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University of Vermont

2019

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Articles 1 - 30 of 114

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Optimization Of Over-Summer Snow Storage At Midlatitudes And Low Elevation, Hannah S. Weiss, Paul R. Bierman, Yves Dubief, Scott D. Hamshaw Dec 2019

Optimization Of Over-Summer Snow Storage At Midlatitudes And Low Elevation, Hannah S. Weiss, Paul R. Bierman, Yves Dubief, Scott D. Hamshaw

College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Publications

Climate change, including warmer winter temperatures, a shortened snowfall season, and more rain-on-snow events, threatens nordic skiing as a sport. In response, oversummer snow storage, attempted primarily using woodchips as a cover material, has been successfully employed as a climate change adaptation strategy by high-elevation and/or high-latitude ski centers in Europe and Canada. Such storage has never been attempted at a site that is both low elevation and midlatitude, and few studies have quantified storage losses repeatedly through the summer. Such data, along with tests of different cover strategies, are prerequisites to optimizing snow storage strategies. Here, we assess the …

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The Northwestern Greenland Ice Sheet During The Early Pleistocene Was Similar To Today, Andrew J. Christ, Paul R. Bierman, Paul C. Knutz, Lee B. Corbett, Julie C. Fosdick, Elizabeth K. Thomas, Owen C. Cowling, Alan J. Hidy, Marc W. Caffee Dec 2019

The Northwestern Greenland Ice Sheet During The Early Pleistocene Was Similar To Today, Andrew J. Christ, Paul R. Bierman, Paul C. Knutz, Lee B. Corbett, Julie C. Fosdick, Elizabeth K. Thomas, Owen C. Cowling, Alan J. Hidy, Marc W. Caffee

College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Publications

The multi-million year history of the Greenland Ice Sheet remains poorly known. Ice-proximal glacial marine diamict provides a direct but discontinuous record of ice sheet behavior; it is underutilized as a climate archive. Here, we present a novel multiproxy analysis of an Early Pleistocene marine diamict from northwestern Greenland. Low cosmogenic nuclide concentrations indicate minimal near-surface exposure, similar to modern terrestrial sediment. Detrital apatite (U-Th-Sm)/He (AHe) ages all predate glaciation by >150 million years, suggesting the northwestern Greenland Ice Sheet had, by 1.9 Ma, not yet incised fjords of sufficient depth to excavate grains with young AHe ages. The diamict …

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Water Quality Improvements Offset The Climatic Debt For Stream Macroinvertebrates Over Twenty Years, Ian P. Vaughan, Nicholas J. Gotelli Dec 2019

Water Quality Improvements Offset The Climatic Debt For Stream Macroinvertebrates Over Twenty Years, Ian P. Vaughan, Nicholas J. Gotelli

College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Publications

Many species are accumulating climatic debt as they fail to keep pace with increasing global temperatures. In theory, concomitant decreases in other stressors (e.g. pollution, fragmentation) could offset some warming effects, paying climatic debt with accrued environmental credit. This process may be occurring in many western European rivers. We fit a Markov chain model to ~20,000 macroinvertebrate samples from England and Wales, and demonstrate that despite large temperature increases 1991–2011, macroinvertebrate communities remained close to their predicted equilibrium with environmental conditions. Using a novel analysis of multiple stressors, an accumulated climatic debt of 0.64 (±0.13 standard error) °C of warming …

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Sustainablewell-Being Challenge: A Student-Centered Pedagogical Tool Linking Human Well-Being To Ecological Flourishing, Christine Vatovec, Haley Ferrer Dec 2019

Sustainablewell-Being Challenge: A Student-Centered Pedagogical Tool Linking Human Well-Being To Ecological Flourishing, Christine Vatovec, Haley Ferrer

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Human behavioral change is necessary if we wish to evolve into a more sustainable human society, but change is hard, especially given that many people equate environmentalism with personal sacrifice. This paper highlights a semester-long assignment in which undergraduate students examined five behaviors that claim to increase happiness with minimal ecological footprints. We used mixed methods to analyze students' self-reported positive and negative affect scores before and after completing each of the five activities, along with descriptions of the carbon footprint of each activity and student self-reflections on whether each challenge promoted "sustainability". Results indicated that students' positive affect increased …

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Making Trees Count: Measurement And Reporting Of Agroforestry In Unfccc National Communications Of Non-Annex I Countries, Todd S. Rosenstock, Andreas Wilkes, Courtney Jallo, Nictor Namoi, Medha Bulusu, Marta Suber, Damaris Mboi, Rachmat Mulia, Elisabeth Simelton, Meryl Richards, Noel Gurwick, Eva Wollenberg Nov 2019

Making Trees Count: Measurement And Reporting Of Agroforestry In Unfccc National Communications Of Non-Annex I Countries, Todd S. Rosenstock, Andreas Wilkes, Courtney Jallo, Nictor Namoi, Medha Bulusu, Marta Suber, Damaris Mboi, Rachmat Mulia, Elisabeth Simelton, Meryl Richards, Noel Gurwick, Eva Wollenberg

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Agroforestry—the integration of trees with crops and livestock—generates many benefits directly relevant to the UNFCCC's Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture, including: (i) building resilience, (ii) increasing soil carbon and improving soil health, (iii) providing fodder and shade for sustainable livestock production and (iv) diversifying human diets and economic opportunities. Despite its significance to the climate agenda, agroforestry may not be included in measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) systems under the UNFCCC. Here we report on a first appraisal of how agroforestry is treated in national MRV systems under the UNFCCC. We examined national communications (NCs) and Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) …

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Soil Aggregates As A Source Of Dissolved Organic Carbon To Streams: An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Solution Chemistry On Water Extractable Carbon, Malayika M. Cincotta, Julia N. Perdrial, Aaron Shavitz, Arianna Libenson, Maxwell Landsman-Gerjoi, Nicolas Perdrial, Jesse Armfield, Thomas Adler, James B. Shanley Nov 2019

Soil Aggregates As A Source Of Dissolved Organic Carbon To Streams: An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Solution Chemistry On Water Extractable Carbon, Malayika M. Cincotta, Julia N. Perdrial, Aaron Shavitz, Arianna Libenson, Maxwell Landsman-Gerjoi, Nicolas Perdrial, Jesse Armfield, Thomas Adler, James B. Shanley

College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Publications

Over the past two decades, headwater streams of the northern hemisphere have shown increased amounts of dissolved organic carbon (DOC), coinciding with decreased acid deposition. The exact nature of the mechanistic link between precipitation composition and stream water DOC is still widely debated in the literature. We hypothesize that soil aggregates are the main source of stream water DOC and that DOC release is greater in organic rich, riparian soils vs. hillslope soils. To test these hypotheses, we collected soils from two main landscape positions (hillslope and riparian zones) from the acid-impacted Sleepers River Research Watershed in northeastern Vermont. We …

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Functional Dissection Of The Chickpea (Cicer Arietinum L.) Stay-Green Phenotype Associated With Molecular Variation At An Ortholog Of Mendel’S I Gene For Cotyledon Color: Implications For Crop Production And Carotenoid Biofortification, Kaliamoorthy Sivasakthi, Edward Marques, Ng’Andwe Kalungwana, Noelia Carrasquilla-Garcia, Peter L. Chang, Emily M. Bergmann, Erika Bueno, Matilde Cordeiro, Syed Gul A.S. Sani, Sripada M. Udupa, Irshad A. Rather, Reyazul Rouf Mir, Vincent Vadez, George J. Vandemark, Pooran M. Gaur, Douglas R. Cook, Christine Boesch, Eric J.B. Von Wettberg, Jana Kholova, R. Varma Penmetsa Nov 2019

Functional Dissection Of The Chickpea (Cicer Arietinum L.) Stay-Green Phenotype Associated With Molecular Variation At An Ortholog Of Mendel’S I Gene For Cotyledon Color: Implications For Crop Production And Carotenoid Biofortification, Kaliamoorthy Sivasakthi, Edward Marques, Ng’Andwe Kalungwana, Noelia Carrasquilla-Garcia, Peter L. Chang, Emily M. Bergmann, Erika Bueno, Matilde Cordeiro, Syed Gul A.S. Sani, Sripada M. Udupa, Irshad A. Rather, Reyazul Rouf Mir, Vincent Vadez, George J. Vandemark, Pooran M. Gaur, Douglas R. Cook, Christine Boesch, Eric J.B. Von Wettberg, Jana Kholova, R. Varma Penmetsa

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

“Stay-green” crop phenotypes have been shown to impact drought tolerance and nutritional content of several crops. We aimed to genetically describe and functionally dissect the particular stay-green phenomenon found in chickpeas with a green cotyledon color of mature dry seed and investigate its potential use for improvement of chickpea environmental adaptations and nutritional value. We examined 40 stay-green accessions and a set of 29 BC2F4-5 stay-green introgression lines using a stay-green donor parent ICC 16340 and two Indian elite cultivars (KAK2, JGK1) as recurrent parents. Genetic studies of segregating populations indicated that the green cotyledon trait is controlled by a …

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Designing A Global Mechanism For Intergovernmental Biodiversity Financing, Nils Droste, Joshua Farley, Irene Ring, Peter H. May, Taylor H. Ricketts Nov 2019

Designing A Global Mechanism For Intergovernmental Biodiversity Financing, Nils Droste, Joshua Farley, Irene Ring, Peter H. May, Taylor H. Ricketts

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

The Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol display a broad international consensus for biodiversity conservation and equitable benefit sharing. Yet, the Aichi biodiversity targets show a lack of progress and thus indicate a need for additional action such as enhanced and better targeted financial resource mobilization. To date, no global financial burden-sharing instrument has been proposed. Developing a global-scale financial mechanism to support biodiversity conservation through intergovernmental transfers, we simulate three allocation designs: ecocentric, socioecological, and anthropocentric. We analyze the corresponding incentives needed to reach the Aichi target of terrestrial protected area coverage by 2020. Here we show …

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Genotype-Specific Effects Of Ericoid Mycorrhizae On Floral Traits And Reproduction In Vaccinium Corymbosum, Alison K. Brody, Benjamin Waterman, Taylor H. Ricketts, Allyson L. Degrassi, Jonathan B. González, Jeanne M. Harris, Leif L. Richardson Nov 2019

Genotype-Specific Effects Of Ericoid Mycorrhizae On Floral Traits And Reproduction In Vaccinium Corymbosum, Alison K. Brody, Benjamin Waterman, Taylor H. Ricketts, Allyson L. Degrassi, Jonathan B. González, Jeanne M. Harris, Leif L. Richardson

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

American Journal of Botany is published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of the Botanical Society of America. Premise: Most plants interact with mycorrhizal fungi and animal pollinators simultaneously. Yet, whether mycorrhizae affect traits important to pollination remains poorly understood and may depend on the match between host and fungal genotypes. Here, we examined how ericoid mycorrhizal fungi affected flowering phenology, floral traits, and reproductive success, among eight genotypes of highbush blueberry, Vaccinium corymbosum (Ericaceae). We asked three overarching questions: (1) Do genotypes differ in response to inoculation? (2) How does inoculation affect floral and flowering traits? (3) Are inoculated …

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Bird Dispersal As A Pre-Adaptation For Domestication In Legumes: Insights For Neo-Domestication, Hester Brǿnnvik, Eric J. Von Wettberg Oct 2019

Bird Dispersal As A Pre-Adaptation For Domestication In Legumes: Insights For Neo-Domestication, Hester Brǿnnvik, Eric J. Von Wettberg

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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Payment For Ecosystem Services: Incentives To Support Environmental Quality & Farming In Vermont, Stephen Posner, Taylor Ricketts, Eric Roy Oct 2019

Payment For Ecosystem Services: Incentives To Support Environmental Quality & Farming In Vermont, Stephen Posner, Taylor Ricketts, Eric Roy

Reports and Policy Briefs

Environmental quality is an ongoing concern in the Lake Champlain Basin. Vermont farmers are in a unique position to manage land in a way that maintains and improves environmental quality. A payment for ecosystem services (PES) program for Vermont would both support the economic vi- ability of Vermont farms and incentivize farmers to improve water quality and soil health. How- ever, conceptual and practical implementation challenges remain.

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Green Infrastructure Solutions To Health Impacts Of Climate Change: Perspectives Of Affected Residents In Detroit, Michigan, Usa, Christine Carmichael, Cecilia Danks, Christine Vatovec Oct 2019

Green Infrastructure Solutions To Health Impacts Of Climate Change: Perspectives Of Affected Residents In Detroit, Michigan, Usa, Christine Carmichael, Cecilia Danks, Christine Vatovec

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Cities worldwide are incorporating green infrastructure to mitigate climate change and achieve health cobenefits. However, green infrastructure projects are often distributed inequitably based on race and class. Residents' perspectives are necessary to develop and enact effective and equitable 'green' strategies to address climate change and its health impacts. This study reports findings from interviews and ethnographic observations with diverse residents of Detroit, Michigan, USA, who have experience with both green infrastructure projects and intense weather events (flooding). Residents expressed widespread support for green infrastructure solutions, while also sharing concerns about unintended health consequences from unsatisfactory governance of green spaces and …

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Loving The Mess: Navigating Diversity And Conflict In Social Values For Sustainability, Jasper O. Kenter, Christopher M. Raymond, Carena J. Van Riper, Elaine Azzopardi, Michelle R. Brear, Fulvia Calcagni, Ian Christie, Michael Christie, Anne Fordham, Rachelle K. Gould, Christopher D. Ives, Adam P. Hejnowicz, Richard Gunton, Andra Ioana Horcea-Milcu, Dave Kendal, Jakub Kronenberg, Julian R. Massenberg, Seb O’Connor, Neil Ravenscroft, Andrea Rawluk, Ivan J. Raymond, Jorge Rodríguez-Morales, Samarthia Thankappan Sep 2019

Loving The Mess: Navigating Diversity And Conflict In Social Values For Sustainability, Jasper O. Kenter, Christopher M. Raymond, Carena J. Van Riper, Elaine Azzopardi, Michelle R. Brear, Fulvia Calcagni, Ian Christie, Michael Christie, Anne Fordham, Rachelle K. Gould, Christopher D. Ives, Adam P. Hejnowicz, Richard Gunton, Andra Ioana Horcea-Milcu, Dave Kendal, Jakub Kronenberg, Julian R. Massenberg, Seb O’Connor, Neil Ravenscroft, Andrea Rawluk, Ivan J. Raymond, Jorge Rodríguez-Morales, Samarthia Thankappan

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of ‘lenses’ and ‘tensions’ to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what epistemic and procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas …

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Scale And Sense Of Place Among Urban Dwellers, Nicole M. Ardoin, Rachelle K. Gould, Heather Lukacs, Carly C. Sponarski, Janel S. Schuh Sep 2019

Scale And Sense Of Place Among Urban Dwellers, Nicole M. Ardoin, Rachelle K. Gould, Heather Lukacs, Carly C. Sponarski, Janel S. Schuh

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Place connections are core to being human: Every person lives in, and thus has direct experience of, at least one place and likely of numerous places throughout a lifetime. Sense of place—or the meanings, knowledge, and bonds that arise from the biophysical, social, and political–economic aspects of places—in turn influences people's interactions with those places. Of particular interest to researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, such interactions can impact place-protective, stewardship, or conservation behaviors. However, how sense of place develops and what it represents is shifting in today's rapidly urbanizing, globalizing world. Especially when considering the integrated social–ecological context, questions related to …

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Us County-Level Agricultural Crop Production Typology, Courtney R. Hammond Wagner, Meredith T. Niles, Eric D. Roy Aug 2019

Us County-Level Agricultural Crop Production Typology, Courtney R. Hammond Wagner, Meredith T. Niles, Eric D. Roy

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Objectives: Crop production is an important variable in social, economic and environmental analyses. There is an abundance of crop data available for the United States, but we lack a typology of county-level crop production that accounts for production similarities in counties across the country. We fill this gap with a county-level classification of crop production with ten mutually exclusive categories across the contiguous United States. Data description: To create the typology we ran a cluster analysis on acreage data for 21 key crops from the United States Department of Agriculture's 2012 Agricultural Census. Prior to clustering, we estimated undisclosed county …

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Us County-Level Agricultural Crop Production Typology, Courtney R. Hammond Wagner, Meredith T. Niles, Eric D. Roy Aug 2019

Us County-Level Agricultural Crop Production Typology, Courtney R. Hammond Wagner, Meredith T. Niles, Eric D. Roy

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

Objectives: Crop production is an important variable in social, economic and environmental analyses. There is an abundance of crop data available for the United States, but we lack a typology of county-level crop production that accounts for production similarities in counties across the country. We fill this gap with a county-level classification of crop production with ten mutually exclusive categories across the contiguous United States. Data description: To create the typology we ran a cluster analysis on acreage data for 21 key crops from the United States Department of Agriculture's 2012 Agricultural Census. Prior to clustering, we estimated undisclosed county …

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Policy Options To Streamline The Carbon Market For Agricultural Nitrous Oxide Emissions, Meredith T. Niles, Hannah Waterhouse, Robert Parkhurst, Eileen L. Mclellan, Sara Kroopf Aug 2019

Policy Options To Streamline The Carbon Market For Agricultural Nitrous Oxide Emissions, Meredith T. Niles, Hannah Waterhouse, Robert Parkhurst, Eileen L. Mclellan, Sara Kroopf

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

The majority of emissions of nitrous oxide – a potent greenhouse gas (GHG) – are from agricultural sources, particularly nitrogen fertilizer applications. A growing focus on these emission sources has led to the development in the United States of GHG offset protocols that could enable payment to farmers for reducing fertilizer use or implementing other nitrogen management strategies. Despite the development of several protocols, the current regional scope is narrow, adoption by farmers is low, and policy implementation of protocols has a significant time lag. Here we utilize existing research and policy structures to propose an ‘umbrella’ approach for nitrogen …

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An Analog Approach For Weather Estimation Using Climate Projections And Reanalysis Data, Patrick J. Clemins, Gabriela Bucini, Jonathan M. Winter, Brian Beckage, Erin Towler, Alan Betts, Rory Cummings, Henrique Chang Queiroz Aug 2019

An Analog Approach For Weather Estimation Using Climate Projections And Reanalysis Data, Patrick J. Clemins, Gabriela Bucini, Jonathan M. Winter, Brian Beckage, Erin Towler, Alan Betts, Rory Cummings, Henrique Chang Queiroz

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

General circulation models (GCMs) are essential for projecting future climate; however, despite the rapid advances in their ability to simulate the climate system at increasing spatial resolution, GCMs cannot capture the local and regional weather dynamics necessary for climate impacts assessments. Temperature and precipitation, for which dense observational records are available, can be bias corrected and downscaled, but many climate impacts models require a larger set of variables such as relative humidity, cloud cover, wind speed and direction, and solar radiation. To address this need, we develop and demonstrate an analog-based approach, which we call a ‘‘weather estimator.’’ The weather …

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Late Quaternary Tectonics, Incision, And Landscape Evolution Of The Calchaquí River Catchment, Eastern Cordillera, Nw Argentina, James A. Mccarthy, Lindsay M. Schoenbohm, Paul R. Bierman, Dylan Rood, Alan J. Hidy Aug 2019

Late Quaternary Tectonics, Incision, And Landscape Evolution Of The Calchaquí River Catchment, Eastern Cordillera, Nw Argentina, James A. Mccarthy, Lindsay M. Schoenbohm, Paul R. Bierman, Dylan Rood, Alan J. Hidy

College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Publications

Unraveling the relative impacts of climate, tectonics, and lithology on landscape evolution is complicated by the temporal and spatial scale over which observations are made. We use soil and desert pavement classification, longitudinal river profiles, 10Be-derived catchment mean modern and paleo-erosion rates, and vertical incision rates to test whether, if we restrict our analyses to a spatial scale over which climate is relatively invariant, tectonic and lithologic factors will dominate the late Quaternary landscape evolution of the Calchaquí River Catchment, NW Argentina. We find that the spatial distribution of erosion rates, normalized channel steepness indices, and concavity indices reflect active …

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Engaging Policy In Science Writing: Patterns And Strategies, J. B. Ruhl, Stephen M. Posner, Taylor H. Ricketts Aug 2019

Engaging Policy In Science Writing: Patterns And Strategies, J. B. Ruhl, Stephen M. Posner, Taylor H. Ricketts

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Many scientific researchers aspire to engage policy in their writing, but translating scientific research and findings into policy discussion often requires an understanding of the institutional complexities of legal and policy processes and actors. To examine how researchers have undertaken that challenge, we developed a set of metrics and applied them to articles published in one of the principal academic publication venues for science and policy—Science magazine’s Policy Forum. We reviewed each Policy Forum article published over a five-year period (2011–15), 220 in all. For each article, we assessed the level of policy content based on presence of a stated …

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Effects Of Human Demand On Conservation Planning For Biodiversity And Ecosystem Services, Keri B. Watson, Gillian L. Galford, Laura J. Sonter, Insu Koh, Taylor H. Ricketts Aug 2019

Effects Of Human Demand On Conservation Planning For Biodiversity And Ecosystem Services, Keri B. Watson, Gillian L. Galford, Laura J. Sonter, Insu Koh, Taylor H. Ricketts

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Safeguarding ecosystem services and biodiversity is critical to achieving sustainable development. To date, ecosystem services quantification has focused on the biophysical supply of services with less emphasis on human beneficiaries (i.e., demand). Only when both occur do ecosystems benefit people, but demand may shift ecosystem service priorities toward human-dominated landscapes that support less biodiversity. We quantified how accounting for demand affects the efficiency of conservation in capturing both human benefits and biodiversity by comparing conservation priorities identified with and without accounting for demand. We mapped supply and benefit for 3 ecosystem services (flood mitigation, crop pollination, and nature-based recreation) by …

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Aligning Evidence Generation And Use Across Health, Development, And Environment, Heather Tallis, Katharine Kreis, Lydia Olander, Claudia Ringler, David Ameyaw, Mark E. Borsuk, Diana Fletschner, Edward Game, Daniel O. Gilligan, Marc Jeuland, Gina Kennedy, Yuta J. Masuda, Sumi Mehta, Nicholas Miller, Megan Parker, Carmel Pollino, Julie Rajaratnam, David Wilkie, Wei Zhang, Selena Ahmed, Oluyede C. Ajayi, Harold Alderman, George Arhonditsis, Ines Azevedo, Ruchi Badola, Rob Bailis, Patricia Balvanera, Emily Barbour, Mark Bardini, David N. Barton, Jill Baumgartner Aug 2019

Aligning Evidence Generation And Use Across Health, Development, And Environment, Heather Tallis, Katharine Kreis, Lydia Olander, Claudia Ringler, David Ameyaw, Mark E. Borsuk, Diana Fletschner, Edward Game, Daniel O. Gilligan, Marc Jeuland, Gina Kennedy, Yuta J. Masuda, Sumi Mehta, Nicholas Miller, Megan Parker, Carmel Pollino, Julie Rajaratnam, David Wilkie, Wei Zhang, Selena Ahmed, Oluyede C. Ajayi, Harold Alderman, George Arhonditsis, Ines Azevedo, Ruchi Badola, Rob Bailis, Patricia Balvanera, Emily Barbour, Mark Bardini, David N. Barton, Jill Baumgartner

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Although health, development, and environment challenges are interconnected, evidence remains fractured across sectors due to methodological and conceptual differences in research and practice. Aligned methods are needed to support Sustainable Development Goal advances and similar agendas. The Bridge Collaborative, an emergent research-practice collaboration, presents principles and recommendations that help harmonize methods for evidence generation and use. Recommendations were generated in the context of designing and evaluating evidence of impact for interventions related to five global challenges (stabilizing the global climate, making food production sustainable, decreasing air pollution and respiratory disease, improving sanitation and water security, and solving hunger and malnutrition) …

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Smallholder Farmers Spend Credit Primarily On Food: Gender Differences And Food Security Implications In A Changing Climate, Marissa Carranza, Meredith T. Niles Jul 2019

Smallholder Farmers Spend Credit Primarily On Food: Gender Differences And Food Security Implications In A Changing Climate, Marissa Carranza, Meredith T. Niles

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

In many low-income nations agriculture is used as the primary source of income, which in the face of a changing climate, is known to be at considerable risk for the smallholder farmers that rely on it. Financial resources may enable smallholder farmers to implement adaptation practices and diversify income and investments, which has the potential to affect household income and food security. Here we explore relationships between access to different types of financial resources among male and female-headed households and women vs. men, use of financial resources, and its relationship to food security. We use data from the CGIAR Climate …

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The Climate Sensitivity Of Carbon, Timber, And Species Richness Covaries With Forest Age In Boreal–Temperate North America, Dominik Thom, Marina Golivets, Laura Edling, Garrett W. Meigs, Jesse D. Gourevitch, Laura J. Sonter, Gillian L. Galford, William S. Keeton Jul 2019

The Climate Sensitivity Of Carbon, Timber, And Species Richness Covaries With Forest Age In Boreal–Temperate North America, Dominik Thom, Marina Golivets, Laura Edling, Garrett W. Meigs, Jesse D. Gourevitch, Laura J. Sonter, Gillian L. Galford, William S. Keeton

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Climate change threatens the provisioning of forest ecosystem services and biodiversity (ESB). The climate sensitivity of ESB may vary with forest development from young to old-growth conditions as structure and composition shift over time and space. This study addresses knowledge gaps hindering implementation of adaptive forest management strategies to sustain ESB. We focused on a number of ESB indicators to (a) analyze associations among carbon storage, timber growth rate, and species richness along a forest development gradient; (b) test the sensitivity of these associations to climatic changes; and (c) identify hotspots of climate sensitivity across the boreal–temperate forests of eastern …

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Use Of The Journal Impact Factor In Academic Review, Promotion, And Tenure Evaluations, Erin C. Mckiernan, Lesley A. Schimanski, Carol Muñoz Nieves, Lisa Matthias, Meredith T. Niles, Juan P. Alperin Jul 2019

Use Of The Journal Impact Factor In Academic Review, Promotion, And Tenure Evaluations, Erin C. Mckiernan, Lesley A. Schimanski, Carol Muñoz Nieves, Lisa Matthias, Meredith T. Niles, Juan P. Alperin

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

We analyzed how often and in what ways the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is currently used in review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) documents of a representative sample of universities from the United States and Canada. 40% of research-intensive institutions and 18% of master’s institutions mentioned the JIF, or closely related terms. Of the institutions that mentioned the JIF, 87% supported its use in at least one of their RPT documents, 13% expressed caution about its use, and none heavily criticized it or prohibited its use. Furthermore, 63% of institutions that mentioned the JIF associated the metric with quality, 40% with …

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Integrating Team Science Into Interdisciplinary Graduate Education: An Exploration Of The Sesync Graduate Pursuit, Kenneth E. Wallen, Karen Filbee-Dexter, Jeremy B. Pittman, Stephen M. Posner, Steven M. Alexander, Chelsie L. Romulo, Drew E. Bennett, Elizabeth C. Clark, Stella J.M. Cousins, Bradford A. Dubik, Margaret Garcia, Heather A. Haig, Elizabeth A. Koebele, Jiangxiao Qiu, Ryan C. Richards, Celia C. Symons, Samuel C. Zipper Jun 2019

Integrating Team Science Into Interdisciplinary Graduate Education: An Exploration Of The Sesync Graduate Pursuit, Kenneth E. Wallen, Karen Filbee-Dexter, Jeremy B. Pittman, Stephen M. Posner, Steven M. Alexander, Chelsie L. Romulo, Drew E. Bennett, Elizabeth C. Clark, Stella J.M. Cousins, Bradford A. Dubik, Margaret Garcia, Heather A. Haig, Elizabeth A. Koebele, Jiangxiao Qiu, Ryan C. Richards, Celia C. Symons, Samuel C. Zipper

Peer-Reviewed Studies

Complex socio-environmental challenges require interdisciplinary, team-based research capacity. Graduate students are fundamental to building such capacity, yet formal opportunities for graduate students to develop these capacities and skills are uncommon. This paper presents an assessment of the Graduate Pursuit (GP) program, a formal interdisciplinary team science graduate research and training program administered by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC). Quantitative and qualitative assessment of the program’s first cohort revealed that participants became significantly more comfortable with interdisciplinary research and team science approaches, increased their capacity to work across disciplines, and were enabled to produce tangible research outcomes. Qualitative analysis of …

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Knowledge, Attitudes, Beliefs And Behaviors Regarding Fruits And Vegetables Among Cost-Offset Community-Supported Agriculture (Csa) Applicants, Purchasers, And A Comparison Sample, Karla L. Hanson, Leah C. Volpe, Jane Kolodinsky, Grace Hwang, Weiwei Wang, Stephanie B. Jilcott Pitts, Marilyn Sitaker, Eretii Timeon, Alice S. Ammerman, Rebecca A. Seguin Jun 2019

Knowledge, Attitudes, Beliefs And Behaviors Regarding Fruits And Vegetables Among Cost-Offset Community-Supported Agriculture (Csa) Applicants, Purchasers, And A Comparison Sample, Karla L. Hanson, Leah C. Volpe, Jane Kolodinsky, Grace Hwang, Weiwei Wang, Stephanie B. Jilcott Pitts, Marilyn Sitaker, Eretii Timeon, Alice S. Ammerman, Rebecca A. Seguin

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

Community-supported agriculture (CSA) participation has been associated with high fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption, which may be due to better access to FV for CSA purchasers, or to positive knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs (KAB) regarding healthy eating among CSA applicants. The objective of this study was to examine KAB and consumption, in association with application to a cost-offset CSA (CO-CSA) program, and with CO-CSA purchase among applicants. We conducted a cross-sectional survey of CO-CSA applicants and a comparison sample in August 2017. All respondents were English-reading adults with a child 2–12 years old and household income of < 185% of the federal poverty level. Among CO-CSA applicants, some were CO-CSA purchasers (n = 46) and some were not (n = 18). An online comparison sample met equivalent eligibility criteria, but had not participated in CSA for three years (n = 105). We compared CO-CSA applicants to the comparison sample, and compared purchasers and non-purchaser sub-groups, using Mann- Whitney U tests and chi-square analysis. CO-CSA applicants reported better knowledge, selfefficacy, home habits, and diet than the comparison sample. Among applicants, CO-CSA purchasers and non-purchasers had equivalent KAB, but children in purchaser households had higher FV consumption than in non-purchaser households (4.14 vs. 1.83 cups, P = 0.001). Future research should explore associations between CO-CSA participation and diet using experimental methods.

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Population Genomic Analysis Of Mango (Mangifera Indica) Suggests A Complex History Of Domestication, Emily J. Warschefsky, Eric J.B. Von Wettberg Jun 2019

Population Genomic Analysis Of Mango (Mangifera Indica) Suggests A Complex History Of Domestication, Emily J. Warschefsky, Eric J.B. Von Wettberg

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

Trust Humans have domesticated diverse species from across the plant kingdom, yet much of our foundational knowledge of domestication has come from studies investigating relatively few of the most important annual food crops. Here, we examine the impacts of domestication on genetic diversity in a tropical perennial fruit species, mango (Mangifera indica). We used restriction site associated DNA sequencing to generate genomic single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data from 106 mango cultivars from seven geographical regions along with 52 samples of closely related species and unidentified cultivars to identify centers of mango genetic diversity and examine how post-domestication dispersal shaped the …

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Optimizing Wetland Restoration To Improve Water Quality At A Regional Scale, Nitin K. Singh, Jesse D. Gourevitch, Beverley C. Wemple, Keri B. Watson, Donna M. Rizzo, Stephen Polasky, Taylor H. Ricketts May 2019

Optimizing Wetland Restoration To Improve Water Quality At A Regional Scale, Nitin K. Singh, Jesse D. Gourevitch, Beverley C. Wemple, Keri B. Watson, Donna M. Rizzo, Stephen Polasky, Taylor H. Ricketts

College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Publications

Published by IOP Publishing Ltd. Excessive phosphorus (P) export to aquatic ecosystems can lead to impaired water quality. There is a growing interest among watershed managers in using restored wetlands to retain P from agricultural landscapes and improve water quality. We develop a novel framework for prioritizing wetland restoration at a regional scale. The framework uses an ecosystem service model and an optimization algorithm that maximizes P reduction for given levels of restoration cost. Applying our framework in the Lake Champlain Basin, we find that wetland restoration can reduce P export by 2.6% for a budget of $50 M and …

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Optimizing Wetland Restoration To Improve Water Quality At A Regional Scale, Nitin K. Singh, Jesse D. Gourevitch, Beverley C. Wemple, Keri B. Watson, Donna M. Rizzo, Stephen Polasky, Taylor H. Ricketts May 2019

Optimizing Wetland Restoration To Improve Water Quality At A Regional Scale, Nitin K. Singh, Jesse D. Gourevitch, Beverley C. Wemple, Keri B. Watson, Donna M. Rizzo, Stephen Polasky, Taylor H. Ricketts

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Excessive phosphorus (P) export to aquatic ecosystems can lead to impaired water quality. There is a growing interest among watershed managers in using restored wetlands to retain P from agricultural landscapes and improve water quality. We develop a novel framework for prioritizing wetland restoration at a regional scale. The framework uses an ecosystem service model and an optimization algorithm that maximizes P reduction for given levels of restoration cost. Applying our framework in the Lake Champlain Basin, we find that wetland restoration can reduce P export by 2.6% for a budget of $50 M and 5.1% for a budget of …

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