From Stanford University: “Food forests and urban farms hold promise of addressing numerous problems at once”

From Stanford University

5.24.23
Elana Kimbrell
Natural Capital Project
elanak@stanford.edu

Stanford’s Natural Capital Project to present a new report to the San Antonio city council on May 25 about ways to strategically and equitably scale-up urban agriculture.

What if you could grow fresh food where it is most needed, cost-effectively reduce heat-related deaths, and create green space for the local community? What if you could also reduce flooding and help mitigate climate change? These questions and more are at the heart of a Report [below] on the many possibilities of urban agriculture that the Stanford-based Natural Capital Project (NatCap) is presenting this week to a San Antonio City Council subcommittee.

Food forests are a system of perennial crops – primarily fruit and nuts – planted in layers to mimic mature ecosystems from tree canopy to soil. Credit: Talia Trepte & Rob Jordan.

The report considered two forms of urban agriculture: food forests and urban farms. Food forests are a system of perennial crops – primarily fruit and nuts – planted in layers to mimic a mature ecosystem with plants of differing heights. They are intended to provide food, shade, a haven for pollinators and other wildlife, and to capture water in the landscape. Urban farms typically grow and sell annual mixed vegetable crops, while food forests are primarily perennial orchard crops and tend to be open-access public spaces where people can pick food for free.

A collaboration between NatCap, the Food Policy Council of San Antonio, and three San Antonio city departments (Innovation, Metro Health, and Sustainability), the report estimates the amount of food that could be produced by urban farms and food forests, as well as some of their additional benefits: urban cooling, carbon storage, flood retention, and green space. Anne Guerry, chief strategy officer and lead scientist at NatCap, explained, “Using our model, we took all the publicly owned natural areas in San Antonio and reimagined them from vacant or underutilized lots to farms and food forests. Then, we calculated the benefits that would be provided.”

Specifically, the team found that if all underutilized, publicly owned land in San Antonio were converted to food forests – as an upper limit on what’s possible – they could provide 192+ million pounds of food a year, worth $995 million and enough to feed nearly 314,000 households for a year. Food forests would also provide $3.5 million in urban cooling services per year (potentially saving ~600 lives per year), reduce flooding, increase carbon sequestration, and significantly increase access to green space. If all underutilized publicly owned land in San Antonio were converted to urban farms, they could provide 926 million pounds of food worth $1.17 billion, enough to feed 1.27 million households. Without careful management, farms might increase nutrient pollution to neighboring areas from compost runoff – which has negative effects on water quality and aquatic life – and potentially reduce green space access, though less so than many alternative development scenarios like buildings or parking lots.

Using San Antonio as the pilot and with funding from NASA’s Environmental Equity and Justice program, NatCap is developing an online tool that will allow urban planners without technical expertise to use NatCap’s InVEST models to explore how different development scenarios change the distribution of nature’s benefits to different groups of people.

Improving equity by linking supply and demand for food

Residents of low-income neighborhoods in San Antonio face a wide range of issues, including a greater risk of health problems such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease stemming from a lack of access to healthy foods. These neighborhoods can also be up to 20 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than surrounding areas, and two of the local counties have the highest risk from flash flooding in the state of Texas. The city of San Antonio has recognized that urban agriculture can offer some relief from all of these challenges and aims to expand it, including through this report’s findings.

Volunteers plant crops at Garcia Street Urban Farm, in San Antonio, Texas. (Image credit: Garcia Street Urban Farm)

“In a lot of places in America, urban and rural, people have to travel a long distance to reach supermarkets, to be able to access both food in general and also healthy food,” said Jess Silver, ecosystem services analyst with NatCap. “Part of the goal of this analysis was to really try and understand some of those food-related inequities across the city … to think about the potential production of urban agriculture and also the needs of the communities located around urban farms or urban food forests.”

Thus, the report focuses on urban agriculture in locations where fresh food is less accessible. Using information from the U.S. Census on use of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, the models identified several districts where the demand for local food production is highest – and thus may be good places to target investments in urban agriculture for the greatest impact. These districts also suffer disproportionately from heat, so food forests can offer significant cooling benefits as well.

Expanding on local successes

Planting trees at the Tamōx Talōm Community Food Forest. (Image credit: Mitch Hagney)

Mitch Hagney, who runs his own local produce business in San Antonio and is on the board of the Food Policy Council of San Antonio, has played a pivotal role in establishing the first food forests in the city, the Tamōx Talōm Community Food Forest (a partnership between the Food Policy Council of San Antonio, the city’s Office of Innovation, and Bexar County’s Parks and Recreation Department). Hagney has worked closely with the NatCap team throughout the past year.

“Our hope is the results from this report are able to galvanize action to expand urban agriculture in San Antonio; helping policymakers do things like increase tool access for would-be farmers or food foresters, use vacant lots as potential long leases for urban farms, and include food forests in land management practices for our parks department and public works department,” said Hagney. “Hopefully, examples of how urban agriculture can flourish in this city can be applicable all throughout the rest of the United States, so every city can have environmentally-friendly and equitable urban agriculture plans.”

The report recommends that San Antonio aim for a mix of urban farms and food forests, carefully consider where to locate them in order to support neighborhoods with greater food insecurity, and address potential downsides of urban farms by offering alternative public green space and reducing nutrient runoff by limiting compost use. The NatCap team hopes to continue working with San Antonio to further support their expansion of urban farms and food forests. More information about NatCap’s urban-focused projects can be found here.

Report

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Stanford University campus

Leland and Jane Stanford founded Stanford University to “promote the public welfare by exercising an influence on behalf of humanity and civilization.” Stanford opened its doors in 1891, and more than a century later, it remains dedicated to finding solutions to the great challenges of the day and to preparing our students for leadership in today’s complex world. Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus near Palo Alto. Since 1952, more than 54 Stanford faculty, staff, and alumni have won the Nobel Prize, including 19 current faculty members.

Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university located in Stanford, California. Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford is consistently ranked as among the most prestigious and top universities in the world by major education publications. It is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Leland Stanford was a U.S. senator and former governor of California who made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students on October 1, 1891, as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Stanford University struggled financially after the death of Leland Stanford in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley.

The university is organized around seven schools: three schools consisting of 40 academic departments at the undergraduate level as well as four professional schools that focus on graduate programs in law, medicine, education, and business. All schools are on the same campus. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. It has gained 126 NCAA team championships, and Stanford has won the NACDA Directors’ Cup for 24 consecutive years, beginning in 1994–1995. In addition, Stanford students and alumni have won 270 Olympic medals including 139 gold medals.

As of October 2020, 84 Nobel laureates, 28 Turing Award laureates, and eight Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. In addition, Stanford is particularly noted for its entrepreneurship and is one of the most successful universities in attracting funding for start-ups. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, roughly equivalent to the 7th largest economy in the world (as of 2020). Stanford is the alma mater of one president of the United States (Herbert Hoover), 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.

Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to Leland Stanford Jr, their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford’s previous Palo Alto farm.

Jane and Leland Stanford modeled their university after the great eastern universities, most specifically Cornell University. Stanford opened being called the “Cornell of the West” in 1891 due to faculty being former Cornell affiliates (either professors, alumni, or both) including its first president, David Starr Jordan, and second president, John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to have higher education be accessible, nonsectarian, and open to women as well as to men. Cornell is credited as one of the first American universities to adopt this radical departure from traditional education, and Stanford became an early adopter as well.

Despite being impacted by earthquakes in both 1906 and 1989, the campus was rebuilt each time. In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I. The Stanford Medical Center, completed in 1959, is a teaching hospital with over 800 beds. The DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.

DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory campus with world’s first x-ray laser- the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) unveiled in 2009.

Land

Most of Stanford is on an 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km^2) campus, one of the largest in the United States. It is located on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (30 km) northwest of San Jose. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped.

Stanford’s main campus includes a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley.

Non-central campus

Stanford currently operates in various locations outside of its central campus.

On the founding grant:

Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a 1,200-acre (490 ha) natural reserve south of the central campus owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is a facility west of the central campus operated by the university for the Department of Energy. It contains the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, 2 miles (3.2 km) on 426 acres (172 ha) of land. Golf course and a seasonal lake: The university also has its own golf course and a seasonal lake (Lake Lagunita, actually an irrigation reservoir), both home to the vulnerable California tiger salamander. As of 2012 Lake Lagunita was often dry and the university had no plans to artificially fill it.

Off the founding grant:

Hopkins Marine Station, in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892., in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892.
Study abroad locations: unlike typical study abroad programs, Stanford itself operates in several locations around the world; thus, each location has Stanford faculty-in-residence and staff in addition to students, creating a “mini-Stanford”.

Redwood City campus for many of the university’s administrative offices located in Redwood City, California, a few miles north of the main campus. In 2005, the university purchased a small, 35-acre (14 ha) campus in Midpoint Technology Park intended for staff offices; development was delayed by The Great Recession. In 2015 the university announced a development plan and the Redwood City campus opened in March 2019.

The Bass Center in Washington, DC provides a base, including housing, for the Stanford in Washington program for undergraduates. It includes a small art gallery open to the public.

China: Stanford Center at Peking University, housed in the Lee Jung Sen Building, is a small center for researchers and students in collaboration with Beijing University [北京大学](CN) (Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University(CN) (KIAA-PKU).

Administration and organization

Stanford is a private, non-profit university that is administered as a corporate trust governed by a privately appointed board of trustees with a maximum membership of 38. Trustees serve five-year terms (not more than two consecutive terms) and meet five times annually.[83] A new trustee is chosen by the current trustees by ballot. The Stanford trustees also oversee the Stanford Research Park, the Stanford Shopping Center, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University Medical Center, and many associated medical facilities (including the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital).

The board appoints a president to serve as the chief executive officer of the university, to prescribe the duties of professors and course of study, to manage financial and business affairs, and to appoint nine vice presidents. The provost is the chief academic and budget officer, to whom the deans of each of the seven schools report. Persis Drell became the 13th provost in February 2017.

As of 2018, the university was organized into seven academic schools. The schools of Humanities and Sciences (27 departments), Engineering (nine departments), and Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (four departments) have both graduate and undergraduate programs while the Schools of Law, Medicine, Education and Business have graduate programs only. The powers and authority of the faculty are vested in the Academic Council, which is made up of tenure and non-tenure line faculty, research faculty, senior fellows in some policy centers and institutes, the president of the university, and some other academic administrators, but most matters are handled by the Faculty Senate, made up of 55 elected representatives of the faculty.

The Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) is the student government for Stanford and all registered students are members. Its elected leadership consists of the Undergraduate Senate elected by the undergraduate students, the Graduate Student Council elected by the graduate students, and the President and Vice President elected as a ticket by the entire student body.

Stanford is the beneficiary of a special clause in the California Constitution, which explicitly exempts Stanford property from taxation so long as the property is used for educational purposes.

Endowment and donations

The university’s endowment, managed by the Stanford Management Company, was valued at $27.7 billion as of August 31, 2019. Payouts from the Stanford endowment covered approximately 21.8% of university expenses in the 2019 fiscal year. In the 2018 NACUBO-TIAA survey of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, only Harvard University, the University of Texas System, and Yale University had larger endowments than Stanford.

In 2006, President John L. Hennessy launched a five-year campaign called the Stanford Challenge, which reached its $4.3 billion fundraising goal in 2009, two years ahead of time, but continued fundraising for the duration of the campaign. It concluded on December 31, 2011, having raised a total of $6.23 billion and breaking the previous campaign fundraising record of $3.88 billion held by Yale. Specifically, the campaign raised $253.7 million for undergraduate financial aid, as well as $2.33 billion for its initiative in “Seeking Solutions” to global problems, $1.61 billion for “Educating Leaders” by improving K-12 education, and $2.11 billion for “Foundation of Excellence” aimed at providing academic support for Stanford students and faculty. Funds supported 366 new fellowships for graduate students, 139 new endowed chairs for faculty, and 38 new or renovated buildings. The new funding also enabled the construction of a facility for stem cell research; a new campus for the business school; an expansion of the law school; a new Engineering Quad; a new art and art history building; an on-campus concert hall; a new art museum; and a planned expansion of the medical school, among other things. In 2012, the university raised $1.035 billion, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Research centers and institutes

DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Stanford Research Institute, a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.
Hoover Institution, a conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government.
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, a multidisciplinary design school in cooperation with the Hasso Plattner Institute of University of Potsdam [Universität Potsdam](DE) that integrates product design, engineering, and business management education).
Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, which grew out of and still contains the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project.
John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists
Center for Ocean Solutions
Together with UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, Stanford is part of the Biohub, a new medical science research center founded in 2016 by a $600 million commitment from Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and pediatrician Priscilla Chan.

Discoveries and innovation

Natural sciences

Biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) – Arthur Kornberg synthesized DNA material and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his work at Stanford.
First Transgenic organism – Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetic engineering. Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including human growth hormone and hepatitis B vaccine.
Laser – Arthur Leonard Schawlow shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work on lasers.
Nuclear magnetic resonance – Felix Bloch developed new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements, which are the underlying principles of the MRI.

Computer and applied sciences

ARPANET – Stanford Research Institute, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four original ARPANET nodes.

Internet—Stanford was the site where the original design of the Internet was undertaken. Vint Cerf led a research group to elaborate the design of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) that he originally co-created with Robert E. Kahn (Bob Kahn) in 1973 and which formed the basis for the architecture of the Internet.

Frequency modulation synthesis – John Chowning of the Music department invented the FM music synthesis algorithm in 1967, and Stanford later licensed it to Yamaha Corporation.

Google – Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford. They were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP’s goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library” and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.

Klystron tube – invented by the brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian at Stanford. Their prototype was completed and demonstrated successfully on August 30, 1937. Upon publication in 1939, news of the klystron immediately influenced the work of U.S. and UK researchers working on radar equipment.

RISC – ARPA funded VLSI project of microprocessor design. Stanford and University of California- Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. The Stanford MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley RISC gave its name to the entire concept, commercialized as the SPARC. Another success from this era were IBM’s efforts that eventually led to the IBM POWER instruction set architecture, PowerPC, and Power ISA. As these projects matured, a wide variety of similar designs flourished in the late 1980s and especially the early 1990s, representing a major force in the Unix workstation market as well as embedded processors in laser printers, routers and similar products.
SUN workstation – Andy Bechtolsheim designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation, which led to Sun Microsystems.

Businesses and entrepreneurship

Stanford is one of the most successful universities in creating companies and licensing its inventions to existing companies; it is often held up as a model for technology transfer. Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing is responsible for commercializing university research, intellectual property, and university-developed projects.

The university is described as having a strong venture culture in which students are encouraged, and often funded, to launch their own companies.

Companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world.

Some companies closely associated with Stanford and their connections include:

Hewlett-Packard, 1939, co-founders William R. Hewlett (B.S, PhD) and David Packard (M.S).
Silicon Graphics, 1981, co-founders James H. Clark (Associate Professor) and several of his grad students.
Sun Microsystems, 1982, co-founders Vinod Khosla (M.B.A), Andy Bechtolsheim (PhD) and Scott McNealy (M.B.A).
Cisco, 1984, founders Leonard Bosack (M.S) and Sandy Lerner (M.S) who were in charge of Stanford Computer Science and Graduate School of Business computer operations groups respectively when the hardware was developed.[163]
Yahoo!, 1994, co-founders Jerry Yang (B.S, M.S) and David Filo (M.S).
Google, 1998, co-founders Larry Page (M.S) and Sergey Brin (M.S).
LinkedIn, 2002, co-founders Reid Hoffman (B.S), Konstantin Guericke (B.S, M.S), Eric Lee (B.S), and Alan Liu (B.S).
Instagram, 2010, co-founders Kevin Systrom (B.S) and Mike Krieger (B.S).
Snapchat, 2011, co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (B.S).
Coursera, 2012, co-founders Andrew Ng (Associate Professor) and Daphne Koller (Professor, PhD).

Student body

Stanford enrolled 6,996 undergraduate and 10,253 graduate students as of the 2019–2020 school year. Women comprised 50.4% of undergraduates and 41.5% of graduate students. In the same academic year, the freshman retention rate was 99%.

Stanford awarded 1,819 undergraduate degrees, 2,393 master’s degrees, 770 doctoral degrees, and 3270 professional degrees in the 2018–2019 school year. The four-year graduation rate for the class of 2017 cohort was 72.9%, and the six-year rate was 94.4%. The relatively low four-year graduation rate is a function of the university’s coterminal degree (or “coterm”) program, which allows students to earn a master’s degree as a 1-to-2-year extension of their undergraduate program.

As of 2010, fifteen percent of undergraduates were first-generation students.

Athletics

As of 2016 Stanford had 16 male varsity sports and 20 female varsity sports, 19 club sports and about 27 intramural sports. In 1930, following a unanimous vote by the Executive Committee for the Associated Students, the athletic department adopted the mascot “Indian.” The Indian symbol and name were dropped by President Richard Lyman in 1972, after objections from Native American students and a vote by the student senate. The sports teams are now officially referred to as the “Stanford Cardinal,” referring to the deep red color, not the cardinal bird. Stanford is a member of the Pac-12 Conference in most sports, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in several other sports, and the America East Conference in field hockey with the participation in the inter-collegiate NCAA’s Division I FBS.

Its traditional sports rival is the University of California, Berkeley, the neighbor to the north in the East Bay. The winner of the annual “Big Game” between the Cal and Cardinal football teams gains custody of the Stanford Axe.

Stanford has had at least one NCAA team champion every year since the 1976–77 school year and has earned 126 NCAA national team titles since its establishment, the most among universities, and Stanford has won 522 individual national championships, the most by any university. Stanford has won the award for the top-ranked Division 1 athletic program—the NACDA Directors’ Cup, formerly known as the Sears Cup—annually for the past twenty-four straight years. Stanford athletes have won medals in every Olympic Games since 1912, winning 270 Olympic medals total, 139 of them gold. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, and 2016 Summer Olympics, Stanford won more Olympic medals than any other university in the United States. Stanford athletes won 16 medals at the 2012 Summer Olympics (12 gold, two silver and two bronze), and 27 medals at the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Traditions

The unofficial motto of Stanford, selected by President Jordan, is Die Luft der Freiheit weht. Translated from the German language, this quotation from Ulrich von Hutten means, “The wind of freedom blows.” The motto was controversial during World War I, when anything in German was suspect; at that time the university disavowed that this motto was official.
Hail, Stanford, Hail! is the Stanford Hymn sometimes sung at ceremonies or adapted by the various University singing groups. It was written in 1892 by mechanical engineering professor Albert W. Smith and his wife, Mary Roberts Smith (in 1896 she earned the first Stanford doctorate in Economics and later became associate professor of Sociology), but was not officially adopted until after a performance on campus in March 1902 by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
“Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman”: Stanford does not award honorary degrees, but in 1953 the degree of “Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman” was created to recognize individuals who give rare and extraordinary service to the University. Technically, this degree is awarded by the Stanford Associates, a voluntary group that is part of the university’s alumni association. As Stanford’s highest honor, it is not conferred at prescribed intervals, but only when appropriate to recognize extraordinary service. Recipients include Herbert Hoover, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Lucile Packard, and John Gardner.
Big Game events: The events in the week leading up to the Big Game vs. UC Berkeley, including Gaieties (a musical written, composed, produced, and performed by the students of Ram’s Head Theatrical Society).
“Viennese Ball”: a formal ball with waltzes that was initially started in the 1970s by students returning from the now-closed Stanford in Vienna overseas program. It is now open to all students.
“Full Moon on the Quad”: An annual event at Main Quad, where students gather to kiss one another starting at midnight. Typically organized by the Junior class cabinet, the festivities include live entertainment, such as music and dance performances.
“Band Run”: An annual festivity at the beginning of the school year, where the band picks up freshmen from dorms across campus while stopping to perform at each location, culminating in a finale performance at Main Quad.
“Mausoleum Party”: An annual Halloween Party at the Stanford Mausoleum, the final resting place of Leland Stanford Jr. and his parents. A 20-year tradition, the “Mausoleum Party” was on hiatus from 2002 to 2005 due to a lack of funding, but was revived in 2006. In 2008, it was hosted in Old Union rather than at the actual Mausoleum, because rain prohibited generators from being rented. In 2009, after fundraising efforts by the Junior Class Presidents and the ASSU Executive, the event was able to return to the Mausoleum despite facing budget cuts earlier in the year.
Former campus traditions include the “Big Game bonfire” on Lake Lagunita (a seasonal lake usually dry in the fall), which was formally ended in 1997 because of the presence of endangered salamanders in the lake bed.

Award laureates and scholars

Stanford’s current community of scholars includes:

19 Nobel Prize laureates (as of October 2020, 85 affiliates in total)
171 members of the National Academy of Sciences
109 members of National Academy of Engineering
76 members of National Academy of Medicine
288 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
19 recipients of the National Medal of Science
1 recipient of the National Medal of Technology
4 recipients of the National Humanities Medal
49 members of American Philosophical Society
56 fellows of the American Physics Society (since 1995)
4 Pulitzer Prize winners
31 MacArthur Fellows
4 Wolf Foundation Prize winners
2 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award winners
14 AAAI fellows
2 Presidential Medal of Freedom winners

From Rutgers University: “Rutgers Agrivoltaics Program Partners with NJBPU in Dual-Use Solar Energy Pilot Program”

Our Great Seal.

From Rutgers University

5.22.23

Photo credit: agrarheute.com

The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (NJBPU) and the Rutgers Agrivoltaics Program (RAP) have entered an agreement to develop and implement a Dual-Use Solar Energy Pilot Program.

The pilot program, which was announced on May 1 and will last for three years, is designed to demonstrate and study the compatibility of agricultural or horticultural production with solar photovoltaic infrastructure on the same land (called agrivoltaics or dual-use solar).

RAP is investigating the scientific merit of this emerging technology to be installed at the Rutgers Animal Farm in New Brunswick, Rutgers Agricultural Research and Extension Center in Bridgeton, and the Clifford E. & Melda C. Snyder Research and Extension Farm in Pittstown.

The team will provide public research and technical assistance through the Rutgers EcoComplex “Clean Energy Innovation Center,” Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Rutgers Cooperative Extension and other applicable schools and units within the university.

New Jersey’s Dual-Use Solar Energy Pilot Program will allow for the installation and operation of up to 200 Megawatts of direct current (MWdc) of solar electric capacity over three years, extendable by NJBPU to up to 300 MWdc over five years. Individual solar projects would be limited to 10 MWdc. The pilot program and the results from its associated research requirements will inform a permanent program that includes standards for construction and operation of dual-use solar energy projects.

The pilot program will provide incentives to solar electric generation facilities, located on unpreserved farmland, which plan to maintain the land’s active agricultural or horticultural use.

Agrivoltaics can provide farmers with an additional stream of revenue, assisting with farm financial viability by enabling continued agricultural or horticultural production of land while also increasing the statewide production of clean energy.

RAP, a multidisciplinary team of 15 Rutgers personnel, faculty and Rutgers Cooperative Extension agents, is investigating this emerging agrivoltaics technology, which has the potential to keep farmland productive and produce clean energy.

Margaret Brennan-Tonetta, senior associate director of Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station (NJAES) and director of the Office of Resource and Economic Development, said, “Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station has made a large commitment to investigate the opportunities for dual-use Solar by installing agrivoltaic R&D systems at three of our research farms. By working closely with NJBPU and the New Jersey Department of Agriculture, I am confident that we can utilize this new technology to not only generate clean energy, but also improve farm viability and sustainability.”

Photo credit: jackssolargarden.com

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey, is a leading national research university and the state’s preeminent, comprehensive public institution of higher education. Rutgers is dedicated to teaching that meets the highest standards of excellence; to conducting research that breaks new ground; and to providing services, solutions, and clinical care that help individuals and the local, national, and global communities where they live.

Founded in 1766, Rutgers teaches across the full educational spectrum: preschool to precollege; undergraduate to graduate; postdoctoral fellowships to residencies; and continuing education for professional and personal advancement.

Rutgers University is a public land-grant research university based in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen’s College, and today it is the eighth-oldest college in the United States, the second-oldest in New Jersey (after Princeton University), and one of the nine U.S. colonial colleges that were chartered before the American War of Independence. In 1825, Queen’s College was renamed Rutgers College in honor of Colonel Henry Rutgers, whose substantial gift to the school had stabilized its finances during a period of uncertainty. For most of its existence, Rutgers was a private liberal arts college but it has evolved into a coeducational public research university after being designated The State University of New Jersey by the New Jersey Legislature via laws enacted in 1945 and 1956.

Rutgers today has three distinct campuses, located in New Brunswick (including grounds in adjacent Piscataway), Newark, and Camden. The university has additional facilities elsewhere in the state, including oceanographic research facilities at the New Jersey shore. Rutgers is also a land-grant university, a sea-grant university, and the largest university in the state. Instruction is offered by 9,000 faculty members in 175 academic departments to over 45,000 undergraduate students and more than 20,000 graduate and professional students. The university is accredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools and is a member of the Big Ten Academic Alliance, the Association of American Universities and the Universities Research Association. Over the years, Rutgers has been considered a Public Ivy.

Research

Rutgers is home to the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science, also known as RUCCS. This research center hosts researchers in psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, electrical engineering, and anthropology.

It was at Rutgers that Selman Waksman (1888–1973) discovered several antibiotics, including actinomycin, clavacin, streptothricin, grisein, neomycin, fradicin, candicidin, candidin, and others. Waksman, along with graduate student Albert Schatz (1920–2005), discovered streptomycin—a versatile antibiotic that was to be the first applied to cure tuberculosis. For this discovery, Waksman received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1952.

Rutgers developed water-soluble sustained release polymers, tetraploids, robotic hands, artificial bovine insemination, and the ceramic tiles for the heat shield on the Space Shuttle. In health related field, Rutgers has the Environmental & Occupational Health Science Institute (EOHSI).

Rutgers is also home to the RCSB Protein Data bank, “…an information portal to Biological Macromolecular Structures’ cohosted with the San Diego Supercomputer Center. This database is the authoritative research tool for bioinformaticists using protein primary, secondary and tertiary structures worldwide….”

Rutgers is home to the Rutgers Cooperative Research & Extension office, which is run by the Agricultural and Experiment Station with the support of local government. The institution provides research & education to the local farming and agro industrial community in 19 of the 21 counties of the state and educational outreach programs offered through the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station Office of Continuing Professional Education.

Rutgers University Cell and DNA Repository (RUCDR) is the largest university based repository in the world and has received awards worth more than $57.8 million from the National Institutes of Health. One will fund genetic studies of mental disorders and the other will support investigations into the causes of digestive, liver and kidney diseases, and diabetes. RUCDR activities will enable gene discovery leading to diagnoses, treatments and, eventually, cures for these diseases. RUCDR assists researchers throughout the world by providing the highest quality biomaterials, technical consultation, and logistical support.

Rutgers–Camden is home to the nation’s PhD granting Department of Childhood Studies. This department, in conjunction with the Center for Children and Childhood Studies, also on the Camden campus, conducts interdisciplinary research which combines methodologies and research practices of sociology, psychology, literature, anthropology and other disciplines into the study of childhoods internationally.

Rutgers is home to several National Science Foundation IGERT fellowships that support interdisciplinary scientific research at the graduate-level. Highly selective fellowships are available in the following areas: Perceptual Science, Stem Cell Science and Engineering, Nanotechnology for Clean Energy, Renewable and Sustainable Fuels Solutions, and Nanopharmaceutical Engineering.

Rutgers also maintains the Office of Research Alliances that focuses on working with companies to increase engagement with the university’s faculty members, staff and extensive resources on the four campuses.

As a ’67 graduate of University College, second in my class, I am proud to be a member of

Alpha Sigma Lamda, National Honor Society of non-tradional students.

From “Science Magazine” : “Unmixed blessing”

From “Science Magazine”

5.18.23
Erik Stokstad

Scientists hope to alter cow pea seedlings so the crop can reproduce clonally. Hy‑Gain .

Game-changer scientists are genetically engineering crops to clone themselves.

Researchers are closing in on the long-sought goal of creating high-yielding hybrid crops that can be propagated indefinitely without sex.

In early summer, unusual pollinators swoop over rice fields in Texas and Arkansas. Small, nimble helicopters fly low and steady so their rotors blow pollen from one row of plants to another. The flights help RiceTec, a plant breeding company, produce seed for high-yielding, robust varieties of rice grown across the southern United States. It’s an expensive and complicated way to create seed.

But the effort is worthwhile because the seeds sprout into plants with a mysterious robustness and resilience. The phenomenon, called “hybrid vigor”, comes from crossing two strains of inbred parents. Why hybrids are superior to normal plants is not clear, but one long-standing hypothesis is that favorable versions of genes from one parent dominate poor-performing, recessive genes from the other.

The development of hybrid varieties has boosted the yield of maize, sorghum, and other crops by up to 50% and has resulted in other valuable traits, such as better drought tolerance. But the method is only feasible in some species; there’s no practical way to produce hybrid wheat or soybeans, for example. And when it works, it’s extremely labor intensive.

In rice, seed companies must first develop a strain of plants that can’t self-pollinate. Then come the helicopters, which sweep in pollen from a second strain. The process has to be repeated for each new batch of seed to avoid the reshuffling of genes and loss of favorable traits that happens during ordinary sexual reproduction. “It’s a very imperfect system,” says José Ré, vice president of research at RiceTec.

Plant breeders have long dreamed of an easier, more powerful way to create hybrid seed. In nature, some plant species reproduce clonally: The eggs inside their flowers become embryos without pollination, part of a process called apomixis—“away from mixing” in Greek. If researchers could genetically engineer crops to reproduce through apomixis, the process of creating the first hybrid generation might still be laborious. But then seed companies could much more easily propagate hybrid offspring.

For decades, scientists had limited success. But recent breakthroughs have brought the concept closer to reality. In 2019, an international team reported that it had successfully engineered a line of rice plants that could reproduce clonally—the first instance of synthetic apomixis in a crop. Groups around the world are working to develop apomictic varieties of sorghum, tomatoes, alfalfa, and other crops. There’s a palpable “sense of excitement” in the field, says Mary Gehring, a molecular biologist at the Whitehead Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies development in apomictic plants.

The technology won’t be ready to be commercialized for years. “There’s still an awful lot that we don’t understand about how to make it efficient for agriculture,” says Peggy Ozias-Akins, a geneticist at the University of Georgia. But seed companies are paying attention. Apomictic reproduction would simplify how they produce hybrid seeds, quicken the release of new varieties, and reduce costs. The technology could also benefit smallholder farmers in poorer countries who might not have regular access to commercial hybrid seeds, because they could save seeds produced by the previous year’s crop. “It really would be a big game changer,” says Adam Famoso, a rice breeder at Louisiana State University.

The discovery of virgin birth in plants is widely credited to John Smith, a 19th century botanist who served as the inaugural curator at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens. For a decade, he had watched three holly plants from Australia bear fruit without having ever produced a male flower or anything that resembled pollen, the vehicle for plant sperm. In 1839, Smith reported to the Linnean Society of London that he could grow new plants from the seeds of the hollies. It was an incendiary claim that was met with “incredulity,” according to Thomas Meehan, a botanist writing decades later.

In 1898, however, Swedish botanist Oscar Juel demonstrated, with convincing microscopy, that the egg cells of a plant called alpine catsfoot could develop into embryos in the absence of pollen. Other researchers took a closer look at their own favorite species. As evidence accumulated, more and more botanists began to take the phenomenon seriously. Today, apomictic reproduction has been confirmed in more than 400 plant species but no staple crops.

In the late 1990s, as genetic tools became more readily available, experts were optimistic they could identify the genes behind apomixis and deploy them in crops, creating clones that would bypass the genetic recombination that happens during plant sex, which shuffles away favorable gene combinations. But progress was slow. “People said, ‘OK, we will crack that nut,’” recalls Erik Jongedijk, a plant geneticist at KWS, a major seed company in Europe. And for a long time, “it was never cracked.”

Part of the difficulty stems from the complexity of the reproductive process researchers are trying to modify. During sexual reproduction, gametes—eggs and sperm—are created through meiosis, a process that results in haploid cells, with half the number of chromosomes. To form embryos with a full complement of chromosomes, eggs and sperm need to come together. Many naturally apomictic plants instead create gametes through mitosis, with no change in the chromosome count. The eggs can then turn into an embryo without being fertilized, in a process known as parthenogenesis.

It’s taken decades to identify some of the genes involved and to figure out how to tinker with them. In 2009, a group of scientists led by Raphaël Mercier, a geneticist now at the MPG Institute for Plant Breeding Research, showed that if they knocked out three genes involved in meiosis in the model plant Arabidopsis, it would make gametes through mitosis [Plos Biology (below)], preserving their full set of chromosomes. They named the trio of mutations MiMe, short for “mitosis instead of meiosis.” In 2016, they replicated the feat in rice [Cell Research (below)], showing that the MiMe mutations would create diploid eggs genetically identical to the mother plant.

Engineering perpetual vigor

Hybrid rice is prized by farmers because it is robust and high yielding. Breeders produce it by creating strains of highly inbred parents and crossing them. But only first generation (F1) crosses have the prized genetics; sexual reproduction shuffles away the favorable traits and renders the seeds of later generations less valuable (below, left). To get around that problem, scientists have genetically engineered a rice strain that reproduces clonally, through a process called apomixis (below, right).

Credit: A. Fisher/Science.

Meanwhile, other groups were figuring out how to coax egg cells to develop into embryos without being fertilized. In 2002, geneticist Kim Boutilier—now at Wageningen University—made what turned out to be a key discovery when she and her colleagues identified a gene called BABY BOOM in rapeseed. The gene, the team found, triggered the growth of embryos from shoots and leaves when it was turned on in Arabidopsis.

Since then, BABY BOOM–like genes have been found in many plants. In 2015, Ozias-Akins and her colleagues identified the function of one of them in a natural apomict, the grass Pennisetum squamulatum. When they transferred this gene into a closely related grass that reproduces sexually, as well as into rice and maize, it induced parthenogenesis, resulting in haploid embryos that were viable [PNAS (below)]. “Amazingly, it worked,” says Ueli Grossniklaus of the University of Zurich, a developmental geneticist who studies reproduction in Arabidopsis and natural apomicts.

The stage was set for the next step of the engineering process: knocking out the trio of meiosis genes and activating the critical BABY BOOM gene within a single plant.

Scientists didn’t want to simply transfer the key embryo activating gene from a grass into rice containing MiMe mutations. Although such a step is technically possible, it comes with a regulatory downside: Crops that are created by transferring a gene between species require lengthy regulatory evaluation before they can go to market. So scientists looked to rice’s own genome instead.

A landmark accomplishment came from someone who didn’t set out to study apomixis. Venkatesan Sundaresan, a development biologist at the University of California-Davis, had been investigating genes expressed in rice as egg and sperm cells fuse and develop into embryos. He and his colleagues noticed that the rice version of BABY BOOM is normally expressed in a plant’s sperm cells, but not the eggs, and that it remains active in the embryo after fertilization. If they could activate BABY BOOM in the egg cells as well, it could make pollination unnecessary, they reasoned.

Venkatesan Sundaresan and his colleagues engineered rice plants to reproduce clonally, which could simplify hybrid seed production. University of California-Davis.

To test whether that would work, UC Davis team member Imtiyaz Khanday isolated rice’s BABY BOOM and tacked on a promoter that turns the gene on specifically in the egg. The next step was to get the gene back into the plants. Khanday inserted this DNA package into the genome of a plant-infecting bacterium, a standard vehicle for genetically modifying plants. Added to a petri dish of rice cells, the modified bacterium inserted its own DNA—including the added gene—into the crop’s DNA. The cells formed a tumorlike tissue known as callus that could then be coaxed to grow into a seedling.

The resulting plants, which were also modified using CRISPR gene editing to have the MiMe mutations, underwent parthenogenesis and produced clonal seeds. Those seeds germinated and the seedlings were genetically identical to the mother plant, the team reported in 2019 in Nature [below].

It was a groundbreaking achievement, but the plants weren’t perfect: Only about 30% of their seeds were clonal. (The remainder had been fertilized by pollen produced by the genetically modified plants and were not viable.) So the team continued to tinker with its methods. In a follow-up paper published in Nature Communications [below] in December 2022, the researchers reported that after using a different variety of rice—a commercial hybrid—and adding the MiMe mutations and the BABY BOOM promoter in the same step, they ended up with plants that yielded more than 95% clonal seeds. It’s “absolutely fantastic work,” Jongedijk says.

The group is now looking for funding to test its clonal rice in field trials, says co-author Emmanuel Guiderdoni, a rice geneticist at the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development. The researchers want to see how their clonal plants fare in harsher conditions than they experienced in the greenhouse.

Farmers must buy fresh seed for each crop of hybrid rice.Yang Huafeng/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images.

Research on other crops is also picking up steam. Anna Koltunow of the University of Queensland is developing apomictic varieties of sorghum and cowpea, important crops for farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. In October 2022, she and her team began field trials in Australia of sorghum that was genetically modified to be parthenogenic and produce haploid embryos; they plan to add MiMe mutations to strains in the future. At least 10 groups in China are also working on apomictic varieties of cabbage, tomatoes, alfalfa, and other vegetable and forage crops, says Kejian Wang, a geneticist at the China National Rice Research Institute who is developing an apomictic strain of hybrid rice [Molecular Plant (below)].

One challenge for those researching dicots—the large group of flowering plants that includes beans and vegetable crops—has been that BABY BOOM doesn’t seem to work in them when expressed in egg cells. “We’ve tried really hard, and nothing ever worked,” Grossniklaus says. But now they have another option. In January 2022, a group led by plant geneticist Peter van Dijk of KeyGene, a plant breeding company, reported in Nature Genetics the discovery of PAR, a gene in dandelion—a naturally apomictic dicot—that appears to have a similar function as BABY BOOM. When his team switched on PAR in lettuce, rudimentary embryos formed without fertilization. The search for that gene took more than 15 years. “It’s a beautiful story, but it also demonstrates how much work and effort was needed,” says Tim Sharbel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Saskatchewan.

Dandelions are natural apomicts. Their yellow blooms consist of many tiny flowers, each with clonal eggs. David J. Green/Alamy.

Jongedijk expects another 5 to 10 years of research may be needed before synthetic apomixis can be deployed commercially in any crop. For an apomictic hybrid variety to appeal to farmers, 100% of the seeds must be clonal because they won’t want the less vigorous seeds that are produced through normal sexual reproduction. And as with all new crop varieties, scientists will need to conduct extensive field testing to determine how hybrid varieties respond to drought and other stressors.

Further tinkering with genes that control seed development could lead to even more progress. Like most plants, the apomictic rice now under development still needs pollen to fertilize its endosperm—the seed tissue that provides sustenance for the developing embryo. For those strains—as well as for commercial varieties that reproduce sexually—that step is vulnerable to climate change, because pollen can become less viable when it’s exposed to high temperatures. Gehring’s team recently received funding to try to engineer plants that develop endosperm without being fertilized, a feat that some naturally apomictic plants are capable of. If the team is successful, future apomictic crop varieties wouldn’t rely on pollen at all—enabling them to produce bountiful seeds even during heat waves.

As research on apomixis proceeds, some breeders caution that even when perfected, such crops might not succeed in the market. Famoso notes that some countries, especially in Asia, that have resisted genetically modified foods may not want to import apomictic rice. But Jauhar Ali, head of the hybrid rice program at the International Rice Research Institute, is more optimistic. “Gene editing is slowly being accepted and many governments are understanding the importance of this tool for bringing benefits to agriculture,” he says.

“There’s a lot of promise for this technology and hopefully it can make it into a farmer’s field someday,” Famoso says. For now, though, the helicopters will keep flying.

Plos Biology 2009

Figure 1. Schematic summary of the main results.

During mitosis in diploid cells, chromosomes replicate and sister chromatids segregate to generate daughter cells that are diploid and genetically identical to the initial cell. During meiosis, two rounds of chromosome segregation follow a single round of replication. At division one, homologous chromosomes recombine and are separated. Meiosis II is more similar to mitosis, resulting in equal distribution of sister chromatids. The obtained spores are thus haploid and carry recombined genetic information. In the osd1 mutant (this study), meiosis II is skipped giving rise to diploid spores and gametes with recombined genetic information. The double Atspo11-1/Atrec8 mutant undergoes a mitotic-like division instead of a normal first meiotic division, followed by an unbalanced second division leading to unbalanced spores and sterility [9]. In the triple osd1/Atspo11-1/Atrec8 mutant (MiMe, this study), the presence of the Atspo11-1 and Atrec8 mutations leads to a mitotic-like first meiotic division, and the presence of the osd1 mutation prevents the second meiotic division from occurring. Thus meiosis is replaced by a mitotic-like division. The obtained spores and gametes are genetically identical to the initial cell.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000124.g001

Figure 1
Cell Research 2016
Chromosome spreads of male meiosis in wild-type Arabidopsis and Arabidopsis MiMe genotypes. (A-F) Wild type. (A) Metaphase I with five aligned bivalents. (B) Anaphase I. (C) Telophase I. (D) Metaphase II. (E) Anaphase II. (F) Telophase II. (G-I) prd3 rec8 osd1 triple mutant (n = 17). (J-L) prd1 rec8 osd1 triple mutant (n = 21). (M-O) prd2 rec8 osd1 triple mutant (n = 27). (G, J, M) Metaphase I with 10 aligned univalents. (H, K, N) Anaphase I with segregation of 10 pairs of chromatids. (I, L, O) Telophase. Scale bar = 10 μm.

PNAS 2015

Fig. 1.

PsASGR-BBML expression in sexual embryo sacs. Ovaries from three sexual offspring derived from a T0 PsASGR-BBMLpromoter-GUS line are shown (A–D). The embryo sacs with antipodals have been outlined. Picture Insets are magnified regions of the egg/synergid/central cell region. The Upper Inset in C is the next focal plane of the ovary to show the central cell. Two asterisks indicate the polar nuclei within the central cell. Arrows indicate synergids. GUS expression is detected in the egg cell of unfertilized sexual embryo sacs on the day of anthesis. GUS signal is not detected in the central cell or antipodal cells of the mature sexual embryo sac. GUS staining is detected in cells of the developing embryo (EM) 3 d after fertilization but not in developing endosperm (D). No other staining in ovary tissue is identified. (Scale bar, 50 µm.)

Nature 2016

Nature Communications 2022

Fig. 1: Ploidy and genotype of progeny plants of transformation events harboring the T314 and T315 apomixis-inducing T-DNA constructs.

A)Schematic representation of the T-DNA constructs used to induce the triple MiMe mutation and the triggering of parthenogenesis, resulting in synthetic apomixis. Upper: T313 sgRNA MiMe T-DNA Middle: T314 sgRNA MiMe_pAtECS:BBM1 T-DNA Lower: T315 sgRNA_pOsECS:BBM1 T-DNA: LB and RB: left and right borders of the T-DNA; p35S: promoter of the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus (CaMV); 35S: polyadenylation signal of CaMV; hpt cat int: hygromycin phosphotransferase II with castor bean catalase intron; ZmUbi: promoter, first intron and first exon of the maize Ubiquitin 1 gene; “Os”Cas9: rice-optimized Cas9 coding sequence; NLS: nucleus localization signal fused to Cas9; OSD1, OSD1/2, PAIR1 and REC8: Four cassettes including sgRNAs (20 bp crRNA specific to the target gene + 82 bp tracR RNA) driven by the Pol III U3 promoter targeting OsOSD1, PAIR1, and OsREC8; EC1.2: egg cell-specific promoter from Arabidopsis21,22; OsECA1: egg cell-specific promoter from rice31,50. B) Principle for formation of tetraploid and diploid clonal progenies in MiMe and MiMe + BBM1 plants, respectively. C) Representative flow cytometry histograms of DAPI-marked nuclei suspensions isolated from young leaf blade of a diploid (upper) and tetraploid (lower) progeny plants. D) Upper: Genealogy of the plants selected for whole-genome sequencing including 1 F and D24 parents (two plants each); heterozygous F1 hybrid BRS-CIRAD 302 (two plants), six F2 sexual progenies; T314 15.1 and 37.7 primary transformants (T0); three T1 progeny plants of each of the sequenced T0 plants; three T2 progenies of each of the sequenced T1 plants (i.e., nine T2 plants per event). Lower: Graphical representation of genotypes of the 12 rice chromosomes established from whole-genome sequences of homozygous parents, heterozygous F1 hybrid, F2 progeny plants, T0 events T314 15.1 and 37.7 and their T1 and T2 progenies. Changes in color along F2 progeny chromosomes mark heterozygous-to-homozygous transitions resulting from meiotic crossovers.

Molecular Plant
See all of the science papers for further instructive material with images.

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From The University of Connecticut: “University of Connecticut Researcher Explores Impact of Recreational Homes on Agricultural Land Use”

From The University of Connecticut

5.11.23
Anna Zarra Aldrich | College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources

Research from agricultural economists explores why some farm land goes idle.

Grain silos on a dairy farm in Brunswick, New York, United States (UpstateNYer/Wikimedia Commons)

Charles Towe, associate professor of agricultural and resource economics in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources, started noticing a change in land use in Columbia County, New York where his family farms.

Towe saw a lot of potential agricultural land in New York state going unused. He also personally knew farmers who couldn’t find land in their area. This led him to explore this trend of decreased agricultural productivity.

“I was trying to solve the problem of, how do we have hundreds and hundreds of acres of land idle, and farmers looking for land saying, ‘I can’t find any land around,’” Towe says.

Towe recently published his findings in Land Economics [below].

He found that of the 800 agricultural parcels in Columbia County, an area near the Catskill Mountains, about a quarter were owned by non-residents. Of the non-residents – people whose primary address is somewhere other than their property in Columbia County – the most significant population came from New York City, which is about two hours away by car.

While there may be non-resident owners from other areas, Towe focused his study on New Yorkers to understand their impact on land use in his community.

“It appears that there is a preference for the amenities that an ag parcel here provides for second homeowners coming out of the city,” Towe says.

Since 2001, nonresident ownership of farmland in Columbia County increased by 22.7%. Part of this upward trend may be related to the use value taxation credit New York state offers. The credit, which has existed for decades, allows property owners to receive a break on their property taxes if they use part of their land for agricultural purposes.

However, there are few stipulations about what this use must look like. While the credit does benefit farmers, many non-resident owners use part of their land to produce low-value hay for animal bedding, but not a lot else. Others may rent out their land to local farmers as a way to receive the credit.

Looking at two USDA databases on land use records from the past decade, Towe found that when non-residents buy agricultural land in this area, 10-11% of the land is removed from the agricultural sector altogether. An additional 10-11% is used for low-value hay.

In 2019, Towe completed a similar study for the Connecticut Department of Agriculture to evaluate Connecticut’s Public Act 490 which provides tax breaks for agricultural land. The Act was adopted in 1963 to help preserve the state’s farm, forest, and open land.

Just like in New York, Towe found that, by far, the most common crop grown on farmlands that the owner rented out was hay, around 40%.

“At the end of the day, if you want to buy land and use it in your way, that’s your right,” Towe says. “But perhaps certain pro-agricultural tax policies should be revisited to verify that these are not being abused.”

Towe says this is the “first log on the stack” of uncovering the questions surrounding land use change with non-resident owners and the costs and benefits to the local community.

“There’s a lot happening here that’s kind of hard to put a finger on,” Towe says.

The next study Towe is conducting will look at data from short-terms vacation rentals in the area. Local attitudes often see these types of rentals as detrimental to the local community. But the full picture is likely more complicated as additional rental income makes more expensive homes more affordable to residents, and they bring tourist spending to the area.

“We’re trying to make an economic link between the urban and rural communities because the country feels like it needs it,” Towe says. “I think the takeaway from this is we’re really trying to say, ‘What are the impacts, what are the positives and negatives of being in this second home market.’”

Land Economics

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Stem Education Coalition

The University of Connecticut is a public land-grant research university in Storrs, Connecticut. It was founded in 1881.

The primary 4,400-acre (17.8 km^2) campus is in Storrs, Connecticut, approximately a half hour’s drive from Hartford and 90 minutes from Boston. It is a flagship university that is ranked as the best public national university in New England and is tied for 23rd in “top public schools” and tied for 63rd best national university in the 2021 U.S. News & World Report rankings. University of Connecticut has been ranked by Money Magazine and Princeton Review top 18th in value. The university is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. The university has been recognized as a “Public Ivy”, defined as a select group of publicly funded universities considered to provide a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.

The University of Connecticut is one of the founding institutions of the Hartford, Connecticut/Springfield, Massachusetts regional economic and cultural partnership alliance known as “New England’s Knowledge Corridor”. The University of Connecticut was the second U.S. university invited into Universitas 21, an elite international network of 24 research-intensive universities, who work together to foster global citizenship. The University of Connecticut is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges . The University of Connecticut was founded in 1881 as the Storrs Agricultural School, named after two brothers who donated the land for the school. In 1893, the school became a land grant college. In 1939, the name was changed to The University of Connecticut. Over the next decade, social work, nursing and graduate programs were established, while the schools of law and pharmacy were also absorbed into the university. During the 1960s, The University of Connecticut Health was established for new medical and dental schools. John Dempsey Hospital opened in Farmington in 1975.

Competing in the Big East Conference as the Huskies, University of Connecticut has been particularly successful in their men’s and women’s basketball programs. The Huskies have won 21 NCAA championships. The University of Connecticut Huskies are the most successful women’s basketball program in the nation, having won a record 11 NCAA Division I National Championships (tied with the UCLA Bruins men’s basketball team) and a women’s record four in a row (2013–2016), plus over 40 conference regular season and tournament championships. University of Connecticut also owns the two longest winning streaks of any gender in college basketball history.

From The College of Engineering At The University of Arizona : “University ofArizona engineers lead $70M project to turn desert shrub into rubber”University of Arizona engineers lead $70M project to turn desert shrub into rubber”

From The College of Engineering

At

The University of Arizona

5.8.23
Chris Quirk | College of Engineering

Media contact
Katy Smith
College of Engineering
katysmith@arizona.edu
520-621-1992
520-271-3780

Guayule is a sustainable crop with the potential to provide a reliable domestic rubber source.

Researcher Kim Ogden holds up branches from a guayule shrub, a plant with the potential to provide a reliable domestic rubber source. Credit: Julius Schlosburg/Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering.

University of Arizona researchers are teaming up with Bridgestone Americas Inc. to develop a new variety of natural rubber from a source that is more sustainable and can be grown in the forbidding conditions of the arid Southwest.

Kim Ogden, head of the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, is principal investigator on a $70 million, five-year project focused on growing and processing guayule (pronounced why-OO-lee), a hardy, perennial shrub that could be an alternative source of natural rubber.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture granted $35 million for the project, with an equal match from Bridgestone, the tire and rubber company, to help growers transition to guayule crops from their traditional rotations of hay, cotton and wheat.

Additional partners on the project include the Colorado River Indian Tribes, Colorado State University, regional growers and OpenET, a public-private partnership that facilitates responsible water management.

Bridgestone has been working with guayule in Arizona since 2012 at the company’s 280-acre farm in Eloy, about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson. Bridgestone plans to expand the farm to 20,000 acres in the next several years by working with Native American farmers to grow guayule on tribal lands, and with other area farmers.

“Eventually, we hope to have plantings of around 100,000 acres, spread out across 15 or 20 facilities across the Southwest,” said David Dierig, section manager for agro operations at Bridgestone.

Why guayule?

Rubber is currently sourced from a single species – Hevea brasilensis, or the para rubber tree –grown almost exclusively in Southeast Asia.

Having a single source for rubber globally means the supply of this critical material can be precarious and subject to market volatility. The para rubber tree crop is susceptible to disease, particularly leaf fall disease. In addition, the price of rubber is affected by increasing labor costs, and there is the potential for geopolitical disorder, Ogden said.

“There is a big risk, as well as supply chain problems, when you have all the natural rubber coming from one region of the world,” Ogden said. “The goal for Bridgestone and for the other tire companies is to find reliable, domestic sources of rubber.”

Scientists have had their eyes on guayule as a rubber producer for over a century, Dierig said. The shrub, which matures in just two years, is native to the Chihuahuan Desert in northern Mexico and southern New Mexico.

“People had looked at this plant as far back as World War I, and during World War II there was a ton of research because our rubber supply got cut off,” Dierig said.

The Emergency Rubber Act, passed by Congress in 1942, directed scientists to find alternative sources for rubber, and guayule was in the mix.

“They probably had around 30,000 acres of it planted here in Arizona, and they found a lot of facets to it that were advantageous,” Dierig said.

Interest in guayule eventually faded, and the para rubber tree remained the sole source of industrial rubber. While synthetic rubber – a material derived from petroleum – is suitable for limited uses, it does not have the resilience of natural rubber and cannot be used in the most demanding products, such as airplane tires or tires for large agricultural vehicles, so the need for a new rubber source has become increasingly pressing.

“Reducing the amount of rubber we are importing from Southeast Asia is also going to help with biodiversity and climate change,” Dierig said.

Climate- and market-smart solution

The grant will fund the development and refinement of growing guayule with climate-smart practices, Ogden said.

“We want to use less water, install irrigation systems to avoid flood irrigation, use less fertilizer and educate the growers,” she said. “If you’re looking at a big system life-cycle assessment, this is going to cut down on greenhouse gases.”

Unlike annual crops, which require tilling the land every time the crops are planted or harvested, guayule is a perennial. That makes no-till and low-till farming a viable practice, and it’s one method of storing carbon dioxide in the soil rather than the air, which is known as carbon sequestration. In addition, guayule has natural properties that deter insects, so no insecticides are needed once the plants reach early maturity.

As promising as guayule is as a source of natural rubber, producing the rubber alone is not economically viable, so Ogden is working to find additional products that could be derived from guayule and marketed to supplement the revenues from manufacturing rubber products. In addition to a rubber content of about 5%, guayule also has a resin content of 7% to 9%, which could be used to make natural adhesives and insect repellents. The rest of the plant is woody biomass that could be converted into biofuel or used to make particle board.

“Finding research-based solutions that have a global impact is an ideal expression of the University of Arizona’s mission,” said University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins. “I am grateful to our partners at Bridgestone and the USDA for their investment in Dr. Ogden’s expertise. I look forward to seeing new, sustainable tires on the road soon, knowing the University of Arizona helped get them there.”

Though the guayule industry is still in its infancy, the domestic rubber is already popping up in some interesting places. Bridgestone recently released a new Firestone racing tire, Firehawk, that contains guayule rubber. The tires, sporting distinctive lime green accents on the sidewalls, debuted as part of the IndyCar circuit races during the Pit Stop Challenge last year, as well as the Big Machine Music City Grand Prix in Nashville. After last year’s successful run, the tires are being used in IndyCar’s five street-circuit races this season.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

University of Arizona College of Engineering

At The University of Arizona College of Engineering:

A Close-Knit Community

If you seek a great engineering education in a diverse, supportive environment on a beautiful campus, where everything – from Pac-12 sports to life-changing research – is done on a grand scale, you’ll feel right at home in the College of Engineering.

100 Percent Student Engagement

Join a university ranked among the best in the world for its research and development, a place where the entrepreneurial spirit reigns and where graduate and undergraduate students alike roll up their sleeves and work alongside world-renowned faculty and industry partners. Engineering experts in areas ranging from water and energy sustainability to cybersecurity to medical sensors and artificial body parts will be in your classrooms and labs from your very first day at the University of Arizona.

Workforce-Ready Graduates

The College’s 16 undergraduate degree programs prepare some of the University of Arizona’s best students for successful careers in engineering. Nearly every undergraduate student participates in one or more internships, a senior design project or research. And, if you crave even more campus life, join one of the College’s 50+ student clubs, many of which have won numerous student and professional awards.

Infinite Possibilities

Strong industry ties help our students and alumni land jobs with top companies around the world. Some students go on to become astronauts, CEOs, professors, mine site managers and city administrators. Others start their own high-tech companies to create robots, computer software, wireless medical devices and solar power systems.

So get ready to Bear Down!

As of 2019, the The University of Arizona enrolled 45,918 students in 19 separate colleges/schools, including The University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson and Phoenix and the James E. Rogers College of Law, and is affiliated with two academic medical centers (Banner – University Medical Center Tucson and Banner – University Medical Center Phoenix). The University of Arizona is one of three universities governed by the Arizona Board of Regents. The university is part of the Association of American Universities and is the only member from Arizona, and also part of the Universities Research Association. The university is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity”.

Known as the Arizona Wildcats (often shortened to “Cats”), The University of Arizona’s intercollegiate athletic teams are members of the Pac-12 Conference of the NCAA. The University of Arizona athletes have won national titles in several sports, most notably men’s basketball, baseball, and softball. The official colors of the university and its athletic teams are cardinal red and navy blue.

After the passage of the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, the push for a university in Arizona grew. The Arizona Territory’s “Thieving Thirteenth” Legislature approved The University of Arizona in 1885 and selected the city of Tucson to receive the appropriation to build the university. Tucson hoped to receive the appropriation for the territory’s mental hospital, which carried a $100,000 allocation instead of the $25,000 allotted to the territory’s only university (Arizona State University was also chartered in 1885, but it was created as Arizona’s normal school, and not a university). Flooding on the Salt River delayed Tucson’s legislators, and by the time they reached Prescott, back-room deals allocating the most desirable territorial institutions had been made. Tucson was largely disappointed with receiving what was viewed as an inferior prize.

With no parties willing to provide land for the new institution, the citizens of Tucson prepared to return the money to the Territorial Legislature until two gamblers and a saloon keeper decided to donate the land to build the school. Construction of Old Main, the first building on campus, began on October 27, 1887, and classes met for the first time in 1891 with 32 students in Old Main, which is still in use today. Because there were no high schools in Arizona Territory, the university maintained separate preparatory classes for the first 23 years of operation.

Research

The University of Arizona is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. UArizona is the fourth most awarded public university by National Aeronautics and Space Administration for research. The University of Arizona was awarded over $325 million for its Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) to lead NASA’s 2007–08 mission to Mars to explore the Martian Arctic, and $800 million for its OSIRIS-REx mission, the first in U.S. history to sample an asteroid.

National Aeronautics Space Agency OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft.

The LPL’s work in the Cassini spacecraft orbit around Saturn is larger than any other university globally.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration/European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea][Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganization](EU)/ASI Italian Space Agency [Agenzia Spaziale Italiana](IT) Cassini Spacecraft.

The University of Arizona laboratory designed and operated the atmospheric radiation investigations and imaging on the probe. The University of Arizona operates the HiRISE camera, a part of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

U Arizona NASA Mars Reconnaisance HiRISE Camera.

NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

While using the HiRISE camera in 2011, University of Arizona alumnus Lujendra Ojha and his team discovered proof of liquid water on the surface of Mars—a discovery confirmed by NASA in 2015. The University of Arizona receives more NASA grants annually than the next nine top NASA/JPL-Caltech-funded universities combined. As of March 2016, The University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory is actively involved in ten spacecraft missions: Cassini VIMS; Grail; the HiRISE camera orbiting Mars; the Juno mission orbiting Jupiter; Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO); Maven, which will explore Mars’ upper atmosphere and interactions with the sun; Solar Probe Plus, a historic mission into the Sun’s atmosphere for the first time; Rosetta’s VIRTIS; WISE; and OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S. sample-return mission to a near-earth asteroid, which launched on September 8, 2016.

NASA – GRAIL Flying in Formation. Artist’s Concept. Credit: NASA.
National Aeronautics Space Agency Juno at Jupiter.

NASA/Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

NASA/Mars MAVEN

NASA Parker Solar Probe Plus named to honor Pioneering Physicist Eugene Parker. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration Wise/NEOWISE Telescope.

The University of Arizona students have been selected as Truman, Rhodes, Goldwater, and Fulbright Scholars. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, UArizona is among the top 25 producers of Fulbright awards in the U.S.

The University of Arizona is a member of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, a consortium of institutions pursuing research in astronomy. The association operates observatories and telescopes, notably Kitt Peak National Observatory just outside Tucson.

National Science Foundation NOIRLab National Optical Astronomy Observatory Kitt Peak National Observatory on Kitt Peak of the Quinlan Mountains in the Arizona-Sonoran Desert on the Tohono O’odham Nation, 88 kilometers (55 mi) west-southwest of Tucson, Arizona, Altitude 2,096 m (6,877 ft). annotated.

Led by Roger Angel, researchers in the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab at The University of Arizona are working in concert to build the world’s most advanced telescope. Known as the Giant Magellan Telescope (CL), it will produce images 10 times sharper than those from the Earth-orbiting Hubble Telescope.

Giant Magellan Telescope(CL) 21 meters, to be at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s(US) NOIRLab NOAO Las Campanas Observatory(CL), some 115 km (71 mi) north-northeast of La Serena, Chile, over 2,500 m (8,200 ft) high.

GMT will ultimately cost $1 billion. Researchers from at least nine institutions are working to secure the funding for the project. The telescope will include seven 18-ton mirrors capable of providing clear images of volcanoes and riverbeds on Mars and mountains on the moon at a rate 40 times faster than the world’s current large telescopes. The mirrors of the Giant Magellan Telescope will be built at The University of Arizona and transported to a permanent mountaintop site in the Chilean Andes where the telescope will be constructed.

Reaching Mars in March 2006, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter contained the HiRISE camera, with Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen as the lead on the project. This National Aeronautics and Space Agency mission to Mars carrying the UArizona-designed camera is capturing the highest-resolution images of the planet ever seen. The journey of the orbiter was 300 million miles. In August 2007, The University of Arizona, under the charge of Scientist Peter Smith, led the Phoenix Mars Mission, the first mission completely controlled by a university. Reaching the planet’s surface in May 2008, the mission’s purpose was to improve knowledge of the Martian Arctic. The Arizona Radio Observatory, a part of The University of Arizona Department of Astronomy Steward Observatory, operates the Submillimeter Telescope on Mount Graham.

University of Arizona Radio Observatory at NOAO Kitt Peak National Observatory, AZ , U Arizona Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory at altitude 2,096 m (6,877 ft).

U Arizona Steward Observatory at NSF’s NOIRLab NOAO Kitt Peak National Observatory in the Arizona-Sonoran Desert 88 kilometers 55 mi west-southwest of Tucson, Arizona in the Quinlan Mountains of the Tohono O’odham Nation, altitude 2,096 m (6,877 ft).

The National Science Foundation funded the iPlant Collaborative in 2008 with a $50 million grant. In 2013, iPlant Collaborative received a $50 million renewal grant. Rebranded in late 2015 as “CyVerse”, the collaborative cloud-based data management platform is moving beyond life sciences to provide cloud-computing access across all scientific disciplines.

In June 2011, the university announced it would assume full ownership of the Biosphere 2 scientific research facility in Oracle, Arizona, north of Tucson, effective July 1. Biosphere 2 was constructed by private developers (funded mainly by Texas businessman and philanthropist Ed Bass) with its first closed system experiment commencing in 1991. The university had been the official management partner of the facility for research purposes since 2007.

U Arizona mirror lab-Where else in the world can you find an astronomical observatory mirror lab under a football stadium?

University of Arizona’s Biosphere 2, located in the Sonoran desert. An entire ecosystem under a glass dome? Visit our campus, just once, and you’ll quickly understand why The University of Arizona is a university unlike any other.

University of Arizona Landscape Evolution Observatory at Biosphere 2.

From The School of Engineering At Stanford University: “When to water? Researchers develop new tool for optimizing irrigation”

From The School of Engineering

At

Stanford University

4.27.23
Adam Hadhazy

A new tool for designing and managing irrigation for farms advances the implementation of smart agriculture, an approach that leverages data and modern technologies to boost crop yields while conserving natural resources. A better and faster tool for saving water on farms.

While traditional drip irrigation waters based on general standards and assumptions, smart systems for drip irrigation water crops when and where they need it most. (Image credit: Getty Images)

Stanford researchers have designed an irrigation optimization tool that could help farmers slash water use.

The tool rapidly estimates water loss from soils due to “evapotranspiration,” a process that involves the evaporation of water into the atmosphere and the uptake of water by plants. Compared to state-of-the-art ways of getting such evapotranspiration estimates, the new Stanford modeling tool works 100 times faster while maintaining high levels of accuracy.

In practice, the tool could dramatically reduce the time needed to devise strategic, efficient irrigation schedules that best position watering and sensing equipment across entire farms. On a narrower, field-by-field basis, the tool could even crunch data fast enough to adjust irrigation on the fly, in near real time, as weather conditions change.

“Evapotranspiration is a critical piece of information for designing efficient irrigation systems,” said Weiyu Li, a PhD candidate in energy science and engineering and lead author of a study describing the findings in Water Resources Research [below]. Li is a Siebel Scholar in the class of 2023 and is currently the first and only recipient at Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

Overall, the research is a step forward for smart agriculture, which leverages the power of modern technologies and approaches such as big data and the Internet of Things to boost crop yields while conserving natural resources.

“With this study, we’re helping to deliver on the promise of smart agriculture to continue sustainably feeding billions of people worldwide and preserving our planet for future generations,” said senior study author Daniel Tartakovsky, a professor of energy science and engineering who is also Li’s advisor.

Simple vertical, complex horizontal

Conventional accounting for evapotranspiration has relied on what researchers call the vertical-flow assumption. In this modeling approach, the water applied during irrigation is treated as only moving straight down into the soil. The fact that the water can (and does) flow in horizontal directions is ignored. Given that smart agriculture requires processing significant amounts of data, the vertical-flow assumption has been used as a sort of computational shortcut. The approach is sufficient for some irrigation modeling needs but the results it gives can be vastly improved upon, Li said.

For truly smart agriculture, particularly via “drip irrigation,” the vertical-flow assumption is inadequate, Li explained. As its name implies, drip irrigation involves administering water both slowly and precisely to plants’ root zones where the water can be absorbed with minimal evaporative loss. Drip irrigation is primarily deployed in arid regions – across much of California for instance – where conventional irrigation techniques that inundate fields lead to egregious water consumption.

Smart agriculture systems also optimize timing. They water a plant only when it’s needed, depending on factors such as weather and the plant’s stage of growth. “Historically, irrigation has largely been divorced from the plant’s needs at a given moment,” Tartakovsky said. “Drip irrigation, informed by smart agriculture practices, bucks that trend.”

Part of the challenge of smart ag, then, is knowing where to best position moisture sensors and drippers. While existing designs are reliant on approximations and assumptions, this tool aims to provide that guidance based on real-world and nearly real-time conditions.

Better algorithms

To develop the tool, Li and Tartakovsky turned to algorithms to improve data crunching and yield quality results. For the new study, the researchers brought together two algorithms known as an enhanced Kalman filter and maximum likelihood estimation.

For statistics and control theory, Kalman filtering, also known as linear quadratic estimation (LQE), is an algorithm that uses a series of measurements observed over time, including statistical noise and other inaccuracies, and produces estimates of unknown variables that tend to be more accurate than those based on a single measurement alone, by estimating a joint probability distribution over the variables for each timeframe. The filter is named after Rudolf E. Kálmán, who was one of the primary developers of its theory.

The algorithms start with predictions based on available measured data, then reduce uncertainties based on subsequent measurements.

“We plug real data measurements of soil moisture and root water uptake into our model, which improves our understanding of the overall physical system and the algorithm’s performance,” Li said. “Our study is the first to combine this kind of algorithmic approach and apply it to drip irrigation.”

To test the accuracy and efficiency of their approach, the Stanford researchers simulated a plot of land measuring approximately 5 by 33 feet in width – roughly the equivalent of a short row of planted crops.

Using the new modeling tool, calculating a precise estimate of the evapotranspiration rate for the test plot of land only took about 10 minutes. If an enhanced Kalman filter alone was used, as other recent studies have demonstrated, the computational time would have run on the order of 100 times longer, or about 1,000 minutes. That chunk of time equates to nearly 17 hours, and thus is not actionable for timely smart agriculture. “In comparison, an irrigation optimization system based on our modeling tool could be responsive in near-real time to changing conditions,” Li said.

When considering the goal of optimizing the upfront design of drip irrigation systems for an entire farm, which can encompass thousands of acres, the computational time required becomes downright prohibitive. “You can start to see why irrigation system designers have relied on the simplified vertical-flow method when faced with major installation projects,” Li said.

Looking ahead, the Stanford researchers plan to see how well their modeling tool works in real-world settings when deployed on a working farm. “We next want to perform a ‘field’ test, literally,” Tartakovsky said. “We look forward to honing our approach further with all the variables presented by real sensors, real drippers, real crops, and real weather.”

Water Resources Research

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Stanford University School of Engineering has been at the forefront of innovation for nearly a century, creating pivotal technologies that have transformed the worlds of information technology, communications, health care, energy, business and beyond.

The school’s faculty, students and alumni have established thousands of companies and laid the technological and business foundations for Silicon Valley. Today, the school educates leaders who will make an impact on global problems and seeks to define what the future of engineering will look like.
Mission

Our mission is to seek solutions to important global problems and educate leaders who will make the world a better place by using the power of engineering principles, techniques and systems. We believe it is essential to educate engineers who possess not only deep technical excellence, but the creativity, cultural awareness and entrepreneurial skills that come from exposure to the liberal arts, business, medicine and other disciplines that are an integral part of the Stanford experience.

Our key goals are to:

Conduct curiosity-driven and problem-driven research that generates new knowledge and produces discoveries that provide the foundations for future engineered systems
Deliver world-class, research-based education to students and broad-based training to leaders in academia, industry and society
Drive technology transfer to Silicon Valley and beyond with deeply and broadly educated people and transformative ideas that will improve our society and our world.

The Future of Engineering

The engineering school of the future will look very different from what it looks like today. So, in 2015, we brought together a wide range of stakeholders, including mid-career faculty, students and staff, to address two fundamental questions: In what areas can the School of Engineering make significant world‐changing impact, and how should the school be configured to address the major opportunities and challenges of the future?

One key output of the process is a set of 10 broad, aspirational questions on areas where the School of Engineering would like to have an impact in 20 years. The committee also returned with a series of recommendations that outlined actions across three key areas — research, education and culture — where the school can deploy resources and create the conditions for The Stanford University College of Engineering to have significant impact on those challenges.

Stanford University

Stanford University campus

Leland and Jane Stanford founded Stanford University to “promote the public welfare by exercising an influence on behalf of humanity and civilization.” Stanford opened its doors in 1891, and more than a century later, it remains dedicated to finding solutions to the great challenges of the day and to preparing our students for leadership in today’s complex world. Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus near Palo Alto. Since 1952, more than 54 Stanford faculty, staff, and alumni have won the Nobel Prize, including 19 current faculty members.

Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university located in Stanford, California. Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford is consistently ranked as among the most prestigious and top universities in the world by major education publications. It is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Leland Stanford was a U.S. senator and former governor of California who made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students on October 1, 1891, as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Stanford University struggled financially after the death of Leland Stanford in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley.

The university is organized around seven schools: three schools consisting of 40 academic departments at the undergraduate level as well as four professional schools that focus on graduate programs in law, medicine, education, and business. All schools are on the same campus. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. It has gained 126 NCAA team championships, and Stanford has won the NACDA Directors’ Cup for 24 consecutive years, beginning in 1994–1995. In addition, Stanford students and alumni have won 270 Olympic medals including 139 gold medals.

As of October 2020, 84 Nobel laureates, 28 Turing Award laureates, and eight Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. In addition, Stanford is particularly noted for its entrepreneurship and is one of the most successful universities in attracting funding for start-ups. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, roughly equivalent to the 7th largest economy in the world (as of 2020). Stanford is the alma mater of one president of the United States (Herbert Hoover), 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.

Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to Leland Stanford Jr, their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford’s previous Palo Alto farm.

Jane and Leland Stanford modeled their university after the great eastern universities, most specifically Cornell University. Stanford opened being called the “Cornell of the West” in 1891 due to faculty being former Cornell affiliates (either professors, alumni, or both) including its first president, David Starr Jordan, and second president, John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to have higher education be accessible, nonsectarian, and open to women as well as to men. Cornell is credited as one of the first American universities to adopt this radical departure from traditional education, and Stanford became an early adopter as well.

Despite being impacted by earthquakes in both 1906 and 1989, the campus was rebuilt each time. In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I. The Stanford Medical Center, completed in 1959, is a teaching hospital with over 800 beds. The DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.

Land

Most of Stanford is on an 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km^2) campus, one of the largest in the United States. It is located on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (30 km) northwest of San Jose. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped.

Stanford’s main campus includes a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley.

Non-central campus

Stanford currently operates in various locations outside of its central campus.

On the founding grant:

Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a 1,200-acre (490 ha) natural reserve south of the central campus owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is a facility west of the central campus operated by the university for the Department of Energy. It contains the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, 2 miles (3.2 km) on 426 acres (172 ha) of land.
Golf course and a seasonal lake: The university also has its own golf course and a seasonal lake (Lake Lagunita, actually an irrigation reservoir), both home to the vulnerable California tiger salamander. As of 2012 Lake Lagunita was often dry and the university had no plans to artificially fill it.

Off the founding grant:

Hopkins Marine Station, in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892.

Study abroad locations:

Unlike typical study abroad programs, Stanford itself operates in several locations around the world; thus, each location has Stanford faculty-in-residence and staff in addition to students, creating a “mini-Stanford”.

Redwood City campus for many of the university’s administrative offices located in Redwood City, California, a few miles north of the main campus. In 2005, the university purchased a small, 35-acre (14 ha) campus in Midpoint Technology Park intended for staff offices; development was delayed by The Great Recession.

In 2015 the university announced a development plan and the Redwood City campus opened in March 2019.

The Bass Center in Washington, DC provides a base, including housing, for the Stanford in Washington program for undergraduates. It includes a small art gallery open to the public.

China: Stanford Center at Peking University, housed in the Lee Jung Sen Building, is a small center for researchers and students in collaboration with Beijing University [北京大学](CN) (Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University(CN) KIAA-PKU).

Administration and organization

Stanford is a private, non-profit university that is administered as a corporate trust governed by a privately appointed board of trustees with a maximum membership of 38. Trustees serve five-year terms (not more than two consecutive terms) and meet five times annually. A new trustee is chosen by the current trustees by ballot. The Stanford trustees also oversee the Stanford Research Park, the Stanford Shopping Center, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University Medical Center, and many associated medical facilities (including the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital).

The board appoints a president to serve as the chief executive officer of the university, to prescribe the duties of professors and course of study, to manage financial and business affairs, and to appoint nine vice presidents. The provost is the chief academic and budget officer, to whom the deans of each of the seven schools report. Persis Drell became the 13th provost in February 2017.

As of 2018, the university was organized into seven academic schools. The schools of Humanities and Sciences (27 departments), Engineering (nine departments), and Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (four departments) have both graduate and undergraduate programs while the Schools of Law, Medicine, Education and Business have graduate programs only. The powers and authority of the faculty are vested in the Academic Council, which is made up of tenure and non-tenure line faculty, research faculty, senior fellows in some policy centers and institutes, the president of the university, and some other academic administrators, but most matters are handled by the Faculty Senate, made up of 55 elected representatives of the faculty.

The Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) is the student government for Stanford and all registered students are members. Its elected leadership consists of the Undergraduate Senate elected by the undergraduate students, the Graduate Student Council elected by the graduate students, and the President and Vice President elected as a ticket by the entire student body.

Stanford is the beneficiary of a special clause in the California Constitution, which explicitly exempts Stanford property from taxation so long as the property is used for educational purposes.

Endowment and donations

The university’s endowment, managed by the Stanford Management Company, was valued at $27.7 billion as of August 31, 2019. Payouts from the Stanford endowment covered approximately 21.8% of university expenses in the 2019 fiscal year. In the 2018 NACUBO-TIAA survey of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, only Harvard University, the University of Texas System, and Yale University had larger endowments than Stanford.

In 2006, President John L. Hennessy launched a five-year campaign called the Stanford Challenge, which reached its $4.3 billion fundraising goal in 2009, two years ahead of time, but continued fundraising for the duration of the campaign. It concluded on December 31, 2011, having raised a total of $6.23 billion and breaking the previous campaign fundraising record of $3.88 billion held by Yale. Specifically, the campaign raised $253.7 million for undergraduate financial aid, as well as $2.33 billion for its initiative in “Seeking Solutions” to global problems, $1.61 billion for “Educating Leaders” by improving K-12 education, and $2.11 billion for “Foundation of Excellence” aimed at providing academic support for Stanford students and faculty. Funds supported 366 new fellowships for graduate students, 139 new endowed chairs for faculty, and 38 new or renovated buildings. The new funding also enabled the construction of a facility for stem cell research; a new campus for the business school; an expansion of the law school; a new Engineering Quad; a new art and art history building; an on-campus concert hall; a new art museum; and a planned expansion of the medical school, among other things. In 2012, the university raised $1.035 billion, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Research centers and institutes

DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory,
Stanford Research Institute, a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.

Hoover Institution, a conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government.

Hasso Plattner Institute of Design -Stanford Engineering, a multidisciplinary design school in cooperation with the Hasso Plattner Institute of University of Potsdam [Universität Potsdam](DE) that integrates product design, engineering, and business management education).

Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, which grew out of and still contains the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project.

John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists

Center for Ocean Solutions

Together with University of California-Berkeley and University of California-San Francisco, Stanford is part of the Biohub, a new medical science research center founded in 2016 by a $600 million commitment from Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and pediatrician Priscilla Chan.

Discoveries and innovation

Natural sciences

Biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) – Arthur Kornberg synthesized DNA material and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his work at Stanford.
First Transgenic organism – Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetic engineering. Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including human growth hormone and hepatitis B vaccine.
Laser – Arthur Leonard Schawlow shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work on lasers.
Nuclear magnetic resonance – Felix Bloch developed new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements, which are the underlying principles of the MRI.

Computer and applied sciences

ARPANET – Stanford Research Institute, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four original ARPANET nodes.

Internet. Stanford was the site where the original design of the Internet was undertaken. Vint Cerf led a research group to elaborate the design of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) that he originally co-created with Robert E. Kahn (Bob Kahn) in 1973 and which formed the basis for the architecture of the Internet.

Frequency modulation synthesis – John Chowning of the Music department invented the FM music synthesis algorithm in 1967, and Stanford later licensed it to Yamaha Corporation.

Google – Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford. They were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP’s goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library” and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.

Klystron tube – invented by the brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian at Stanford. Their prototype was completed and demonstrated successfully on August 30, 1937. Upon publication in 1939, news of the klystron immediately influenced the work of U.S. and UK researchers working on radar equipment.

RISC [Reduced Instruction Set Computer microprocessor architecture] – DARPA funded VLSI project of microprocessor design. Stanford and The University of California-Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. The Stanford MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley RISC gave its name to the entire concept, commercialized as SPARC. Another success from this era were IBM’s efforts that eventually led to the IBM POWER instruction set architecture, the PowerPC, and Power ISA. As these projects matured, a wide variety of similar designs flourished in the late 1980s and especially the early 1990s, representing a major force in the Unix workstation market as well as embedded processors in laser printers, routers and similar products.

SUN workstation – Andy Bechtolsheim designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation, which led to Sun Microsystems.

Businesses and entrepreneurship

Stanford is one of the most successful universities in creating companies and licensing its inventions to existing companies; it is often held up as a model for technology transfer. Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing is responsible for commercializing university research, intellectual property, and university-developed projects.

The university is described as having a strong venture culture in which students are encouraged, and often funded, to launch their own companies.

Companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world.

Some companies closely associated with Stanford and their connections include:

Hewlett-Packard, 1939, co-founders William R. Hewlett (B.S, PhD) and David Packard (M.S).
Silicon Graphics, 1981, co-founders James H. Clark (Associate Professor) and several of his grad students.
Sun Microsystems, 1982, co-founders Vinod Khosla (M.B.A), Andy Bechtolsheim (PhD) and Scott McNealy (M.B.A).
Cisco Systems, 1984, founders Leonard Bosack (M.S) and Sandy Lerner (M.S) who were in charge of Stanford Computer Science and Graduate School of Business computer operations groups respectively when the hardware was developed.
Yahoo!, 1994, co-founders Jerry Yang (B.S, M.S) and David Filo (M.S).
Google, 1998, co-founders Larry Page (M.S) and Sergey Brin (M.S).
LinkedIn, 2002, co-founders Reid Hoffman (B.S), Konstantin Guericke (B.S, M.S), Eric Lee (B.S), and Alan Liu (B.S).
Instagram, 2010, co-founders Kevin Systrom (B.S) and Mike Krieger (B.S).
Snapchat, 2011, co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (B.S).
Coursera, 2012, co-founders Andrew Ng (Associate Professor) and Daphne Koller (Professor, PhD).

Student body

Stanford enrolled 6,996 undergraduate and 10,253 graduate students as of the 2019–2020 school year. Women comprised 50.4% of undergraduates and 41.5% of graduate students. In the same academic year, the freshman retention rate was 99%.

Stanford awarded 1,819 undergraduate degrees, 2,393 master’s degrees, 770 doctoral degrees, and 3270 professional degrees in the 2018–2019 school year. The four-year graduation rate for the class of 2017 cohort was 72.9%, and the six-year rate was 94.4%. The relatively low four-year graduation rate is a function of the university’s coterminal degree (or “coterm”) program, which allows students to earn a master’s degree as a 1-to-2-year extension of their undergraduate program.

As of 2010, fifteen percent of undergraduates were first-generation students.

Athletics

As of 2016 Stanford had 16 male varsity sports and 20 female varsity sports, 19 club sports and about 27 intramural sports. In 1930, following a unanimous vote by the Executive Committee for the Associated Students, the athletic department adopted the mascot “Indian.” The Indian symbol and name were dropped by President Richard Lyman in 1972, after objections from Native American students and a vote by the student senate. The sports teams are now officially referred to as the “Stanford Cardinal,” referring to the deep red color, not the cardinal bird. Stanford is a member of the Pac-12 Conference in most sports, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in several other sports, and the America East Conference in field hockey with the participation in the inter-collegiate NCAA’s Division I FBS.

Its traditional sports rival is the University of California-Berkeley, the neighbor to the north in the East Bay. The winner of the annual “Big Game” between the Cal and Cardinal football teams gains custody of the Stanford Axe.

Stanford has had at least one NCAA team champion every year since the 1976–77 school year and has earned 126 NCAA national team titles since its establishment, the most among universities, and Stanford has won 522 individual national championships, the most by any university. Stanford has won the award for the top-ranked Division 1 athletic program—the NACDA Directors’ Cup, formerly known as the Sears Cup—annually for the past twenty-four straight years. Stanford athletes have won medals in every Olympic Games since 1912, winning 270 Olympic medals total, 139 of them gold. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, and 2016 Summer Olympics, Stanford won more Olympic medals than any other university in the United States. Stanford athletes won 16 medals at the 2012 Summer Olympics (12 gold, two silver and two bronze), and 27 medals at the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Traditions

The unofficial motto of Stanford, selected by President Jordan, is Die Luft der Freiheit weht. Translated from the German language, this quotation from Ulrich von Hutten means, “The wind of freedom blows.” The motto was controversial during World War I, when anything in German was suspect; at that time the university disavowed that this motto was official.

Hail, Stanford, Hail! is the Stanford Hymn sometimes sung at ceremonies or adapted by the various University singing groups. It was written in 1892 by mechanical engineering professor Albert W. Smith and his wife, Mary Roberts Smith (in 1896 she earned the first Stanford doctorate in Economics and later became associate professor of Sociology), but was not officially adopted until after a performance on campus in March 1902 by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

“Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman”: Stanford does not award honorary degrees, but in 1953 the degree of “Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman” was created to recognize individuals who give rare and extraordinary service to the University. Technically, this degree is awarded by the Stanford Associates, a voluntary group that is part of the university’s alumni association. As Stanford’s highest honor, it is not conferred at prescribed intervals, but only when appropriate to recognize extraordinary service. Recipients include Herbert Hoover, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Lucile Packard, and John Gardner.

Big Game events: The events in the week leading up to the Big Game vs.The University of California-Berkeley, including Gaieties (a musical written, composed, produced, and performed by the students of Ram’s Head Theatrical Society).

“Viennese Ball”: a formal ball with waltzes that was initially started in the 1970s by students returning from the now-closed Stanford in Vienna overseas program. It is now open to all students.

“Full Moon on the Quad”: An annual event at Main Quad, where students gather to kiss one another starting at midnight. Typically organized by the Junior class cabinet, the festivities include live entertainment, such as music and dance performances.

“Band Run”: An annual festivity at the beginning of the school year, where the band picks up freshmen from dorms across campus while stopping to perform at each location, culminating in a finale performance at Main Quad.

“Mausoleum Party”: An annual Halloween Party at the Stanford Mausoleum, the final resting place of Leland Stanford Jr. and his parents. A 20-year tradition, the “Mausoleum Party” was on hiatus from 2002 to 2005 due to a lack of funding, but was revived in 2006. In 2008, it was hosted in Old Union rather than at the actual Mausoleum, because rain prohibited generators from being rented. In 2009, after fundraising efforts by the Junior Class Presidents and the ASSU Executive, the event was able to return to the Mausoleum despite facing budget cuts earlier in the year.

Former campus traditions include the “Big Game bonfire” on Lake Lagunita (a seasonal lake usually dry in the fall), which was formally ended in 1997 because of the presence of endangered salamanders in the lake bed.

Award laureates and scholars

Stanford’s current community of scholars includes:

19 Nobel Prize laureates (as of October 2020, 85 affiliates in total)
171 members of the National Academy of Sciences
109 members of National Academy of Engineering
76 members of National Academy of Medicine
288 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
19 recipients of the National Medal of Science
1 recipient of the National Medal of Technology
4 recipients of the National Humanities Medal
49 members of American Philosophical Society
56 fellows of the American Physics Society (since 1995)
4 Pulitzer Prize winners
31 MacArthur Fellows
4 Wolf Foundation Prize winners
2 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award winners
14 AAAI fellows
2 Presidential Medal of Freedom winners

From “The Magazine” At Johns Hopkins University : “How will we feed the future and save the planet?”

From The Magazine

at

Johns Hopkins University

4.24.23
Sarah Kuta

The world’s food systems are in peril—but there’s still time to act.

As she scrolled through news reports about the string of storms devastating California in early January, Jessica Fanzo kept returning to one thing: garlic.

She found herself contemplating the plant’s fields in Gilroy, aka the Garlic Capital of the World. Would they be flooded beyond repair? Would high water destroy this year’s crop? What would that mean for our supply of garlic in the months to come?

For Fanzo, the fate of Gilroy’s garlic is a possible glimmer of what’s to come. In this small, pungent allium, she envisions a harrowing future, one in which more extreme weather events pummel farmland, rising temperatures make it impossible to raise livestock, and drought dries up the world’s fields.

Climate change has the potential to wreck our already vulnerable food systems within the next few decades, an occurrence that could lead to rising food prices and economic disruption, increased malnutrition and diet-related diseases, more nationalism and geopolitical conflict, and a host of other ripple effects.

“It’s very doom and gloom, but it’s reality—all the data is pointing to it, and we’re already seeing it,” says Fanzo, a professor of global food policy and ethics at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the director of the Global Food Ethics and Policy Program. “We’re reaching these tipping points of one crisis building upon another upon another. It’s a bit of a perfect storm that’s going to have a really big impact on people’s food security, their livelihoods, and, of course, the planet.”

As the Earth gets warmer and drier, Fanzo and other experts worry that extreme weather events will become even more common and make it increasingly difficult to produce food, a development that means more people will go hungry. Research suggests that every 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature corresponds to a more than 1% increase in the likelihood of severe food insecurity around the world.

Rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) levels will likely reduce crop yields. Beyond that, climate change may also make food less nutritious: One study found that when soy, rice, wheat, and corn are exposed to the levels of atmospheric CO2 predicted for 2050, they lose valuable zinc, iron, and protein.

Already, as much as 40% of food crops are lost to diseases and pests—and those issues will likely worsen.

At the same time, water availability could become increasingly unpredictable, giving rise to droughts, floods, and wildfires. Heavy rains will increase agricultural runoff into the world’s oceans, a change that can contribute to algae blooms and fish die-offs. Sea-level rise will threaten agricultural operations along coastlines.

And climate change isn’t the only challenge our global food systems will face. Projected population growth, coupled with rising income levels in some parts of the world, means an increase in the overall demand for food. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations projects the world’s population will reach 9.1 billion by 2050—up from 7.88 billion today—and that income levels will be a “multiple” of what they are now. Together, these factors suggest that food production must increase by a whopping 70% in the next few decades.

But producing more food will likely contribute further harm to the planet. Already, food systems are responsible for more than one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the FAO. It uses more than half the planet’s habitable land and accounts for 70% of all freshwater consumption. Growing, harvesting, transporting, processing, and packaging food also contribute to soil degradation, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, pollution, deforestation, and more.

This is not the first time experts have worried about looming food crises, however. In 1798, for example, economist Thomas Robert Malthus famously argued that food production would not be able to keep pace with population growth, a problem that would eventually cause a catastrophic population die-off. But, of course, that never happened. Technology advanced to allow humans to produce more food.

Similarly, today, all hope is not lost. If players at every level take action, from governments and international coalitions all the way down to individual consumers, the world can make its food systems more resilient—and improve the health of humans and the planet at the same time.

“We know what we need to do, now it’s just a matter of doing it,” says Keeve Nachman, an associate professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and director of the Center for a Livable Future’s food production and public health program. Johns Hopkins researchers are hard at work leading this charge. Below are a few of the most promising solutions on the horizon.

Reduce Food Waste

While 828 million people around the globe face hunger, roughly one-third of all food produced for human consumption gets lost or wasted—an estimated 1.3 billion tons per year. It spills out of trucks en route to processing facilities, passes its sell-by date in supermarkets, and rots in household refrigerators.

Not only is this mismatch disheartening, but food waste also harms the environment—twice. Growing, processing, and transporting food produces CO2, the most abundant of greenhouse gases resulting from human activities. It also requires the use of water, land, and other finite resources.

“When we’re throwing out food, we’re basically throwing out all those things—all those resources never needed to have been expended in the first place,” says Roni Neff, BSPH ’06 (PhD), an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Then, when it ends up in the landfill, rotting food produces methane, which is 25 times better at trapping heat than CO2 and is responsible for roughly 30% of global temperature increases. In the U.S., 17% of all methane emissions come from food waste in landfills, behind petroleum production and animal gas and manure, per the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. If food waste were its own country, it would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter on the planet, trailing only China and the U.S.

The consequences don’t stop there: Wasted food is also wasted money for individual consumers and families, as well as for governments that fund food programs. Losing food also means missing out on its nutritional value, and, in many cases, the foods people throw out are highly nutritious—but perishable—items, like fruits, vegetables, and dairy. A 2017 study led by Johns Hopkins researchers found that wasted food at the consumer and retail levels in the U.S. meant losing 1,217 calories, 33 grams of protein, 5.9 grams of dietary fiber, 1.7 micrograms of vitamin D, 286 milligrams of calcium, and 880 milligrams of potassium per person, per day.

Food waste is a complex problem—and addressing it will require different solutions for the various actors throughout food systems, as well as different approaches for geographic regions.

As co-director of the RECIPES national food waste research network, Neff is leading efforts to help address food waste in the U.S. The National Science Foundation awarded $15 million to Johns Hopkins, American University, and a dozen other institutions in 2021 to form the network, which will further study the root causes of food waste, improve wasted food tracking, model potential solutions, develop new technologies around composting and anaerobic digestion, and implement educational programming. The five-year project aligns with the national goal of cutting food waste in half by 2030.

One of the very first steps? Getting people to acknowledge that food waste is even a problem.

“When we do surveys, we find that 75% of Americans say they waste less food than the average American,” Neff says. “If you ask people, very often you get the response, ‘I don’t waste food, it’s those other people who waste food.’ We all waste food—I do, too. The fact that we’re not tuned into it leads us to waste even more because we don’t think it’s a problem. You can have all the solutions you want, but if we don’t think we need to apply them, we’re not going to get anywhere.”

Awareness aside, researchers are also studying the effectiveness of policy changes that could help curb food waste. In 2021 alone, lawmakers in 18 states proposed more than 50 bills related to food waste management—and some have even become laws. In Maryland, for instance, many schools, businesses, and organizations can no longer send their food waste to landfills.

Other projects include understanding the quality of “rescued food,” or food waste that’s still edible and can be repurposed or redistributed, and studying the overproduction and overpurchasing of food that contributes to waste, Neff says.

This is not the first time experts have worried about looming food crises, however. In 1798, for example, economist Thomas Robert Malthus famously argued that food production would not be able to keep pace with population growth, a problem that would eventually cause a catastrophic population die-off. But, of course, that never happened. Technology advanced to allow humans to produce more food.

Similarly, today, all hope is not lost. If players at every level take action, from governments and international coalitions all the way down to individual consumers, the world can make its food systems more resilient—and improve the health of humans and the planet at the same time.

“We know what we need to do, now it’s just a matter of doing it,” says Keeve Nachman, an associate professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and director of the Center for a Livable Future’s food production and public health program. Johns Hopkins researchers are hard at work leading this charge. Below are a few of the most promising solutions on the horizon.

Improve Food System Resilience

For many people, the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on food systems was an eye-opener. Empty grocery store shelves, long lines at food pantries, shuttered production facilities, rising food prices, school closures, and unemployment all exacerbated food insecurity. Globally, an additional 350 million people became moderately or severely food insecure, according to the United Nations.

But these types of systemwide shocks aren’t just limited to pandemics. As the climate continues to shift because of human activities, scientists expect extreme weather events and natural disasters to increase in frequency and severity. These, too, could mean big consequences for food systems.

“The number of crises that challenge our food systems just keeps increasing,” Neff says. “They can throw our food systems haywire.”

Johns Hopkins researchers are working to help communities make their local food systems more impervious to disruptions—from hurricanes to flooding to heat waves and everything in between. After working closely with city officials in Baltimore, Neff and a team of experts from five U.S. cities developed a robust, hands-on food system resilience planning guide that’s now available online.

Though each type of crisis may play out and affect communities differently, they all pose risks to three core tenets of food security: accessibility, availability, and acceptability. But with the right preparation now, community leaders can help mitigate those risks and ensure that when disaster strikes, residents do not go hungry.

“The key is: How are we going to preserve food security in the face of these threats, and how can we make our food system overall stronger?” Neff says. “And if a crisis never happens, we’ve still strengthened the system.”

Teach People How to Cook

Food insecurity has contributed to roughly 462 million adults around the world being underweight, 149 million children being too short for their age, and 45 million children being too thin for their height, according to the latest statistics from the World Health Organization. Undernutrition also plays a role in roughly 45% of all deaths of children under the age of 5.

But malnutrition takes other forms, too. In many parts of the world, especially high-income countries, it’s also linked with obesity and diet-related noncommunicable diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Around 1.9 million adults across the globe are overweight or obese, along with 340 million children and teens, per WHO.

Cardiovascular diseases kill an estimated 17.9 million people each year, a figure that represents 32% of all deaths worldwide—they’re the leading cause of death around the world. Diabetes, meanwhile, causes another 2 million deaths. These diseases are also expensive to treat and lead to lower levels of economic productivity—obesity alone costs $2 trillion globally each year, according to one estimate.

“When you have a population that is dealing with high rates of chronic disease, there are all these little extra ripple effects that go throughout society and the economy,” says Julia Wolfson, BSPH ’16 (PhD), an associate professor in the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

One of the big culprits responsible for these conditions is ultra-processed foods, such as those found at fast food chains, convenience stores, restaurants, and grocery stores.

The good news? These diseases are preventable. Improving access to and affordability of nutritious, minimally processed foods can also help improve human health. And though more work needs to be done at the big-picture, systemic level to change the policies and environments that shape people’s food choices, changes at the individual or family level can also help.

One such change is encouraging people to cook more at home—rather than relying as much on fast food and other convenient, ultra-processed foods—and giving them the skills and training they need to be successful.

“On the whole, cooking more at home is associated with better diet quality,” Wolfson says. “There’s also some research that finds that better cooking skills can be protective for food security as well—these are skills that allow people to have what we call food agency, in terms of having more control and ability to shape their food choices and make the most out of the food resources they have available to them.”

Wolfson and collaborators have developed a cooking skills intervention that can help people build their skills and confidence in the kitchen. They’re testing the six-session cooking class series among people with prediabetes as part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Diabetes Prevention Program, as well as among women with high-risk pregnancies related to diabetes in Baltimore.

“Food agency is so central to building confidence and self-efficacy around making healthy food choices and being able to cook one’s own food,” she says. “As a broader research group, we are thinking about how to develop effective and scalable food agency–based interventions to build those skills.”

Change Food Environments

Changing individual behavior alone won’t be enough to solve the many food-related issues at hand. People don’t make decisions about what and how they eat in a vacuum—they’re influenced by their culture and heritage, their socioeconomic status, marketing and advertising, and even store-level layouts and offerings. To that end, researchers are also studying broader environmental and contextual changes that have the potential to affect how consumers, retailers, and suppliers make food decisions, a phenomenon referred to as choice architecture.

“We have an incredibly perverse food environment that we interact with every day that doesn’t promote a healthy or sustainable diet—it’s expensive, it’s time-consuming, it’s confusing,” Fanzo says. “It’s not an easy place to navigate. We need to make it easier for people to make the choices that fit with their aspirations and their lifestyle.”

Wolfson and colleagues, for instance, recently studied whether adding climate impact labels—such as “low climate impact” or “high climate impact”—to fast food menus would affect which foods people ordered. They were especially interested in whether the climate labels would affect purchases of meals that contained red meat, which is not only linked with various health problems but also produces large amounts of greenhouse gases.

In the experiment, this one small menu design change indeed made a difference: Participants ordered fewer burgers and more salads and chicken sandwiches when they looked at menus with climate impact labels.

Choice architecture also plays a big role in food retail settings. In many low-income urban areas, for example, residents have limited options when it comes to buying food. Their neighborhood may not have any grocery stores, and they may lack transportation to shop at one elsewhere; some residents simply cannot afford conventional grocery stores. Often, they must shop at small convenience or corner stores, which are typically stocked with processed foods that are high in sugar, salt, and fat. This, in turn, can contribute to diet-related chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

For their part, corner store owners are simply doing what’s easiest and best for business. Stocking their shelves with processed packaged goods is easy, thanks to deliveries, discounts, free display racks and refrigerators, and other incentives from large food distributors.

“The small stores in these low-income neighborhoods are at the mercy of their wholesalers and their suppliers,” says Joel Gittelsohn, a professor in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “The system is set up now such that if you are junk food—if you are a bag of potato chips, a candy bar, a can of soda, an ice cream sandwich—you have smooth sailing to make it into a corner store. The corner store owner doesn’t have to lift a finger if he or she wants to stock unhealthy foods.”

To offer more nutritious foods—like vegetables, dairy, and bread—corner store owners would have to work a lot harder, adding, for example, such activities as visiting a wholesaler to pick up their orders themselves. Farmers, meanwhile, often have surplus foods but no way to easily get them to low-income neighborhoods.

Changing this entire food ecosystem requires outside-the-box thinking that targets multiple levels of the local food system—from suppliers to retailers to individual consumers. To that end, Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a new mobile app to help connect food suppliers with corner stores in East Baltimore. Known as the Baltimore Urban Food Distribution, or BUD, project, the app allows suppliers to list the products they have available for purchase. It also integrates discounts to help keep costs down and encourage corner store owners to participate.

It’s still early days for BUD, but Gittelsohn and his collaborators hope it will eventually lead to Baltimore’s corner stores stocking and selling more healthy foods, a change that will, in turn, help improve the health of residents.

“The problem of why we see unhealthy foods in low-income neighborhoods of Baltimore and many other cities is not just choosing to give junk food to low-income communities—it’s also that the supply system is set up in a way that dramatically favors the provision of unhealthy food over healthier options, and that’s what BUD is intended to address,” Gittelsohn says.

Improve Food Policies

Zooming out even further, people’s food choices are also heavily shaped by policy, whether they realize it or not. Governments at every level implement rules, programs, subsidies, and initiatives that ultimately affect what ends up on the dinner plate.

Untangling the messy web of interconnected policies that affect the food system will be a colossal task. But with enough data in front of them, decision-makers can begin to make meaningful changes. That’s the philosophy behind the Food Systems Dashboard, a collaborative project from Johns Hopkins University, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, plus several other partners.

The dashboard brings together troves of global data touching nearly every aspect of food systems—from the average price of sugar to fertilizer consumption in various countries.

“Food systems are complex and it’s really hard for policymakers to navigate not only how their food systems are performing but also what actions to take,” Fanzo says. “The dashboard allows decision-makers to review data in a very visually appealing, easy-to-understand way, and that allows them to identify and prioritize ways to improve nutrition and environmental sustainability in their food systems.”

Researchers at Johns Hopkins are also studying the effects of other policies, from agriculture subsidies to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to sugar-sweetened beverage taxes, with an overarching goal of influencing local, state, regional, and tribal groups that can ultimately take action to improve food systems.

“Food policies should help ensure that all people have access to safe, healthy, affordable food; that farmers and workers are supported; that animals are treated humanely; and that air, water, and land are protected for future generations,” Fanzo writes in her 2021 book Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? “Current food policies in the United States—or anywhere else—don’t achieve all of these goals. On the contrary, not a single nation has a holistic food system policy designed to improve human nutrition and well-being while protecting the environment.”

Looking Ahead

Though the world’s food systems will undoubtedly endure challenges in the years to come, Fanzo and others remain optimistic. That’s because many scientists, innovators, and policymakers around the world are actively working to slow the progression of climate change and make food systems more sustainable, healthy, and equitable.

“When you look back in history, we have overcome some very, very dark days and significant challenges,” Fanzo says. “We have so much ample evidence around how to make food systems more resilient and how to mitigate and adapt to climate change. We have a lot of technology, we have a lot of local solutions—we have a whole range of different adaptation and mitigation policies that could be put into place. Now we just need to act.”

See the full article here .

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How long has Johns Hopkins Magazine been around?

The first issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine landed in readers’ mailboxes in 1950, marking the birth of a new kind of magazine. Published for the graduates, faculty, and friends of a leading university, it was conceived to give readers intellectual nourishment, and over the years has featured thought-provoking and sometimes controversial articles on topics ranging from particle physics to student unrest. The magazine’s founding editor was alumnus Corbin Gwaltney, who was also the founding editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Who receives Johns Hopkins Magazine?

The magazine mails to over 120,000 people four times each year. Johns Hopkins alumni comprise about 75 percent of that total. The remaining 25 percent includes faculty, senior staff, parents of current students, and friends (i.e., donors) of the university. All of these readers receive the magazine free of charge.

Where does the magazine get its funding?

The magazine gets a good portion of its support from the university. In addition, reader donations account for about 20 percent of the overall budget; local and national advertising account for about 15 percent. Subscriptions are available for $20 per year ($25 overseas). For subscription information contact: jhmagazine@jhu.edu.

What makes a good story for Johns Hopkins Magazine?

There needs to be a Hopkins link. Beyond that, there’s no hard-and-fast recipe. We run profiles about alumni doing fascinating things: wildlife ecologists, figurative painters, media moguls. Excerpts from books written by Hopkins authors. In-depth reports on cutting-edge research being done by faculty and students. Historical looks at people and events that shaped Hopkins. News stories about events shaping Hopkins today.

How do you come up with story ideas?

By canvassing the university’s many campuses and divisions: chatting with faculty members, showing up at poetry readings and engineering symposiums, going to alumni events, hanging out with students, and keeping current on the many publications that come out of the university. Some of our best story ideas come from faculty, students, and alumni who pick up the phone or drop us a note.

Do you run contributions from readers and/or freelance writers?

Though the magazine’s freelance budget is limited, we do make some freelance assignments—most often when a writer approaches us with a great idea. (When we come up with a great idea, someone on the staff usually grabs it first.) We also welcome contributions from readers, though it’s prudent to call or write the editor first (gjr@jhu.edu), with a description of what you have in mind.

Johns Hopkins University campus

The Johns Hopkins University opened in 1876, with the inauguration of its first president, Daniel Coit Gilman. “What are we aiming at?” Gilman asked in his installation address. “The encouragement of research … and the advancement of individual scholars, who by their excellence will advance the sciences they pursue, and the society where they dwell.”

The mission laid out by Gilman remains the university’s mission today, summed up in a simple but powerful restatement of Gilman’s own words: “Knowledge for the world.”

What Gilman created was a research university, dedicated to advancing both students’ knowledge and the state of human knowledge through research and scholarship. Gilman believed that teaching and research are interdependent, that success in one depends on success in the other. A modern university, he believed, must do both well. The realization of Gilman’s philosophy at Johns Hopkins, and at other institutions that later attracted Johns Hopkins-trained scholars, revolutionized higher education in America, leading to the research university system as it exists today.

The Johns Hopkins University is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, the university was named for its first benefactor, the American entrepreneur and philanthropist Johns Hopkins. His $7 million bequest (approximately $147.5 million in today’s currency)—of which half financed the establishment of the Johns Hopkins Hospital—was the largest philanthropic gift in the history of the United States up to that time. Daniel Coit Gilman, who was inaugurated as the institution’s first president on February 22, 1876, led the university to revolutionize higher education in the U.S. by integrating teaching and research. Adopting the concept of a graduate school from Germany’s historic Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, [Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg] (DE), Johns Hopkins University is considered the first research university in the United States. Over the course of several decades, the university has led all U.S. universities in annual research and development expenditures. In fiscal year 2016, Johns Hopkins spent nearly $2.5 billion on research. The university has graduate campuses in Italy, China, and Washington, D.C., in addition to its main campus in Baltimore.

Johns Hopkins is organized into 10 divisions on campuses in Maryland and Washington, D.C., with international centers in Italy and China. The two undergraduate divisions, the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Whiting School of Engineering, are located on the Homewood campus in Baltimore’s Charles Village neighborhood. The medical school, nursing school, and Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Johns Hopkins Children’s Center are located on the Medical Institutions campus in East Baltimore. The university also consists of the Peabody Institute, Applied Physics Laboratory, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, School of Education, Carey Business School, and various other facilities.

Johns Hopkins was a founding member of the American Association of Universities. As of October 2019, 39 Nobel laureates and 1 Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Johns Hopkins. Founded in 1883, the Blue Jays men’s lacrosse team has captured 44 national titles and plays in the Big Ten Conference as an affiliate member as of 2014.

Research

The opportunity to participate in important research is one of the distinguishing characteristics of Hopkins’ undergraduate education. About 80 percent of undergraduates perform independent research, often alongside top researchers. In FY 2013, Johns Hopkins received $2.2 billion in federal research grants—more than any other U.S. university for the 35th consecutive year. Johns Hopkins has had seventy-seven members of the Institute of Medicine, forty-three Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators, seventeen members of The National Academy of Engineering, and sixty-two members of The National Academy of Sciences. As of October 2019, 39 Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with the university as alumni, faculty members or researchers, with the most recent winners being Gregg Semenza and William G. Kaelin.

Between 1999 and 2009, Johns Hopkins was among the most cited institutions in the world. It attracted nearly 1,222,166 citations and produced 54,022 papers under its name, ranking No. 3 globally [after Harvard University and the Max Planck Society (DE)] in the number of total citations published in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals over 22 fields in America.

In FY 2000, Johns Hopkins received $95.4 million in research grants from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, making it the leading recipient of NASA research and development funding. In FY 2002, Hopkins became the first university to cross the $1 billion threshold on either list, recording $1.14 billion in total research and $1.023 billion in federally sponsored research. In FY 2008, Johns Hopkins University performed $1.68 billion in science, medical and engineering research, making it the leading U.S. academic institution in total R&D spending for the 30th year in a row, according to a National Science Foundation ranking. These totals include grants and expenditures of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

The Johns Hopkins University also offers the “Center for Talented Youth” program—a nonprofit organization dedicated to identifying and developing the talents of the most promising K-12 grade students worldwide. As part of the Johns Hopkins University, the “Center for Talented Youth” or CTY helps fulfill the university’s mission of preparing students to make significant future contributions to the world. The Johns Hopkins Digital Media Center (DMC) is a multimedia lab space as well as an equipment, technology and knowledge resource for students interested in exploring creative uses of emerging media and use of technology.

In 2013, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships program was established by a $250 million gift from Michael Bloomberg. This program enables the university to recruit fifty researchers from around the world to joint appointments throughout the nine divisions and research centers. Each professor must be a leader in interdisciplinary research and be active in undergraduate education. Directed by Vice Provost for Research Denis Wirtz, there are currently thirty two Bloomberg Distinguished Professors at the university, including three Nobel Laureates, eight fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ten members of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and thirteen members of The National Academies.

From Stanford University: “Meet the team preserving Stanford’s land and water and wildlife”

From Stanford University

4.22.23
Alex Kekauoha

The staff behind the Conservation Program are leading Stanford’s land stewardship efforts to ensure the university’s vast natural landscape and biodiversity can thrive.

On a recent afternoon in the Stanford foothills, a few hundred meters from the Dish, a crew of Stanford conservationists inspected a pond where California tiger salamanders are successfully breeding.

Preston, Adelsheim, and Launer inspect a pond in the Stanford foothills where California tiger salamanders are breeding. (Image credit: Andrew Brodhead)

“The recent rain has been really positive for these salamanders because it fills up their breeding ponds,” said Esther Adelsheim, program manager in Stanford’s Conservation Program.

Due, in part, to years of drought and habitat conversion, the slithery black and yellow amphibian is a state and federally-recognized threatened species. But constructed pools like this – one of eight at Stanford – are increasing their chances of survival. With around 800 eggs in that pond alone, Adelsheim is optimistic about the species’ future.

“The more aquatic habitat they have, the more successful they’ll be in contributing juvenile salamanders that will sustain and bolster the population into the future,” she said.

Maintaining habitats is just one small part of the work Stanford’s Conservation Program is doing to steward university lands. The team is also supporting biological research, providing educational opportunities for students and the broader community, inspiring local stewardship, and helping fulfill Stanford’s commitment to protecting and bolstering local biodiversity.

Conservation at Stanford

Stanford’s natural landscape has long been a mainstay of the campus and unique among colleges and universities due to its size. In 1876, Leland and Jane Stanford purchased 650 acres of land where they built their country home, Palo Alto Stock Farm, and later their university. Leland Stanford later acquired the adjoining properties, growing the campus to more than 8,000 acres, much of which remains undeveloped.

California tiger salamanders are successfully breeding and producing juveniles in ponds in the Stanford foothills. (Image credit: Andrew Brodhead)

Alan Launer, director of conservation planning, said that the university has done some form of conservation work for decades, much of which was driven by faculty research. In the 1980s and 1990s, he was working with the Center for Conservation Biology, the research group started by Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies, Emeritus.

“We did very applied conservation all across the United States and internationally, including Costa Rica and Madagascar,” Launer said.

Around that time, the group began working with the university on issues related to land use, water storage, and preserving endangered species. As state and federal endangered species lists grew, so did the partnership between Ehrlich’s group and the university, with part of the Center moving to the university administration in the late 1990s.

Today the Conservation Program is part of Land, Buildings, and Real Estate (LBRE) and run by three permanent, full-time staff: Launer, Adelsheim, and Katie Preston, the conservation program coordinator. With help from various seasonal staff, including Stanford students, they protect the biodiversity of Stanford lands, water, and wildlife.

Land, water & wildlife

On any given day, the team can be found conducting vegetation management for the 670 species of native plants and over 325 species of non-native plants on Stanford’s campus. That work includes restoring native trees and plants, seeding grassland species and milkweed, advising on grazing management, or conducting weed control and biological monitoring of terrestrial species. They are also heavily involved with Stanford’s water management systems, including Lagunita, Felt Reservoir, and Searsville Reservoir.

The team surveys plant species in the Stanford foothills. (Image credit: Andrew Brodhead)

Much of their work focuses on supporting the various animal species at Stanford. There are about 150 species of birds, over 45 species of mammals, 19 species of reptiles, 11 species of amphibians, eight species of fish, and countless species of invertebrates. Many of these animals are at risk of extinction.

“I get the greatest joy and satisfaction from our efforts to preserve and support biodiversity as a whole in both aquatic and terrestrial environments,” Adelsheim said. “When a pond is full of native invertebrates, plants, amphibians, reptiles, and birds, it’s a joy to witness.”

But maintaining a healthy ecosystem for this wildlife to thrive isn’t easy. The team faces numerous obstacles, most notably from the impacts of climate change, which Adelsheim described as, “hands-down our biggest challenge.” She explained that in some years, California’s historic drought has left them without enough water.

“As a result, we’ve been dealing with drying ponds and shortened hydroperiods, which reduces survival to metamorphosis for pond breeding amphibians,” she said, adding that years with heavy rainfall have led to water storage and management problems.

The large human population surrounding Stanford can also adversely impact the campus ecology. Years of local development have led to increased foot and vehicle traffic, littering, and other human activity that can harm the local environment.

Education and research

One of the best ways to reduce the adverse impacts of human activity is through outreach. The Conservation Program supports numerous educational programs, including the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve Docent Program, Stanford Bioblitz, the California Naturalists Program, and Biocure Explorations. It also organizes field trips for students at local schools, volunteer opportunities, and public webinars and presentations on topics like the connection between social and environmental systems and the importance of native plant restoration.

“Our program is also very supportive of students,” Preston said. “We hire seasonal technicians, some of whom are Stanford students, and we sponsor master’s capstone projects and other research, including by scholars at other institutions.”

Stanford courses offered through the Conservation Program include BIO/EARTHSYS 105 – Ecology and Natural History of Jasper Ridge, BIO 810 – Introduction to Ecology, and BIO 159 – Herpetology, co-taught by Adelsheim.

Partnerships

Launer, Adelsheim, and Preston said that while their team is small relative to the scope of their work and the vastness of Stanford’s land, their efforts go a long way, thanks in part to the partnerships they’ve built.

“It is important to acknowledge the community of volunteers and collaborators upon which we rely,” said Adelsheim. “Sometimes, the work that we do requires a large number of helping hands – whether that is people that come out to weed or plant during volunteer work days or people that have the curiosity to learn about local biodiversity and advocate for its conservation.”

See the full article here .

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Stanford University campus

Leland and Jane Stanford founded Stanford University to “promote the public welfare by exercising an influence on behalf of humanity and civilization.” Stanford opened its doors in 1891, and more than a century later, it remains dedicated to finding solutions to the great challenges of the day and to preparing our students for leadership in today’s complex world. Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus near Palo Alto. Since 1952, more than 54 Stanford faculty, staff, and alumni have won the Nobel Prize, including 19 current faculty members.

Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university located in Stanford, California. Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford is consistently ranked as among the most prestigious and top universities in the world by major education publications. It is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Leland Stanford was a U.S. senator and former governor of California who made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students on October 1, 1891, as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Stanford University struggled financially after the death of Leland Stanford in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley.

The university is organized around seven schools: three schools consisting of 40 academic departments at the undergraduate level as well as four professional schools that focus on graduate programs in law, medicine, education, and business. All schools are on the same campus. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. It has gained 126 NCAA team championships, and Stanford has won the NACDA Directors’ Cup for 24 consecutive years, beginning in 1994–1995. In addition, Stanford students and alumni have won 270 Olympic medals including 139 gold medals.

As of October 2020, 84 Nobel laureates, 28 Turing Award laureates, and eight Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. In addition, Stanford is particularly noted for its entrepreneurship and is one of the most successful universities in attracting funding for start-ups. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, roughly equivalent to the 7th largest economy in the world (as of 2020). Stanford is the alma mater of one president of the United States (Herbert Hoover), 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.

Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to Leland Stanford Jr, their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford’s previous Palo Alto farm.

Jane and Leland Stanford modeled their university after the great eastern universities, most specifically Cornell University. Stanford opened being called the “Cornell of the West” in 1891 due to faculty being former Cornell affiliates (either professors, alumni, or both) including its first president, David Starr Jordan, and second president, John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to have higher education be accessible, nonsectarian, and open to women as well as to men. Cornell is credited as one of the first American universities to adopt this radical departure from traditional education, and Stanford became an early adopter as well.

Despite being impacted by earthquakes in both 1906 and 1989, the campus was rebuilt each time. In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I. The Stanford Medical Center, completed in 1959, is a teaching hospital with over 800 beds. The DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.

DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory campus with world’s first x-ray laser- the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) unveiled in 2009.

Land

Most of Stanford is on an 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km^2) campus, one of the largest in the United States. It is located on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (30 km) northwest of San Jose. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped.

Stanford’s main campus includes a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley.

Non-central campus

Stanford currently operates in various locations outside of its central campus.

On the founding grant:

Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a 1,200-acre (490 ha) natural reserve south of the central campus owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is a facility west of the central campus operated by the university for the Department of Energy. It contains the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, 2 miles (3.2 km) on 426 acres (172 ha) of land. Golf course and a seasonal lake: The university also has its own golf course and a seasonal lake (Lake Lagunita, actually an irrigation reservoir), both home to the vulnerable California tiger salamander. As of 2012 Lake Lagunita was often dry and the university had no plans to artificially fill it.

Off the founding grant:

Hopkins Marine Station, in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892., in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892.
Study abroad locations: unlike typical study abroad programs, Stanford itself operates in several locations around the world; thus, each location has Stanford faculty-in-residence and staff in addition to students, creating a “mini-Stanford”.

Redwood City campus for many of the university’s administrative offices located in Redwood City, California, a few miles north of the main campus. In 2005, the university purchased a small, 35-acre (14 ha) campus in Midpoint Technology Park intended for staff offices; development was delayed by The Great Recession. In 2015 the university announced a development plan and the Redwood City campus opened in March 2019.

The Bass Center in Washington, DC provides a base, including housing, for the Stanford in Washington program for undergraduates. It includes a small art gallery open to the public.

China: Stanford Center at Peking University, housed in the Lee Jung Sen Building, is a small center for researchers and students in collaboration with Beijing University [北京大学](CN) (Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University(CN) (KIAA-PKU).

Administration and organization

Stanford is a private, non-profit university that is administered as a corporate trust governed by a privately appointed board of trustees with a maximum membership of 38. Trustees serve five-year terms (not more than two consecutive terms) and meet five times annually.[83] A new trustee is chosen by the current trustees by ballot. The Stanford trustees also oversee the Stanford Research Park, the Stanford Shopping Center, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University Medical Center, and many associated medical facilities (including the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital).

The board appoints a president to serve as the chief executive officer of the university, to prescribe the duties of professors and course of study, to manage financial and business affairs, and to appoint nine vice presidents. The provost is the chief academic and budget officer, to whom the deans of each of the seven schools report. Persis Drell became the 13th provost in February 2017.

As of 2018, the university was organized into seven academic schools. The schools of Humanities and Sciences (27 departments), Engineering (nine departments), and Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (four departments) have both graduate and undergraduate programs while the Schools of Law, Medicine, Education and Business have graduate programs only. The powers and authority of the faculty are vested in the Academic Council, which is made up of tenure and non-tenure line faculty, research faculty, senior fellows in some policy centers and institutes, the president of the university, and some other academic administrators, but most matters are handled by the Faculty Senate, made up of 55 elected representatives of the faculty.

The Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) is the student government for Stanford and all registered students are members. Its elected leadership consists of the Undergraduate Senate elected by the undergraduate students, the Graduate Student Council elected by the graduate students, and the President and Vice President elected as a ticket by the entire student body.

Stanford is the beneficiary of a special clause in the California Constitution, which explicitly exempts Stanford property from taxation so long as the property is used for educational purposes.

Endowment and donations

The university’s endowment, managed by the Stanford Management Company, was valued at $27.7 billion as of August 31, 2019. Payouts from the Stanford endowment covered approximately 21.8% of university expenses in the 2019 fiscal year. In the 2018 NACUBO-TIAA survey of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, only Harvard University, the University of Texas System, and Yale University had larger endowments than Stanford.

In 2006, President John L. Hennessy launched a five-year campaign called the Stanford Challenge, which reached its $4.3 billion fundraising goal in 2009, two years ahead of time, but continued fundraising for the duration of the campaign. It concluded on December 31, 2011, having raised a total of $6.23 billion and breaking the previous campaign fundraising record of $3.88 billion held by Yale. Specifically, the campaign raised $253.7 million for undergraduate financial aid, as well as $2.33 billion for its initiative in “Seeking Solutions” to global problems, $1.61 billion for “Educating Leaders” by improving K-12 education, and $2.11 billion for “Foundation of Excellence” aimed at providing academic support for Stanford students and faculty. Funds supported 366 new fellowships for graduate students, 139 new endowed chairs for faculty, and 38 new or renovated buildings. The new funding also enabled the construction of a facility for stem cell research; a new campus for the business school; an expansion of the law school; a new Engineering Quad; a new art and art history building; an on-campus concert hall; a new art museum; and a planned expansion of the medical school, among other things. In 2012, the university raised $1.035 billion, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Research centers and institutes

DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Stanford Research Institute, a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.
Hoover Institution, a conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government.
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, a multidisciplinary design school in cooperation with the Hasso Plattner Institute of University of Potsdam [Universität Potsdam](DE) that integrates product design, engineering, and business management education).
Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, which grew out of and still contains the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project.
John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists
Center for Ocean Solutions
Together with UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, Stanford is part of the Biohub, a new medical science research center founded in 2016 by a $600 million commitment from Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and pediatrician Priscilla Chan.

Discoveries and innovation

Natural sciences

Biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) – Arthur Kornberg synthesized DNA material and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his work at Stanford.
First Transgenic organism – Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetic engineering. Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including human growth hormone and hepatitis B vaccine.
Laser – Arthur Leonard Schawlow shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work on lasers.
Nuclear magnetic resonance – Felix Bloch developed new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements, which are the underlying principles of the MRI.

Computer and applied sciences

ARPANET – Stanford Research Institute, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four original ARPANET nodes.

Internet—Stanford was the site where the original design of the Internet was undertaken. Vint Cerf led a research group to elaborate the design of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) that he originally co-created with Robert E. Kahn (Bob Kahn) in 1973 and which formed the basis for the architecture of the Internet.

Frequency modulation synthesis – John Chowning of the Music department invented the FM music synthesis algorithm in 1967, and Stanford later licensed it to Yamaha Corporation.

Google – Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford. They were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP’s goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library” and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.

Klystron tube – invented by the brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian at Stanford. Their prototype was completed and demonstrated successfully on August 30, 1937. Upon publication in 1939, news of the klystron immediately influenced the work of U.S. and UK researchers working on radar equipment.

RISC – ARPA funded VLSI project of microprocessor design. Stanford and University of California- Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. The Stanford MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley RISC gave its name to the entire concept, commercialized as the SPARC. Another success from this era were IBM’s efforts that eventually led to the IBM POWER instruction set architecture, PowerPC, and Power ISA. As these projects matured, a wide variety of similar designs flourished in the late 1980s and especially the early 1990s, representing a major force in the Unix workstation market as well as embedded processors in laser printers, routers and similar products.
SUN workstation – Andy Bechtolsheim designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation, which led to Sun Microsystems.

Businesses and entrepreneurship

Stanford is one of the most successful universities in creating companies and licensing its inventions to existing companies; it is often held up as a model for technology transfer. Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing is responsible for commercializing university research, intellectual property, and university-developed projects.

The university is described as having a strong venture culture in which students are encouraged, and often funded, to launch their own companies.

Companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world.

Some companies closely associated with Stanford and their connections include:

Hewlett-Packard, 1939, co-founders William R. Hewlett (B.S, PhD) and David Packard (M.S).
Silicon Graphics, 1981, co-founders James H. Clark (Associate Professor) and several of his grad students.
Sun Microsystems, 1982, co-founders Vinod Khosla (M.B.A), Andy Bechtolsheim (PhD) and Scott McNealy (M.B.A).
Cisco, 1984, founders Leonard Bosack (M.S) and Sandy Lerner (M.S) who were in charge of Stanford Computer Science and Graduate School of Business computer operations groups respectively when the hardware was developed.[163]
Yahoo!, 1994, co-founders Jerry Yang (B.S, M.S) and David Filo (M.S).
Google, 1998, co-founders Larry Page (M.S) and Sergey Brin (M.S).
LinkedIn, 2002, co-founders Reid Hoffman (B.S), Konstantin Guericke (B.S, M.S), Eric Lee (B.S), and Alan Liu (B.S).
Instagram, 2010, co-founders Kevin Systrom (B.S) and Mike Krieger (B.S).
Snapchat, 2011, co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (B.S).
Coursera, 2012, co-founders Andrew Ng (Associate Professor) and Daphne Koller (Professor, PhD).

Student body

Stanford enrolled 6,996 undergraduate and 10,253 graduate students as of the 2019–2020 school year. Women comprised 50.4% of undergraduates and 41.5% of graduate students. In the same academic year, the freshman retention rate was 99%.

Stanford awarded 1,819 undergraduate degrees, 2,393 master’s degrees, 770 doctoral degrees, and 3270 professional degrees in the 2018–2019 school year. The four-year graduation rate for the class of 2017 cohort was 72.9%, and the six-year rate was 94.4%. The relatively low four-year graduation rate is a function of the university’s coterminal degree (or “coterm”) program, which allows students to earn a master’s degree as a 1-to-2-year extension of their undergraduate program.

As of 2010, fifteen percent of undergraduates were first-generation students.

Athletics

As of 2016 Stanford had 16 male varsity sports and 20 female varsity sports, 19 club sports and about 27 intramural sports. In 1930, following a unanimous vote by the Executive Committee for the Associated Students, the athletic department adopted the mascot “Indian.” The Indian symbol and name were dropped by President Richard Lyman in 1972, after objections from Native American students and a vote by the student senate. The sports teams are now officially referred to as the “Stanford Cardinal,” referring to the deep red color, not the cardinal bird. Stanford is a member of the Pac-12 Conference in most sports, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in several other sports, and the America East Conference in field hockey with the participation in the inter-collegiate NCAA’s Division I FBS.

Its traditional sports rival is the University of California, Berkeley, the neighbor to the north in the East Bay. The winner of the annual “Big Game” between the Cal and Cardinal football teams gains custody of the Stanford Axe.

Stanford has had at least one NCAA team champion every year since the 1976–77 school year and has earned 126 NCAA national team titles since its establishment, the most among universities, and Stanford has won 522 individual national championships, the most by any university. Stanford has won the award for the top-ranked Division 1 athletic program—the NACDA Directors’ Cup, formerly known as the Sears Cup—annually for the past twenty-four straight years. Stanford athletes have won medals in every Olympic Games since 1912, winning 270 Olympic medals total, 139 of them gold. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, and 2016 Summer Olympics, Stanford won more Olympic medals than any other university in the United States. Stanford athletes won 16 medals at the 2012 Summer Olympics (12 gold, two silver and two bronze), and 27 medals at the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Traditions

The unofficial motto of Stanford, selected by President Jordan, is Die Luft der Freiheit weht. Translated from the German language, this quotation from Ulrich von Hutten means, “The wind of freedom blows.” The motto was controversial during World War I, when anything in German was suspect; at that time the university disavowed that this motto was official.
Hail, Stanford, Hail! is the Stanford Hymn sometimes sung at ceremonies or adapted by the various University singing groups. It was written in 1892 by mechanical engineering professor Albert W. Smith and his wife, Mary Roberts Smith (in 1896 she earned the first Stanford doctorate in Economics and later became associate professor of Sociology), but was not officially adopted until after a performance on campus in March 1902 by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
“Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman”: Stanford does not award honorary degrees, but in 1953 the degree of “Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman” was created to recognize individuals who give rare and extraordinary service to the University. Technically, this degree is awarded by the Stanford Associates, a voluntary group that is part of the university’s alumni association. As Stanford’s highest honor, it is not conferred at prescribed intervals, but only when appropriate to recognize extraordinary service. Recipients include Herbert Hoover, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Lucile Packard, and John Gardner.
Big Game events: The events in the week leading up to the Big Game vs. UC Berkeley, including Gaieties (a musical written, composed, produced, and performed by the students of Ram’s Head Theatrical Society).
“Viennese Ball”: a formal ball with waltzes that was initially started in the 1970s by students returning from the now-closed Stanford in Vienna overseas program. It is now open to all students.
“Full Moon on the Quad”: An annual event at Main Quad, where students gather to kiss one another starting at midnight. Typically organized by the Junior class cabinet, the festivities include live entertainment, such as music and dance performances.
“Band Run”: An annual festivity at the beginning of the school year, where the band picks up freshmen from dorms across campus while stopping to perform at each location, culminating in a finale performance at Main Quad.
“Mausoleum Party”: An annual Halloween Party at the Stanford Mausoleum, the final resting place of Leland Stanford Jr. and his parents. A 20-year tradition, the “Mausoleum Party” was on hiatus from 2002 to 2005 due to a lack of funding, but was revived in 2006. In 2008, it was hosted in Old Union rather than at the actual Mausoleum, because rain prohibited generators from being rented. In 2009, after fundraising efforts by the Junior Class Presidents and the ASSU Executive, the event was able to return to the Mausoleum despite facing budget cuts earlier in the year.
Former campus traditions include the “Big Game bonfire” on Lake Lagunita (a seasonal lake usually dry in the fall), which was formally ended in 1997 because of the presence of endangered salamanders in the lake bed.

Award laureates and scholars

Stanford’s current community of scholars includes:

19 Nobel Prize laureates (as of October 2020, 85 affiliates in total)
171 members of the National Academy of Sciences
109 members of National Academy of Engineering
76 members of National Academy of Medicine
288 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
19 recipients of the National Medal of Science
1 recipient of the National Medal of Technology
4 recipients of the National Humanities Medal
49 members of American Philosophical Society
56 fellows of the American Physics Society (since 1995)
4 Pulitzer Prize winners
31 MacArthur Fellows
4 Wolf Foundation Prize winners
2 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award winners
14 AAAI fellows
2 Presidential Medal of Freedom winners

From The Michigan State University: “Increasing crop yield and reducing water consumption with precision irrigation”

From The Michigan State University

4.10.23
Hannah Holycross
All images credit Michigan State University

Younsuk Dong, an Assistant Professor and Extension Specialist at the MSU Department of Biosystem and Agricultural Engineering, has created a system that will improve irrigation and plant disease management. Dong’s hardware, entitled the Low-Cost Monitoring System, or LOCOMOS, is aimed at helping farmers determine optimal crop water patterns and can help farmers decide when crops need water and how much water to use. The technology utilizes multiple sensors to monitor in-field soil and environmental conditions and uses algorithms to enable precise irrigation and plant disease management.

Low-Cost Monitoring System, or LOCOMOS.

While the most significant advantage of this technology is an increased crop yield with reduced water consumption, LOCOMOS has also proven to be an excellent tool for improving the overall health of crops. For example, data from LOCOMOS can help farmers determine the best application times for spray chemicals such as fungicides. Likewise, Dong also explained that the technology helps make farms more cost-efficient, ensuring farmers don’t waste expensive spray chemicals when they are not needed.

Dong and his research team have also been working on expanding the use of LOCOMOS to automate the irrigation process as well. Not only would the system aid farmers in learning when to irrigate their crops, but it would also automate the irrigation for them. The controlling system would automatically initiate the irrigation based on the data it gathers from its sensors and can compute optimal precision irrigation solutions based on internal algorithms.

Dong said he first gained inspiration for this project from his passion for creating solutions. “In engineering, we like to make things that can help others, so when people say ‘I need this’ or ‘I wish this one technology could do this,’ that is where we come in and start making solutions for it.”

Jon Debling, the technology manager on the project, said that Dong and coinventors Steve Miller and Lyndon Kelly first brought the idea for the technology to the Innovation Center in 2020. “They came to us with this innovation, and we have been working with them on how to advance it further.” With the help of the Innovation Center, Dong and Zhichao Cao, assistant professor at the MSU Department of Computer Science and Engineering, leveraged funding through a full Michigan Translational Research and Commercialization, or MTRAC, grant and with support from the Technology Transfer Talent Network, which are both supported by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.

The MTRAC grant supports the development of an app, currently available on Android devices, that allows farmers to check moisture conditions and make watering decisions from their phones. “Basically, now all farmers have smartphones, so they can use this user-friendly app to tell them what moisture level is in their fields and can provide some recommendations on when to water them and how much water along with pesticide spray timing,” explained Dong.

The partnership is also helping Dong and his team to explore the feasibility of forming a startup company to bring the LOCOMOS technology to market. Working with MSU Technologies , and Spartan Innovations, Dong, along with Hunter Hansen, a research assistant in MSU’s Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering, and Todd Griebe with Spartan Innovations, interviewed farmers, completing 110 interviews, through the NSF Innovation Corps program for customer discovery.

“The process of customer discovery is vital to understanding the problems potential customers face,” says Brad Fingland, director of venture creation at Spartan Innovations. “The support of Spartan Innovations, the Innovations Center, and the NSF I-Corps program are critical in helping guide research in commercially viable sectors.”

LOCOMOS has already been proven in multiple farms in crops such as corn, soybeans, potatoes, blueberries and tomatoes, while testing will soon start in apples and chestnuts. In 2022 Dong worked directly with nearly 20 farmers, and LOCOMOS has been installed in 82 stations across Michigan. Whether it be crop irrigation or disease prevention on fields of corn, soybeans or other crops, LOCOMOS is changing how we see irrigation and, potentially, how we water our crops.

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Michigan State University is a public research university located in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. Michigan State University was founded in 1855 and became the nation’s first land-grant institution under the Morrill Act of 1862, serving as a model for future land-grant universities.

The university was founded as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, one of the country’s first institutions of higher education to teach scientific agriculture. After the introduction of the Morrill Act, the college became coeducational and expanded its curriculum beyond agriculture. Today, Michigan State University is one of the largest universities in the United States (in terms of enrollment) and has approximately 634,300 living alumni worldwide.

U.S. News & World Report ranks its graduate programs the best in the U.S. in elementary teacher’s education, secondary teacher’s education, industrial and organizational psychology, rehabilitation counseling, African history (tied), supply chain logistics and nuclear physics in 2019. Michigan State University pioneered the studies of packaging, hospitality business, supply chain management, and communication sciences. Michigan State University is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. The university’s campus houses the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, the W. J. Beal Botanical Garden, the Abrams Planetarium, the Wharton Center for Performing Arts, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, and the country’s largest residence hall system.

Research

The university has a long history of academic research and innovation. In 1877, botany professor William J. Beal performed the first documented genetic crosses to produce hybrid corn, which led to increased yields. Michigan State University dairy professor G. Malcolm Trout improved the process for the homogenization of milk in the 1930s, making it more commercially viable. In the 1960s, Michigan State University scientists developed cisplatin, a leading cancer fighting drug, and followed that work with the derivative, carboplatin. Albert Fert, an Adjunct professor at Michigan State University, was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Peter Grünberg.

Today Michigan State University continues its research with facilities such as the Department of Energy -sponsored Plant Research Laboratory and a particle accelerator called the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory [below]. The Department of Energy Office of Science named Michigan State University as the site for the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB). The $730 million facility will attract top researchers from around the world to conduct experiments in basic nuclear science, astrophysics, and applications of isotopes to other fields.

Michigan State University FRIB [Facility for Rare Isotope Beams] .

In 2004, scientists at the Cyclotron produced and observed a new isotope of the element germanium, called Ge-60 In that same year, Michigan State University, in consortium with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the government of Brazil, broke ground on the 4.1-meter Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope (SOAR) in the Andes Mountains of Chile.

NSF NOIRLab NOAO Southern Astrophysical Research [SOAR] telescope, operated by a consortium including the countries of Brazil and Chile, Michigan State University, the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) (part of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, NOAO), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill situated on Cerro Pachón, just to the southeast of Cerro Tololo, on the NOIRLab NOAO AURA site at an altitude of 2,700 meters (8,775 feet) above sea level.

The consortium telescope will allow the Physics & Astronomy department to study galaxy formation and origins. Since 1999, Michigan State University has been part of a consortium called the Michigan Life Sciences Corridor, which aims to develop biotechnology research in the State of Michigan. Finally, the College of Communication Arts and Sciences’ Quello Center researches issues of information and communication management.

NSCL Nuclear research at Michigan State University National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory S800 Spectrograph schematic.

The Michigan State University Spartans compete in the NCAA Division I Big Ten Conference. Michigan State Spartans football won the Rose Bowl Game in 1954, 1956, 1988 and 2014, and the university claims a total of six national football championships. Spartans men’s basketball won the NCAA National Championship in 1979 and 2000 and has attained the Final Four eight times since the 1998–1999 season. Spartans ice hockey won NCAA national titles in 1966, 1986 and 2007. The women’s cross country team was named Big Ten champions in 2019. In the fall of 2019, MSU student-athletes posted all-time highs for graduation success rates and federal graduation rates, according to NCAA statistics.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz: “Study pushes back the emergence of African grasslands by more than 10 million years”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz

4.13.23
Tim Stephens | UCSC
stephens@ucsc.edu

Kelly Craine | Baylor

Combined isotopic and geological evidence associated with fossil sites on Napak, in eastern Uganda, indicate a relatively open dry bushland to woodland environment with the presence of grasses, supporting the early evolution of grassy woodland habitats around 20 million years ago. (Image credit: John Kingston)

Today, the Songhor fossil site in western Kenya is covered by a mixture of grass and trees adjacent to a modern river. Evidence from this site indicates that it was likely a relatively closed tropical seasonal forest environment between 19 and 20 million years ago. (Image credit: John Kingston)

An international team of scientists has documented the earliest evidence for local abundance in eastern Africa of the types of grasses that now dominate grassland and savannah ecosystems in tropical and subtropical regions around the world.

Africa’s iconic grasslands are dominated by plants known as “C4 grasses,” which use a photosynthetic pathway adapted for warm, arid conditions. The emergence of these ecosystems is important for understanding the evolution of early apes and other mammals.

“This new study puts C4 grasses on the landscape more than 10 million years before these grasses came to dominate the landscapes where we see them today,” said Pratigya Polissar, associate professor of ocean sciences at UC Santa Cruz and a coauthor of the study, published April 13 in Science [below].

Researchers have often argued that during the early Miocene, between about 15 and 20 million years ago, equatorial Africa was covered by a semi-continuous forest and that open habitats with C4 grasses didn’t proliferate until about 8 to 10 million years ago. Yet there was some research indicating that C4 grasses were present in East Africa as early as 15 million years ago.

The new study sought to determine if this was an anomaly or a clue to the true diversity of ecosystems that occurred during the early Miocene. The findings would have important implications for understanding the features and adaptations of early apes and why there are tropical C4 grasslands and savanna ecosystems in Africa and around the world.

First author Daniel Peppe at Baylor University and an interdisciplinary team of scientists conducted research at nine Early Miocene fossil site complexes in the East African Rift of Kenya and Uganda as part of the Research on Eastern African Catarrhine and Hominoid Evolution (REACHE) project. The team focused on understanding the types of ecosystems that existed in the early Miocene, the prevalence of open environments and C4 grasses, and how these different environments could have potentially affected the evolution of early apes.

Polissar conducted isotopic analysis of fossil soils, focusing on molecular biomarkers from the plants that lived on those soils. “Our carbon isotope analysis of those soils provides unambiguous evidence for grasses with the C4 pathway living in these ancient environments,” he said. “This is a huge project and there were many other analyses that contributed to the overall findings as well.”

As participants exchanged information and expertise about geological features, isotopes, and plant and ape fossils found at the sites, the bigger picture came into focus. The paradigm that during the early Miocene period equatorial Africa was completely forested was wrong.

Further, the result of this decade-long research pushes back the oldest evidence of habitats dominated by C4 grasses—in Africa and globally—by more than 10 million years, calling for revised paleoecological interpretations of mammalian evolution.

“We suspected that we would find C4 plants at some sites, but we didn’t expect to find them at as many sites as we did, and in such high abundance,” Peppe said. “Multiple lines of evidence show that C4 grasses and open habitats were important parts of the early Miocene landscape and that early apes lived in a wide variety of habitats, ranging from closed canopy forests to open habitats like scrublands and wooded grasslands with C4 grasses. It really changes our understanding of what ecosystems looked like when the modern African plant and animal community was evolving.”

The research flourished through the uniqueness of the REACHE project, according to coauthor Kieran McNulty at the University of Minnesota, who played a central role in organizing the project.

“Working in the fossil record is challenging. We discover hints and clues about past life and need to figure out how to assemble and interpret them across space and time. Any one of the analyses in these papers would have made for an interesting study, and any one of them, alone, would have produced incomplete, inconclusive, or incorrect interpretations,” McNulty said. “That is the nature of paleontological research: it’s like putting together a 4D puzzle, but where each team member can only see some of the pieces. By combining these methods, we leverage the strength of one to shore up weaknesses or validate assumptions of another, resulting in a synthetic approach that challenges well-established theories.”

The team combined many different lines of evidence—from geology, fossil soils, isotopes, and phytoliths (plant silica microfossils)—to reach their conclusions.

“The history of grassland ecosystems in Africa prior to 10 million years had remained a mystery, in part because there were so few plant fossils, so it was exciting when it became clear that we had phytolith assemblages to add to the other lines of evidence,” said coauthor Caroline Strömberg at the University of Washington. “What we found was thrilling, and very different from what was the accepted story. We used to think tropical, C4-dominated grasslands only appeared in the last 8 million years or so, depending on the continent. Instead, both phytolith data and isotopic data showed that C4-dominated grassy environments appeared over 10 million years earlier, in the early Miocene in eastern Africa.”

This much earlier occurrence of C4 grasses and open habitats found at the same sites as early apes also allowed the researchers to assess the kinds of environments in which the early apes were living. One of the most advanced early apes, Morotopithecus, was found to inhabit open woodland environments with abundant grasses and to rely on leaves as an important component of its diet. This contradicts long-standing predictions that the unique features of apes, such as an upright torso, originated in forested environments to enable access to fruit resources. These findings are transformative, said Robin Bernstein, program director for biological anthropology at the U.S. National Science Foundation.

“For the first time, by combining diverse lines of evidence, this collaborative research team tied specific aspects of early ape anatomy to nuanced environmental changes in their habitat in eastern Africa, now revealed as more open and less forested than previously thought. The effort outlines a new framework for future studies regarding ape evolutionary origins,” Bernstein said.

The research team includes Daniel J. Peppe, Susanne M. Cote, Alan L. Deino, David L. Fox, John D. Kingston, Rahab N. Kinyanjui, William E. Lukens, Laura M. MacLatchy, Alice Novello, Caroline A.E. Strömberg, Steven G. Driese, Nicole D. Garrett, Kayla R. Hillis, Bonnie F. Jacobs, Kirsten E.H. Jenkins, Robert Kityo, Thomas Lehmann, Fredrick K. Manthi, Emma N. Mbua, Lauren A. Michel, Ellen R. Miller, Amon A.T. Mugume, Samuel N. Muteti, Isaiah O. Nengo, Kennedy O. Oginga, Samuel R. Phelps, Pratigya Polissar, James B. Rossie, Nancy J. Stevens, Kevin T. Uno, and Kieran P. McNulty.

This work was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Science

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz, opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Founded in 1965, The University of California-Santa Cruz began with the intention to showcase progressive, cross-disciplinary undergraduate education, innovative teaching methods and contemporary architecture. The residential college system consists of ten small colleges that were established as a variation of the Oxbridge collegiate university system.

Among the Faculty is 1 Nobel Prize Laureate, 1 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences recipient, 12 members from the National Academy of Sciences, 28 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 40 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Eight University of California-Santa Cruz alumni are winners of 10 Pulitzer Prizes. The University of California-Santa Cruz is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. It is a member of the Association of American Universities, an alliance of elite research universities in the United States and Canada.

The university has five academic divisions: Arts, Engineering, Humanities, Physical & Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences. Together, they offer 65 graduate programs, 64 undergraduate majors, and 41 minors.

Popular undergraduate majors include Art, Business Management Economics, Chemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology, Physics, and Psychology. Interdisciplinary programs, such as Computational Media, Feminist Studies, Environmental Studies, Visual Studies, Digital Arts and New Media, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, and the History of Consciousness Department are also hosted alongside UCSC’s more traditional academic departments.

A joint program with The University of California-Hastings enables University of California-Santa Cruz students to earn a bachelor’s degree and Juris Doctor degree in six years instead of the usual seven. The “3+3 BA/JD” Program between University of California-Santa Cruz and The University of California-Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco accepted its first applicants in fall 2014. University of California-Santa Cruz students who declare their intent in their freshman or early sophomore year will complete three years at The University of California-Santa Cruz and then move on to The University of California-Hastings to begin the three-year law curriculum. Credits from the first year of law school will count toward a student’s bachelor’s degree. Students who successfully complete the first-year law course work will receive their bachelor’s degree and be able to graduate with their University of California-Santa Cruz class, then continue at The University of California-Hastings afterwards for two years.

According to the National Science Foundation, The University of California-Santa Cruz spent $127.5 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 144th in the nation.

Although designed as a liberal arts-oriented university, The University of California-Santa Cruz quickly acquired a graduate-level natural science research component with the appointment of plant physiologist Kenneth V. Thimann as the first provost of Crown College. Thimann developed The University of California-Santa Cruz’s early Division of Natural Sciences and recruited other well-known science faculty and graduate students to the fledgling campus. Immediately upon its founding, The University of California-Santa Cruz was also granted administrative responsibility for the Lick Observatory, which established the campus as a major center for Astronomy research. Founding members of the Social Science and Humanities faculty created the unique History of Consciousness graduate program in The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first year of operation.

Famous former University of California-Santa Cruz faculty members include Judith Butler and Angela Davis.

The University of California-Santa Cruz’s organic farm and garden program is the oldest in the country, and pioneered organic horticulture techniques internationally.

As of 2015, The University of California-Santa Cruz’s faculty include 13 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 33 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Baskin School of Engineering, founded in 1997, is The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first and only professional school. Baskin Engineering is home to several research centers, including the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and Cyberphysical Systems Research Center, which are gaining recognition, as has the work that UCSC researchers David Haussler and Jim Kent have done on the Human Genome Project, including the widely used University of California-Santa Cruz Genome Browser. The University of California-Santa Cruz administers the National Science Foundation’s Center for Adaptive Optics.

Off-campus research facilities maintained by The University of California-Santa Cruz include the Lick and The W. M. Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawai’i and the Long Marine Laboratory. From September 2003 to July 2016, The University of California-Santa Cruz managed a University Affiliated Research System (UARC) for the NASA Ames Research Center under a task order contract valued at more than $330 million.

The University of California-Santa Cruz was tied for 58th in the list of Best Global Universities and tied for 97th in the list of Best National Universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 rankings. In 2017 Kiplinger ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 50th out of the top 100 best-value public colleges and universities in the nation, and 3rd in California. Money Magazine ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 41st in the country out of the nearly 1500 schools it evaluated for its 2016 Best Colleges ranking. In 2016–2017, The University of California-Santa Cruz Santa Cruz was rated 146th in the world by Times Higher Education World University Rankings. In 2016 it was ranked 83rd in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities and 296th worldwide in 2016 by the QS World University Rankings.

In 2009, RePEc, an online database of research economics articles, ranked the The University of California-Santa Cruz Economics Department sixth in the world in the field of international finance. In 2007, High Times magazine placed The University of California-Santa Cruz as first among US universities as a “counterculture college.” In 2009, The Princeton Review (with Gamepro magazine) ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Game Design major among the top 50 in the country. In 2011, The Princeton Review and Gamepro Media ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s graduate programs in Game Design as seventh in the nation. In 2012, The University of California-Santa Cruz was ranked No. 3 in the Most Beautiful Campus list of Princeton Review.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

The University of California-Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory

New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light

March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at The University of Toronto (CA)’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at University of California’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at The University of California- San Diego, discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the University of Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to The University of California-San Diego and installed at the UC Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, The University of California-San Diego Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a University of California-Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at The University of California-Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute.

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.