Project Title:
High-rate microbial production of nitrous oxide for energy generation
Team Members:
Description:
This project joins the fields of space propulsion and environmental biotechnology to develop a bioreactor that converts waste nitrogen into nitrous oxide that is subsequently decomposed into nitrogen and oxygen for thermal power generation. The goal is to develop a low-cost technique that removes nitrogen from water and produces oxygen as a byproduct instead of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.
Project Title:
An alternative development model? Assessing solar electrification for income generation in rural Benin
Team Members:
Description:
Beginning in summer 2007, the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF, a US-based NGO) in collaboration with local organizations will undertake a project to electrify the entire Kalale district of northern Benin with photovoltaic (PV) solar systems. Thanks to the randomized, single-treatment project design, the Kalale project provides an ideal laboratory and rare opportunity for comprehensive, rigorous testing of the economic, environmental, and sociopolitical impacts of sorl electrification. We propose to undertake a multidisciplinary study of SELF's Kalale project. Combining technical measurement equipment with cross-sectional and longitudinal household surveys, we will quantify the project's impact on the local environment, household and community income, resident nutrition and health, and community organization surrounding the provision and maintenance of public goods. Ultimately, we aim to quantify the overall sustainability of the project on these axes and to understand the potential for regional and global replication.
Project Title:
Carbon dioxide sequestration by forests: The importance of cation and phosphorous limitation and its relationship to landscape evolution
Team Members:
Description:
This interdisciplinary research will investigate how landscape processes may influence chemical weathering, which may have important impacts on the input of nutrients to forest ecosystems. We will develop coupled numerical models of landscape evolution and chemical weathering, and test and calibrate these models in the ecosystems in Hawaii and tectonically active areas along the Pacific Rim. In so doing, we hope to build predictive models that will be able to identify forests that have the greatest long-term ability to sequester CO2.
Project Title:
Biomineralization and past climate change: The ion microprobe revolution
Team Members:
Description:
Reef-building corals and other carbonate-producing organisms are used extensively as proxies for past variations in global climate based on the elemental and isotopic composition of their skeletons and shells. Typically, biological processes offset the composition of the skeleton from thermodynamic equilibrium with seawater. It is therefore of wide interest to understand the degree to which biological versus inorganic processes control the chemistry of the coral skeleton. We will study the trace element and isotopic manifestations of biological processes in the coral skeletal mineralization process using state-of-the-art ion microprobe analytical equipment that has never before been applied to this important problem.
Project Title:
An interdisciplinary approach to understanding the role of anthropogenic fire in the desert grasslands of Australia
Team Members:
Description:
Intentional burning is increasingly being recognized as an important force in shaping ecosystems over time. In Australia, the impact of anthropogenic fire has been particularly significant, with indigenous burning hypothesized to have radically altered the continent's biogeography. This EVP will investigate temporal and spatial variability in fire, resource management and habitat modification in Australia's Western Desert. Examining how these practices have changed may better inform models of fire management in arid regions throughout the world.
Project Title:
Toward sustainable coastal tourism in Costa Rica
Team Members:
Description:
The rapidly growing coastal tourism sector has severely impacted Costa Rica's internationally significant natural areas, and projections are that this damage will rapidly increase if development practices are not made more sustainable soon. A collaboration of faculty from the Stanford departments of Anthropology and Biology, the Law School, and the Graduate School of Business proposes to work with Costa Rican government agencies, NGOs, and developers to create a framework for environmentally and economically sustainable coastal decision making. The project outcome will be based on the team’s detailed analysis of the environmental impacts of previous and planned tourism development and an improved understanding of market demand for sustainable travel to that nation.
Project Title:
Fertilizer use and the epidemiology and evolution of cholera in Bangladesh
Team Members:
Description:
This proposal examines another possible consequence of fertilzer-dependent intensive agriculture, the worsening of infectious disease epidemics by microbes that live in the same aquatic habitats that also harbor algae and other components of this complex ecosystem. One such infectious agent is Vibrio cholerae, the cause of asiatic cholera, a devastating diarrheal illness that occurs as a seasonal epidemic in the Ganges Delta region of Bangladesh. This interdisciplinary team will explore the idea that the over use of chemical fertilizers might exacerbate cholera epidemics through their effects on algal ecology in the rural agrarian district of Bangladesh.
Project Title:
Forest conservation and the changing epidemiological environment in southeast Asia
Team Members:
Description:
Forest conversion for agribusiness development has well-known impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem services like carbon sequestration, and regional and global climate stability. However, a profound feature of land conversion that has received less attention is its potential for altering the epidemiology of infectious diseases, including the emergence of novel infections. Southeast Asia represents a hotspot for recent disease emergence, including such well-known diseases as highly pathogenic avian influenza, SARS, and the lesser-known but equally virulent Nipah virus. Our mulit-disciplinary team will travel to the province of West Kalimantan to collect samples that will allow us to characterize the changing epidemiological environment of this remote and highly vulnerable center for biodiversity as a result of ongoing deforestation.
Project Title:
Quantitative natural resource ethics
Team Members:
Description:
Quantitative ethical analysis has primarily focused on medical ethics, for instance determining the acceptable rate of sickness death due to an immunization program. But recent work in natural resource valuation provides a means to couple such quantitative rigor with environmental ethics, thereby grounding the ethical discussion with a realistic estimation of consequences. Our research will engage collaborators throughout the university to tackle a number of touch environmental ethics problems, basing the analysis on quantitative date that our research team will generate.
Project Title:
From Bangalore to the Bay Area: Comparative urban growth patterns across the pacific rim
Team Members:
Description:
Developing nations are moving toward Western-style ways of living, resulting in land- and resource intensive development. What does the globalization of the American suburb mean for the global environment? This project addresses the question through quantitative and qualitative analysis of case studies from China, India and the U.S.
Project Title:
Indoor air pollution and health in developing countries: An intervention study in Bangladesh
Team Members:
Description:
This research represents a new interdisciplinary collaboration at Stanford to investigate the behavioral underpinnings of indoor air pollution in the developing world and to estimate its impact on human health. Researchers will work with a number of public agencies, private companies and NGOs.
Project Title:
Feasibility study: Reintroduction of the bay checkerspot butterfly to stanford university lands
Team Members:
Description:
Researchers are conducting a broad feasibility study concerning the re-introduction of the Bay checkerspot butterfly to Stanford lands. This butterfly sub-species is federally listed as a threatened species and is restricted to serpentine soils, since the plants that it depends on cannot survive competition with Eurasian grasses on other soil types. The butterfly was the subject of extensive long-term studies at Jasper Ridge by Paul Ehrlich and his group from 1960 to the late 1990s, when it became extinct on the Ridge. The feasibility study is exploring options for the re-introduction.
Project Title:
Consequences of increased global meat consumption on the global environment -- trade in virtual water, energy & nutrients
Team Members:
Description:
Meat production is projected to double by 2020 due to increased per capita global consumption of meat and population growth. Most of this increase in production will come through industrialized animal production systems. These trends will have major consequences on the global environment. Vast transfers of "virtual" energy, water and nutrients will occur among nations that will have large impacts on local and distant environments. A full accounting of these trends and projections will give us the capacity to propose policies to ameliorate the negative aspects of these developments and position us to address the multiple consequences of industrialized animal production systems.
Project Title:
Smart chemical design: Integrating functional performance with environmental fate and toxicity
Team Members:
Description:
As rapid technological innovations continue to require the development of high-performance chemicals, we envision implementing a more interdisciplinary and precautionary approach in developing new chemical products by invoking smart chemical design to avoid the unwanted chemical properties of long-term environmental persistence, bioaccumulation and toxicity. We will develop chemical design criteria for a class of perfluoropolyether surfactant compounds, widely used for surface coatings, polymers and lubricants. Collectively, we will design candidate materials and assess how changes in the chemical structure of these model compounds reduce environmental persistence and toxicity without adversely affecting functional performance. The result will be a set of design criteria specific to this class of chemicals that integrates functional performance, biodegradation potential, environmental fate and biological toxicity information.
Project Title:
Enhancing the conservation value of countryside: Hawaii and Costa Rica as test systems
note: this EVP is now part of the Natural Capital Project, a partnership of the Woods Institute, the Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Fund.
Team Members:
Description:
This project's overarching goal is to make conservation economically attractive and commonplace on land that is managed largely for human enterprise -- "countryside." Researchers propose to develop the scientific, economic and institutional basis for achieving this goal. We aim to characterize the potential conservation value of countryside in terms of biodiversity and vital ecosystem services, such as the provision of fertile soil, productive forests and climate stability. We also seek to help private landowners and societies realize this potential by characterizing the ecological, economic, legal and other social tradeoffs associated with alternative patterns of land use. We will strive to make our conceptual framework and analytical approaches generalizable by working in two contrasting and exceptionally biodiverse systems that already serve as models for the world: Hawaii and Costa Rica.
Project Title:
Biophysical interactions in a near-shore kelp ecosystem: Observations and implications for monitoring and design of Marine Protected Areas
Team Members:
Description:
To accurately assess the efficacy of marine protected areas, scientists will need a better understanding of how biophysical processes operate at small scales in marine protected areas. By establishing a kelp forest observatory in the marine protected area adjacent to Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, the EVP team will be able to monitor small-scale physical, chemical and biological processes that affect near-shore fish assemblages within the marine protected area.
Project Title:
Groundwater discharge of wastewater contaminants across the land-sea interface: Law, policy, and science research aimed to improve coastal management
Team Members:
Description:
Many coastal communities use on-site systems (“septic systems”) for treatment of wastewater. Effluent from septic systems is discharged to the coastal aquifer, where it can raise nutrient and pathogen levels in the groundwater. Discharge of septic-impacted groundwater to the coastal ocean is a threat to human and ecosystem health. The overarching goal of the proposed work is to generate law, policy, and scientific finding on submarine groundwater discharge, and the fate and transport of wastewater-derived contaminants in coastal aquifers that will inform coastal management decisions.
Project Title:
Social and environmental transformation in Chile's aquaculture industry, 1950-2000
Team Members:
Description:
Recognizing that it is difficult to ameliorate environmental problems without understanding their connections to associated social changes, we aim to research the complex feedback loops that connect environmental and social change in the salmon-farming industry of southern Chile. We propose to map and analyze the social transformations brought about by comparing the region before and after the advent of salmon farming using methodologies from the humanities and social sciences. Data will be gathered through quantitative and qualitative surveys, archival research, and collaborations with ongoing research in Chile.
Project Title:
Understanding the effects of fishing on coral reef ecosystems: An interdisciplinary approach
Team Members:
Description:
Coral reefs are highly diverse and valuable marine ecosystems that are increasingly threatened by overexploitation. This project unites the expertise of anthropologists, biogeochemists, and ecologists to improve our understanding of how fishing affects the ecology of coral reefs. We will measure the direct and indirect ecological impacts of fishing on reefs of the Line Islands in the central Pacific Ocean, quantify human uses of coral reef resources, and examine how fishing may alter the connections between coral reefs and their neighboring habitats. Understanding the processes and mechanisms by which people affect our threatened and valuable coral reef ecosystems via fishing is prerequisite for developing solutions to address this critical environmental issue.
Project Title:
Wading through muddy waters: The policy, microbiology, and hydrodynamics of estuarine restoration
Team Members:
Description:
The overarching goal of this project is to understand how the salt marsh ecosystem could be affected by proposed hydrological modifications. To achieve this, we propose to monitor a section of tidal marsh with a sediment observatory in order to characterize the present system. We will then reduce the flow in this stretch of tidal marsh by installing a sill in the tidal channel, which will reduce velocities and create an anoxic zone behind the sill, mimicking eutrophic conditions. The sediment observatory will be used to monitor the changes to the system, in conjunction with assessment of how the microbial community and structure and functioning changes. These results will be extrapolated to demonstrate how the estuary might respond to the proposed modifications and what the implications of these results could be for the management of the system.
Project Title:
Pattern and process of coral-reef adaptation: Remote sensing, environmental genetics, and a laboratory model system for testing climate-change effects on coral
Team Members:
Description:
It is currently impossible to predict the environmental impacts of climate change on reef corals because the ability of corals and symbiotic species (symbionts) is virtually unknown. This research will generate data that will allow researchers to develop a powerful understanding of coral-symbiont responses to environmental change, allowing us to better plan conservation strategies to accommodate such responses.
Project Title:
Mineral dust components in aerosols and their effect on ocean productivity
Team Members:
Description:
Researchers are determining the impact that aerosol dust particles have on marine productivity and ecosystem structure and are using the Gulf of Aqaba as a representative study area. The Sahara and adjacent deserts are a major source of aerosols and mineral dust to the atmosphere and contribute to the aerosol load in the vicinity of the Gulf of Aqaba. Since dust emission has increased due to desertification at the borders of the Sahara, emission rates and the resulting effects on climate are now being impacted (potentially severely) by anthropogenic activities. The objective of our work is to elucidate the coupling among aerosol mineralogy, dust sources, deposition rates, and ecosystem responses. Our findings will play a critical role in determining anthropogenic impacts on ocean productivity and resulting climatic impacts, helping to develop the science to predict and policies to mitigate environmental and ecological impacts to our oceans.
Project Title:
Land use practices, subterranean groundwater pollution, and coral reef sustainability
Team Members:
Description:
We propose to apply an innovative, interdisciplinary approach that combines remote sensing, GIS, geochemical, hydrological and biological techniques, to explore the effect of different land-use practices on non-point source pollutants associated with submarine groundwater discharge into the coastal environment, and their effect on coral reef health and sustainability. A key to this approach is determining the flux of submarine groundwater to the coast, as well as its associated nutrient and other pollutant loads, and to determine if there is a relationship between these inputs, onshore land cover, land-use and watershed characteristics, and measures of coral reef health. The latter will be assessed by documenting herbivory, coral cover and diversity, and pollutant levels in coral mucus. We will also conduct a risk analysis and suggest potential solutions to curtail harmful SGD.
Project Title:
Membrane diffusion cells for in-situ monitoring of bacterial gene expression
Team Members:
Description:
The researchers are seeking to develop a system for monitoring bacterial gene expression in response to signals from the natural environment using a blend of membrane diffusion cell, genomics and optical detection technologies. We will develop and test a system for monitoring of Vibrio cholerae, beginning with field experiments in the San Francisco Bay. The results will serve as a foundation for a proposal to the National Institutes of Health for a long-term field scale study in Bangladesh. The developed technology should enable monitoring of genes of many microorganisms of environmental significance and will form the foundation of a novel environmental sensing technology for accurate measurements of classes of contaminants and environmental conditions.
Project Title:
Northern California water supply: Meadow restoration for adaption to climate change
Team Members:
Description:
In an average year in Northern California, the Feather River watershed provides flow equal to 40 percent of reservoir storage in the State Water Project system, which supplies water to 20 million people and 660,000 acres of irrigated farmland. At the headwaters of the watershed are mountain meadows that buffer floodwaters and store and release groundwater, but over the past 150 years virtually all of the meadows have dried up due to human activities. Using airborne and satellite remote sensing, field data analysis and ecosystem service modeling, researchers will evaluate meadow restoration as an effective adaptation tool to combat climate change, develop a method to screen meadows as candidates for restoration and quantify changes in ecosystem services.
Project Title:
Decision making in recycled water project implementation: Asymmetry in scientific knowledge and political economy
Team Members:
Description:
Based on cases studies of at least four water recycling projects in northern California counties, this project will examine how scientific uncertainty, economic incentives, and regulatory pressures influence decisions to implement water recycling projects for agricultural irrigation and ecosystem restoration. Our explanation of the decision-making process incorporates uncertainty in scientific knowledge and considers the effect of higher and lower levels of scientific certainty on perceptions of risk and policymaking. Our ultimate objective is to produce statements about engineering best practices and public policy recommendations to realize the potential of recycled water projects.
Project Title:
Water, health and environment: Childhood survival in Tanzania
Team Members:
Description:
Each year, diarrhea kills an estimated 1.8 million people worldwide. More than 90 percent of the victims are children younger than five in developing countries. This research project assessed the prevalence of diarrhea in the developing world through multiple exposure routes: water supply, sanitation and hygiene practices. The initial research focused on the largest city in Tanzania, Dar es Salaam, where historically residents have relied on water from shallow wells in close proximity to household pit latrines. The project brought together investigators and research methods from environmental science and engineering, medicine, public health, urban planning and policy to identify promising, cost-effective approaches to reducing childhood mortality from water and sanitation-related diseases.
Project Title:
An economic incentives model for california water markets
Team Members:
Description:
Researchers are developing an economic model that allows qualitative insights as to the key drivers of participation in water markets, or, alternatively, long-term contractual exchange agreements. They are applying tools from finance, economics, and operations management to derive actionable conclusions from the model. The application of these tools is informed by the institutional and legal context specific to water rights in the state, as well as an understanding of the technological constraints.
Project Title:
An interdisciplinary assessment of an agricultural-urban water market in southern india: physical impacts, welfare consequences, and policy implications
Team Members:
Description:
The research project analyzes the rural-urban groundwater market in Chennai (formerly Madras, in South India), as a case study of water resources sustainability in a developing nation. The research develops a combined hydrogeological and economic framework to consider the biophysical and welfare impacts of future water demands in the region. In addition, this work examines the potential of public policies to alter the time-profiles of water supplies and demands and thereby enhance social welfare.
Project Title:
Mechanisms and dynamics of abiotic and biotic interactions at environmental interfaces
Team Members:
Description:
The main objective of this project is to examine two important environmental interfaces (mineral-water and biofilm-mineral interfaces) at the molecular level with the aim of understanding the mechanisms by which such interfaces react with and sequester common heavy metal contaminants such as lead and arsenic. Researchers also will examine how microbial biofilms attach to solid surfaces.
Project Title:
Diagnosis of biological wastewater treatment instabilities using molecular methods: A forensic study of unstable nitrification at the Palo Alto water quality control plant
Team Members:
Description:
Researchers seek to develop and apply a suite of molecular tools to diagnose factors that are contributing to unstable nitrification in bioreactors, with an initial focus on unstable nitrification at the Palo Alto Water Quality Control Plant. We will use the results of this work to apply to the National Science Foundation for the creation of a global network of biological wastewater treatment plants with a specific focus on nitrification process control.
Project Title:
Mitigating future arsenic catastrophes in Asia: An integrative study of processes controlling arsenic release induced by land use
Team Members:
Description:
Arsenic is having a devastating impact on human health in Asia. In Bangladesh and West Bengal alone, an estimated 57 million people are exposed to drinking water with arsenic concentrations exceeding the World Health Organization's recommended limit of 10 µg/L. It is our hypothesis that different land uses will limit arsenic exposure to tens of millions more individuals within Southeast and Sub-continental Asia. We therefore propose an interdisciplinary study focusing on how land use alters the solid-water partitioning of arsenic in Cambodia and Vietnam. Our study blends an integrative scientific investigation of chemical, biological, and hydrologic factors controlling arsenic partitioning with an evaluation of the relationship between agricultural policies and farming practices on these processes. This research is a significant departure from existing efforts, in terms of scope and geography, with the goal of understanding the relative impact land use will have on biogeochemical mechanisms responsible for arsenic liberation.
Project Title:
Biodegradable composites for the building industry
Team Members:
Description:
Our research will focus on evaluating bio-composites, a new class of construction material that has reduced energy costs and pollution from production as well as greater resource potential after demolition. With our combined expertise in structural engineering, environmental engineering and composite materials, we will investigate a variety of bio-composites in terms of biodegradability and mechanical performance. We will identify where bio-composites can best be used in the building industry today and what fundamental advancements are needed to facilitate more widespread application of these clean, energy-efficient and resource-rich construction materials.
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