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Surroundings

Big outbreaks of waterborne disease get everyone’s attention, but Joan Rose says a decaying water treatment infrastructure combined with climate change may be causing even more illness. More frequent heavy rainfalls and other extreme weather events may overwhelm old water and sewer pipes. Intake points for drinking water may not be adequately shielded from sewage spills; monitoring of water sources is often inadequate.

Catherine Lindell works to restore abandoned pasturelands to forest in Costa Rica and investigates how the numbers and types of birds using restoration sites change as the forest regrows. She also educates local residents and schoolchildren about effective restoration strategies.

In a study of Arabidopsis genetics, Ian Dworkin and colleagues measured canalization, the ability of a genotype to maintain traits despite environmental changes. Plants that responded dramatically to environmental flux—growing substantially taller than parents, for example—tended to produce fewer flowers, showing the reproductive cost of genetic variation. The study suggested that the gene ERECTA may play a role in that variation.

Ocean phytoplankton perform about half the earth’s photosynthesis, form the basis of marine food webs, and store carbon. Elena Litchman and Christopher Klausmeier developed a model to show how climate change and other human activities might affect the ocean ecosystems. The model predicts altered distribution of the microscopic plants with decreases in efficiency of carbon sequestration and increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Growth in population and affluence will increase stress on the environment, and only significant reductions in humanity’s ecological intensity will compensate. Detrimental environmental impacts are greatest where the population is most affluent. Tom Dietz and colleagues found that to hold global impact constant, technological efficiency would need to be improved by about 2 percent per year to compensate for global increases in population and affluence.

Thomas Dietz, director, Environmental Science and Policy Program, 517-353-8763

Ian Dworkin, assistant professor of zoology, 517-432-6733

Christopher Klausmeier, assistant professor of plant biology, 269-671-4987

Catherine Lindell, associate professor of zoology, 517-884-1241

Elena Litchman, assistant professor of zoology, 269-671-2338

Joan Rose, Nowlin Chair in Water Research, 517-432-4412