Spring 2023

Path to Net Zero: On the Ground Approaches and Challenges in The Corporate World

Manveer Mann, Montclair State University

With growing pressure from regulators and investors, the corporate world is reckoning with the need to account for its impact on the climate. As a result, ESG teams are being chartered with mandate to commit to and develop pathways for net zero targets. However, the path to net zero presents numerous challenges even to the most committed teams. In this talk, I will discuss the approaches being taken and challenges faced as corporations set out on decarbonization journeys. Among others, I will discuss the frameworks being used to account for emissions, and limitations that lead to issues such as over and under-estimation of emissions. As well as practical challenges due to the systematic and institutional legacies in corporations. I will discuss opportunities for the scientific community to develop solutions to improve quantification and reduction of emissions.

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Exploring Innovative Engineering Solutions to Environmental Challenges

Yang Deng, Montclair State University

Our environment faces different challenges. Environmental engineers find solutions at the interface between humans and the environment. Technology innovation and inventive engineering design provide an approach to surmount the challenges. My research program focuses on environmental systems and processes. Particularly, we use physical and chemical principles to tackle water quality-related issues. Because water actively interacts with other environmental elements (e.g., air, soil, sediments, and solid waste), our efforts will ultimately benefit the whole environmental system. This presentation will introduce two intertwined research threads that my group has nurtured over the past years. The first theme is technology innovations for mitigation of environmental pollutants in a cost- and energy-efficient manner. The second thread is to advance adaptation of environmental systems to climate change. Challenges for environmental engineers are endless. Therefore, our endeavors are endless. Finally, the presentation will end with our recent research related to COVID-19.

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

The impacts of a changing climate and human activities on the hydrology in High Mountain Asia

Fadji Z. Maina, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

High Mountain Asia (HMA), the third pole, encompasses Asia’s most prominent rivers such as the Ganges, the Indus, and the Yangtze. HMA, home to over a billion people, experiences warming at a rate that is double the global average making it one of the most vulnerable water towers on Earth in addition to a significant decline in groundwater due to anthropogenic activities and high vegetation greening rates. Understanding the changes in water budgets in HMA and their drivers is essential for water management and climate change mitigation strategies. We used remotely sensed datasets to represent the hydrology of the region over the past two decades. Our model has allowed us to disentangle the impacts of a changing climate and human activities on the water cycle in HMA.

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Big picture immunology: Body size shapes immune strategies

Cynthia Downs, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry

Why are some species susceptible to and capable of transmitting disease-causing pathogens while others are not? Do some species inherently have less effective immune defenses than others? In this presentation, Dr. Downs will explain new research that links the body mass of a species with its capacity to defend against pathogens. Evidence suggests that large and small species experience different disease pressures and physiological constraints leading to the evolution of different immune strategies. This work has implications for understanding disease emergences and dynamics.

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Investigating how urban landscapes alter freshwater environments

Matthew Schuler, Montclair State University

Investigating how urban landscapes alter freshwater environments

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Choosing Future – Climate Adaptation Justice & Transformation

A.R. Siders, University of Delaware

Adaptation to climate change has, to date, generally sought to maintain the status quo. Future adaptation could involve radical shifts in society and socio-ecological systems, but what are the pros and cons of such transformations? What does fair, equitable, or just adaptation involve and is it possible? Dr. Siders will describe emerging dilemmas in the debate about adaptation justice and suggest pathways to envision a broader range of futures we can choose.

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Permian loess and equatorial glaciation in eastern equatorial Pangea: Perspectives on the late Paleozoic climate system from sedimentary basins in southern France

Lily Pfeifer, Rowan University

Carboniferous-Permian strata in basins within and proximal-to the Central Pangean Mountains (CPM) archive regional paleoequatorial climate during a unique interval in geological history (Pangean assembly, ice-age apex-and-collapse, megamonsoon inception). Whether these strata preserve a periglacial signal—or are periglacial in origin—remains debated. With a focus on upper Paleozoic (Upper Carboniferous – Permian) strata from the Lodève Basin, south-central Massif Central, France (eastern equatorial Pangea), this talk aims to address these questions through detailed sedimentology and a variety of analytical methods such as sediment geochemistry, detrital zircon geochronology, and cyclostratigraphy (time series analysis of magnetic susceptibility data). This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under International Research Experiences for Students (IRES) grant OISE-1658614, the Sedimentary Geology and Paleobiology Program (EAR-1338331), and P2C2 (2103117).

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Carbon emission and sequestration during the end-Permian mass extinction

Ying Cui, Montclair State University

Dr. Ying Cui’s current projects include the carbon cycle feedbacks that aid in the recovery of climatic perturbation during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM, 56 Ma) and the end-Permian mass extinction (EPME, 252 Ma). She uses novel isotopes such as boron, lithium and compound-specific carbon isotopes in sedimentary rocks to unravel changes in ocean chemistry, continental weathering, and changes in atmospheric CO2 levels. She will participate in an International ocean Discovery Project (IODP) Expedition 395 at Reykjanes Ridge and serve as an organic geochemist to understand the link between mantle convection and climate change in the late Cenozoic.

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

From Space to the Streets: Leveraging Satellite Data for Air Pollution, Health, and Justice

Gaige Kerr, George Washington University

Ambient air disproportionately affects marginalized and minoritized communities in the United States. Satellite remote sensing provides crucial data needed to assess air pollution at a high spatial resolution and further understand the drivers, extent, and impacts of this form of environmental injustice. I provide a few vignettes to highlight how recent advances in remote sensing can inform and improve our understanding of environment health. First, satellite measurements and datasets that incorporate satellite data demonstrate the inequitable distribution of traffic-related pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter and how disparities have changed during recent years, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, I use satellite measurements to understand the disparate siting of sources of these pollutants such as highways and warehousing facilities. Finally, I combine satellite-derived pollution levels with epidemiological data to document the document the burden of disease associated with these traffic-related pollutants and disparities in their impacts.

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Air Quality Analysis with Sensors, Satellites, and Models

Carl Malings, Morgan State University

Poor air quality is a major global public health concern, which is only projected to get worse in coming years. A comprehensive understanding of current and potential future air quality and its key drivers spanning from local to global scales is needed to tackle this important problem. This presentation will outline the sources of information that we use to understand air quality (e.g., ground-based measurements, satellites, and models), their strengths and limitations, and how they are being used together to give us a better picture of air quality locally and globally.

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Forecasting Winners and Losers of Climate Change: Insights from the Interactions Between Organisms and their Microclimates

Michael Sears, Clemson University

Meaningful forecasts of the responses of organisms to climate require an explicit understanding of how organismal behavior and physiology are affected by environmental heterogeneity. Such predictions are complicated because physiology and behavior vary over different time scales, vary across different life stages, and do not operate in isolation of one another. In this talk, I review case studies from my lab to highlight progress that has been made along these fronts and provide generalizations that might be made to other systems, particularly in the context of predicting responses to climate change.

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Weaving Traditional Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science to address pressing environmental issues in the Navajo Nation

Abhishek RoyChowdhury, Navajo Technical University

The largest Native American tribe in the U.S., the Navajo Nation, faces a humanitarian crisis due to lack of access to clean and safe water resources. Although access to clean water is not a privilege but it is a human right, thirty percent of Navajo residents do not have access to clean running water. Native American households are 19 times more likely than other U.S. households to live without running water. Solutions to water infrastructure that can address this gap are complicated in the arid Southwest where poor groundwater quality, including high salinity, microbial contaminants and metal contaminants, limit available water development options. This talk will demonstrate the reasons behind the poor water quality in the Navajo Nation, its impact on adverse health implications of Navajo communities, and how it has contributed to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic across the reservation. Finally, this talk will demonstrate what it takes to successfully implement an engineered technology to address environmental issues in a Native American community.

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Food web structure and dynamics across space and time

Angélica González, Rugers University

Human activities are fundamentally altering major biogeochemical cycles, which are at the core of the structure and functioning of Earth’s systems. Increasing inputs of chemical elements such as nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) and their imbalanced inputs (N:P ratios) are having severe consequences on ecological phenomena from organism physiology to ecosystem functioning. In this talk, I will discuss the utility of ecological stoichiometry thinking combined with the use of surveys, experiments, and data synthesis approaches, to understand the consequences of shifts in nutrient supply dynamics on ecological processes at multiple scales.

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Radium as a tracer of climate-driven changes in the chemistry of the Arctic Ocean

Lauren Kipp, Rowan University

The Arctic is one of the most rapidly warming regions on the planet, and rising air and sea temperatures are affecting interactions between the land and the Arctic Ocean. Radium isotopes are naturally produced in sediments and are soluble in seawater, making them a useful tool for monitoring these changes and understanding how land-derived elements are transported into the open ocean. Dr. Kipp will describe results from recent oceanographic sampling expeditions in the Arctic and discuss the important role that continental shelves play in controlling the chemistry of the Arctic Ocean.

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM