The Nelson Institute Blog

The Water Resources Management (WRM) program committee met on November 3rd to discuss the proposed program design options and vote if they wanted to move forward with the options.

WRM 11-3-06, Program Redesign Discussion and Vote

Nelson Institute adjunct professor Jim Bennett has established an endowment at the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin to help pay for the restoration, monitoring, inventorying, and preservation of rare plant species in Wisconsin.

The James P. Bennett Rare Plant Preservation Fund will provide annual funding to organizations such as the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ Bureau of Endangered Resources for botanical preservation activities.

“Wisconsin is losing plant species as part of the global biodiversity crisis,” says Bennett, also an honorary fellow in the UW-Madison botany department. “More and more species are going extinct due to habitat loss or other human activities. Funding for inventorying, monitoring, preserving and/or restoring rare species in our state is dwindling, so help is needed in this area. There are groups and agencies that are concerned and able to carry out rare plant conservation, and I hope this fund will be used to help their work.”

“There are over 130 threatened and endangered plant species identified in Wisconsin and this fund will contribute to their protection for future generations,” says Charlie Luthin, executive director of the Natural Resources Foundation. Since its inception in 1986, the nonprofit organization has contributed more than $2 million to conservation projects throughout the state. It currently manages $1 million in assets as part of the Wisconsin Conservation Endowment.

The Nelson Institute Outreach Committee met on Friday, December 8th. Committee Chair, Lew Posekany, led a discussion on the three topics that emerged from the Doyle Cabinet Secretaries’ panel: 1. Reauthorization of the Stewardship Program, 2. Biofuels and Energy, 3. Non-point source pollution. Over the next several weeks, the Nelson Institute’s Director’s Office and Outreach Committee will be shaping a strategy to engage decision-makers on some or all of these issues. The meeting notes summary is available here: Outreach Committee Meeting Notes/Summary December 8

Businesses interact with ecosystems and ecosystem services in two important ways: they use services and they contribute
to ecosystem change. The MA discovered that two thirds of the ecosystem services it examined are being degraded or used unsustainably. This finding has serious ramifications for the world at large and will affect business and industry in three principal ways.

1. If current trends continue, ecosystem services that are freely available today will cease to be available or become more costly in the near future. Once internalized by primary industries, additional costs that result will be passed downstream to secondary and tertiary industries and will transform the operating environment of all businesses.
2. Loss of ecosystem services will also affect the framework conditions within which businesses operate, influencing customer preferences, stockholder expectations, regulatory regimes, governmental policies, employee well-being, and the availability of finance and insurance.
3. New business opportunities will emerge as demand grows for more efficient or different ways to use ecosystem services for mitigating impacts or to track or trade services.

Business cannot assume that there will be ample warning of a change in the availability of key services or that a company’s past responses to changes will be successful in the future. Ecosystems often change in abrupt, unpredictable ways. Most ecosystems are being altered by human actions in unprecedented ways. Consequently, it is difficult to predict the future state of an ecosystem or the availability of an ecosystem service. In addition, these uncertainties mean that past successes in ecosystem management may not apply to current or future conditions.

Read the full report, available here: Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Opportunities and Challenges for Business and Industry

(A collaborative series by David Zaks, Chad Monfreda, and Hassan Masum.)

You don’t miss it ’till it’s gone. That sums up the thinking behind ecosystem good and services, which is all about reconnecting an economic system that has forgotten its ecological roots.

That may mean putting a monetary value on ecosystem services. Indeed, a lot of people are trying to put a dollar figure on nature by asking questions like, “How much is a forest’s carbon sequestration worth?“. But even before broaching monetary valuation, we need to ask which services we care about, and how we should go about measuring them. In other words, the first thing we need to ask about is the biophysical basis of ecosystem services.

Fortunately, ecology is ready to help. Ecologists are still doing the esoteric studies they’re good at, but they’re increasingly using ecosystem services to frame and even direct their research. Ecosystem services as a legitimate research topic came of age in the 1990s with the kinds of pioneering research collected in places like Gretchen Daily’s seminal book, Nature’s Services.

More recently, the idea that we need to take better stock of the link between ecosystems and human well-being was the rationale for the biggest international ecological assessment ever. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (which is summarized nicely by GreenFacts) made a massive contribution to decision-makers, but, perhaps more importantly, created a common language to cut through complex problems. The MA divides ecosystem services into four types:

Provisioning services are the products people obtain from ecosystems, such as food, fuel, fiber, fresh water, and genetic resources.

Regulating services are the benefits people obtain from the regulation of ecosystem processes, including air quality maintenance, climate regulation, erosion control, regulation of human diseases, and water purification.

Cultural services are the non-material benefits people obtain from ecosystems through spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, reflection, recreation, and aesthetic experiences.

Supporting services are those that are necessary for the production of all other ecosystem services, such as primary production, production of oxygen, and soil formation.

So what do these services mean on the ground? (more…)

The Business and Environment Committee met last Friday, December 8, to continue discussions around a joint program between the Nelson Institute and the Business school.

Despite identifying some obstacles to such a program, the group maintained its excitement in the prospect of becoming a world leader in integrating the mobile themes and psp themes of natural resource management and business.

Please consult the meeting minutes for more information.

While some discussions are ongoing regarding the implementation of the new tuition remission policy, we continue to expect the policy to be implemented as currently articulated at the beginning of the Spring 2007 semester. It is widely expected that the new policy will have a negative impact on total number of supported graduate students; however the variety of funding mechanisms that Nelson Institute students find and create makes prediction of the actual impact very difficult. Indeed the actual cost of the policy change as percentage of the total costs of supporting a graduate student will vary significantly based on the details of funding mechanisms.

We are striving to track and document the impacts of the coming change as accurately as possible. To this end, I would appreciate it if you would send me (nice) notes that describe impacts as they occur. Unfortunately the Nelson Institute is not in a position to alleviate any added financial burden, but the ability to make clear and detailed statements about the impacts will allow us to engage more productively and strategically in discussions about the implementation at the campus level.

The National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology has awarded Assistant Professor Teri Balser (soil science/environmental studies) a CAREER Award. She will receive five years of support for her proposal, “Research and education approaches to integrating microbiology and ecosystem functioning in global change ecology.” The work will address issues in interdisciplinary science as well as explore the response of soil carbon to climate warming. (Read a news release about this project.)

PROPOSAL SUMMARY: Ecosystems worldwide are undergoing rapid change due to human activities. In order to protect and sustain altered ecosystems we need an understanding of the nature of the changes and how fast they are happening. This type of research inherently crosses traditional science discipline boundaries; knowledge of chemistry or ecology or physics alone will not allow adequate understanding. Students and faculty receiving disciplinary training also need to be taught to communicate across disciplines as part of scientific teams. The significance of this project is that it will address both an important scientific issue, and will also help to foster interdisciplinary research in global change ecology. The primary research goal of the project is to understand when or whether carbon sequestered in soil will act as a positive feedback to increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere and thus reinforce climate warming. Specifically, the research team will quantify the response of soil decomposers to climate change and measure CO2 output. The education goal is to support interdisciplinary training for ecologists interested in global change issues.

The broader significance of the project is its impact on interdisciplinary graduate student training and faculty development, as well as its potential importance for predicting ecosystem response to climate warming. Currently efforts to predict atmospheric CO2 do not include detailed treatment of the decomposer community. However, the response of the community to warming could act as an important control over release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The work here will substantially increase our understanding of that control.

Each year, the EPA’s National Network for Environmental Management Studies (NNEMS) program offers research projects developed and sponsored by EPA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. and in EPA’s regional offices throughout the U.S. The program is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. Opportunities exist for all levels, from freshmen through Ph.D. students. Recipients of NNEMS fellowships receive a stipend based on the student’s level of education and the duration and location of the project.

The application deadline is Monday, January 29, 2007.

For more detailed information, including links to the program catalog, the list of research projects, FAQs, and the application form, see the web site at

http://www.epa.gov/enviroed/NNEMS/

(more…)

Listed below are the Nelson Institute student fellowship, scholarship, and award recipients for the 2006-2007 academic year. For more information on Nelson Institute student awards for graduate students, check out our Funding and Fellowship web pages.

Nelson Institute and University Awards

University Prize Award Fellowship

• Steven Hall (Land Resources MS, advisor: Joy Zedler)

Advanced Opportunity Fellowships

• Sue Vang (Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development MS, advisor: Warren Porter)
• Amanda Cardenas (Land Resources MS, advisor: Arthur McEvoy)

Bunn Distinguished Graduate Fellowship

• Jeannette LeBoyer (Land Resources/Energy Analysis and Policy MS, advisor: Doug Reinemann)

Cottam and Loucks Distinguished Graduate Fellowships

• Ron Dolen (Land Resources MS, advisor: Pete Nowak) Loucks
• Katie Songer (Land Resources MS, advisor: Paul Zedler) Cottam
  

Doris Duke Conservation Fellowships

• Peter Boger (Land Resources MS, advisor: Nancy Mathews)
• Leif Brottem (Land Resources MS, advisor: Matt Turner)
• Ariana Hauck (Land Resources MS, advisor: Arthur McEvoy)
• Erin Heidtke LaFaive (Land Resources MS, advisor: Janet Silbernagel Balster)
• Andrew Stuhl (Land Resources MS, advisor: Nancy Langston)
• Katy Warner (Land Resources MS, advisor: Paul Zedler)

(more…)