animal populations are at greatest risk of establishing a native reservoir, and where the overlap with human populations is greatest. We propose to model the risk of spillover to animal populations and conversely the risk of future secondary spillover by combining models of molecular interaction between the virus and potential hosts, with multi- species Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) models. Complementing decades of experience in vertebrate genomics (Dávalos) with expertise in epidemiology (Meliker), and spatial dynamics of wildlife disease (Mets), ours is the ideal team to quickly generate and test the necessary models to avert this risk.

We assembled a group of socio-environmental scientists to analyze and model the natural and human factors that determine the extinction and resilience of insular vertebrate fauna and leverage this understanding into metrics for use in conservation assessments.

We propose to develop a cross-scale research program that focuses on the relationships between phylogenetic diversity, genetic diversity and functional diversity of a biologically and economically important taxonomic group; bats.

This training program responds to the challenges of new careers at the interface between science and decision making with an interdisciplinary set of new courses and a suite of activities united by the theme of “Scientific Training and Research to Inform DEcisions” (STRIDE).