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Institute of Environmental Sustainability

May 2016

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Welcome

Dear Friends,

Congratulations to the 52 IES seniors who graduated last Friday, and a hearty thanks to the IES faculty and staff for another successful academic year! We are grateful to have the honor of contributing to the education of our graduating seniors and are very proud of their growth and development. These students have spent countless hours in IES studying, conducting research and being stewards to our ever-changing planet. I’m proud of the knowledge we’ve imparted on them through important IES initiatives like our annual climate change conference, the Solutions to Environmental Problems (STEP) class and our six majors, three dual degree programs, three minors and many internships. This academic year, our faculty and staff have worked with 260 IES majors and I44 IES interns.  

With summer around the corner, please consider supporting IES Urban Agriculture and local farmers by purchasing your meat, produce and eggs at Loyola’s Farmers Market. Our Farmer’s Market runs every Monday from June 6-October 17 from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. at Loyola Plaza. Also, if you haven’t purchased summer herbs and vegetable starter plants for your garden, consider buying them from IES. Urban Agriculture Coordinator Kevin Erickson has organized an IES organic Plant Sale for May 23 from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the Loyola Plaza.

Thank you, and have a wonderful summer,


Dr. Nancy C. Tuchman
Founding Director, Institute of Environmental Sustainability

 

Congratulations to the IES Class of 2016

Our annual senior celebration was held on Thursday, May 12. Take a moment to learn about our very accomplished student award winners.

Aldo Leopold Award for Outstanding Achievement
Amber M. White
As a STEP Student and Biodiesel Lab intern Amber White contributed to the US EPA’s People, Planet, and Prosperity Grant for Sustainable Technology. Through this grant she traveled to Washington D.C. to present her research. She was the recipient of an IES Undergraduate Fellowship for 2014-2015 and was awarded the US EPA’s Greater Research Opportunity Fellowship. This program provided funding for the last two years of her undergraduate career as well as a paid summer internship at an EPA facility.  

Rachel Carson Award for Academic Excellence & James E. Hansen Award for Outstanding Performance in IES Internship
Lauren E. Standal
In addition to being a stellar student with a 3.91 GPA, Lauren Standal served as an excellent IES sustainability intern. She helped calculate the greenhouse gas emissions of Loyola's campuses; taught students about composting; and helped create an educational program known as the No Impact Meal. Through the No Impact Meal, she taught freshmen about how eating lightly packaged local and organic food reduces food miles, keeps harmful chemicals out of our ground, water and landfills while benefiting local communities.

Wangaria Muta Maathai Award for Outstanding Service
Monique Sosnowski
Monique Sosnowski has devoted the last four years to working with organizations in Namibia and Botswana, primarily in wildlife research and monitoring efforts. In Botswana, she investigated and assessed the World Bank’s human-wildlife mitigation strategies, speaking to local farmers and agencies to make proper recommendations to the government and World Bank. She also created For the Wildlife, an organization developed to shed light on our disappearing wildlife via photographs personally taken while traveling and working with wildlife conservation. For every photograph sold, a quarter of the sale is donated to a nonprofit organization specifically committed to saving the species depicted in the photograph.
 
Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores Award for Outstanding Leadership
Magdalena B. Nykaza
Maggie Nykaza has been a constant presence in the IES Ecodome and in the Urban Agriculture Program. She is the recipient of the Presidential Medallion and polished her leadership skills by leading volunteer days in our Urban Agriculture Program as well as club meetings and education events through the Grower’s Guild. When Nykaza became co-president of the Growers’ Guild, she set out to increase educational activities and reach out to more students. Since then, the club has hosted garden parties, soap making, candle making, an apple picking field trip, and many workdays at the gardens on campus.

E. O. Wilson Award for Outstanding Performance in Independent Research
Graciela Olmedo
Graciela Olmedo was a Biodiversity Research Intern for the summer of 2015. She worked on a three month research project to analyze the biotic and abiotic changes within the three calcareous ponds out at LUREC.  Her team set out to compile a list of all the species that lived in these three ponds at the start of the summer and for each successive week for six weeks. In addition, Olmedo geo-referenced every milkweed plant found on the LUREC property last summer and monitored each plant for Monarch butterfly caterpillars throughout the summer.

Congratulations to our award winners and to all of our graduating seniors!

View photos from our Senior Celebration, here.  
View photos from the IES Commencement Ceremony, here.

 

2016 Climate Change Conference was an enormous success--thank you for attending



Students, scholars and concerned citizens gathered en masse during Loyola’s third annual Climate Change Conference—Global Climate Change: Economic Challenges and Solutions--- at the end of March. The conference featured a Keynote Address by Naomi Klein, activist and author of the critically claimed book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Klein reminded the audience that we live in a moment of high contradiction in which our current economic system, including free trade, stands in the way of caring for our planet.  This year’s three-day conference focused on the economic implications of climate change and included panels on international policy, economics, climate justice, and the social dimensions of climate change.  The conference was multidisciplinary in nature and featured climate change artwork by artist Alisa Singer of Environmental Graphiti as well as a dance performance choreographed by Amy Wilkinson of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts

 

Save the Date for Loyola’s fourth annual Climate Change Conference:
March 16-18, 2017

 
Next year’s conference will focus on the nexus of climate  change—food, water and poverty. To view the presentations, photos and videos from this year’s conference, please visit our conference website.

IES student helps Rogers Park and Edgewater restore butterfly population
By Alex Schmidt ‘16

Last fall, a new program started at Swift Elementary School in Edgewater. Fourth grade students spent their afternoons reconnecting with the outdoors. The program taught students about sustainable gardening, and showed them how planting milkweed can save the monarch butterfly population. Loyola student Marina Garcia started the program. Garcia is an IES student studying Sustainable Agriculture and is the recipient of the 2015 Community Action Scholarship.  Read the full article here.

A conversation with Urban Agriculture Coordinator Kevin Erickson
By Alex Schmidt ‘16

IES Urban Agriculture Coordinator Kevin Erickson starts his day by biking to work at Loyola University Chicago’s Institute of Environmental Sustainability. His mornings are busy as he collaborates with Rogers Park community partners about sustainable agriculture ideas or assists with student projects in Loyola’s Ecodome. In the afternoon, he’ll oversee the production on each of Loyola’s four garden sites on campus. Read more about Kevin Erickson and the IES Urban Agriculture Program.

Around IES News briefs

Loyola Sustainability News

Happy (b)Earth Day.
IES celebrated Earth Day with a birthday party that featured student groups and their “greenest ideas” including seed bombs given out by the Restoration Club, plants sold by the Grower’s Guild and the ribbon-cutting of our solar-powered picnic bench in St. Ignatius Plaza.  Take a look at the pictures from the day’s festivities, here.

RecycleMania results. The numbers are in! Loyola University Chicago won first place nationwide in the Zero Waste Game category for our Men's Basketball game against Wichita State. Ramblers successfully diverted 96% of waste created that day into recycling and compost bins. Loyola also ranked #14 nationwide in the category of Waste Minimization at 21.7 lbs per student during the weeks of RecycleMania and managed to divert waste to the appropriate bin 50.9% of the time. Keep recycling and composting Ramblers! This is a huge improvement from last year when our diversion rate was 44%.

Think Green and Give. Think Green and Give is Loyola's dormitory green move-out collection and donation program. This year, over 15,900 items weighing over 8,300 pounds were kept from the landfill. For the seventh year, clothing, toiletries, household goods and food were collected from students moving out, sorted and donated to two local charities.Thanks to all the students that helped out with this program or donated materials.


Loyola's FY'15 Carbon Footprint. A carbon footprint measures the amount of greenhouse gases emitted each year by an organization and thus measures the organization's contribution to climate change. At Loyola, we know that our main contributors to greenhouse gas emissions are purchased electricity; natural gas burned on site; research, study abroad, and conference air travel; and student and employee commuting. In FY'15 our net carbon dioxide emissions were 62,103 metric tons after offsetting 11,230 metric tons by purchasing carbon offsets like renewable energy credits, on-campus carbon sequestration and on-campus composting.

Faculty and Staff News

IES Assistant Professor Ping Jing awarded NASA Grant.  Physical Scientist Dr. Ping Jing received a $171,000 grant from NASA to investigate the effect of climate change on Rossby Wave Breaking (RWB) in the U.S. using historical data from the NASA Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Application (MERRA) between 1985 and 2014. The long-term trend of RWB in terms of its frequency, location and intensity will be analyzed. The relationship of RWB to extreme weather conditions and high tropospheric ozone events will be investigated. A RWB index that measures the strength of RWB will be developed, which can be used as an indicator of the effect of climate change on extreme weather in the National Climate Assessment (NCA). The grant is for three years beginning in May 2015; Jing is the sole researcher on this grant.

Invasives-to-Energy Grant. IES Research Associates Shane Lishawa and Brendan Carson along with IES Founding Director Nancy Tuchman of the Invasives-to-Energy (I2E) program were awarded a $284,000 grant from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Invasive Species Grant Program: Novel approaches to European Frogbit detection and management. European Frogbit is an aquatic invasive plant that was recently detected in the upper Great Lakes and the extent of Frogbit populations are presently unclear. Frogbit is commonly associated with invasive cattails—another ecologically destructive invasive plant, which Dr.Tuchman’s research lab has studied for over 15 years. Ecosystem managers are struggling to control both species. 

This new research will evaluate the effectiveness of several frogbit and cattail (seen right) control methods, and detect new populations using high resolution drone and satellite imagery. IES researchers are partnering with the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, Oregon State University and Boise State University to implement the project. The I2E program is scientifically vetting holistic invasive species management methods that control invasive plants, increase biodiversity, reduce the use of herbicides, and utilize invasive plant biomass for energy and agricultural soil amendments.


IES welcomes Analytical Chemist Dr. Zhenwei Zhu. IES has recently hired Analytical Chemist Dr. Zhenwei Zhu to begin development of an analytical chemistry lab, named the Loyola Environmental Testing Laboratory (LETL). The lab will analyze contaminants and fertility in soil, water and plant samples in the greater Chicago area as well train students in analytical chemistry. The laboratory will operate as a business that offers analytical testing services to Loyola University Chicago faculty and staff, urban agriculture growers, local consulting entities for landscaping, composting, and waste management, and the general public who are interested in knowing soil nutrients and contaminants, soil classification and properties, compost characterization and water quality for both drinking water and wastewater. Zhu worked as a Senior Chemist at Kuo Testing Labs in Othello, Washington where he performed chemical analysis on soil, water, plant tissue and fertilizer samples. Zhu received his doctorate in Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee after studying in Denmark and China.  


Loyola receives recognition from the Illinois Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects.  Loyola was recognized in the top twenty percent of landscape architecture outreach and communication projects with an 'Honor Award' at an event held at the end of April. A 2014 project funded by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and Loyola provided signage on the Lake Shore Campus highlighting the campus' green infrastructure including rain gardens, green roofs and permeable paving. It also created a centralized website where community members could learn what steps they might take to reduce storm water runoff and protect Lake Michigan. The project was a collaboration with the IES, Loyola's Facilities, University Marketing and Communications, Community Relations and our landscape designers, SmithGroup JJR.


Student and Alumni News

IES alumna appointed to the EPA’s Youth Climate Justice Work Group. Environmental Law and Policy Center Communications Fellow Amber Vignieri (’15) has recently been appointed to the US EPA's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council’s (NEJAC) Youth Perspectives on Climate Justice Work Group. According to the EPA “the work group is comprised of young people, ages 18 to 29, at the forefront of the fight against climate change. They will assist the US EPA in developing strategies and finding opportunities to combat climate change and to empower other young people to take on the challenge.”

IES student attends SEEDS Leadership meeting. Maggie Yarnold ('19)  attended the Ecological Society of America’s annual SEEDS leadership meeting. She was accompanied by 16 other undergraduates and two graduate students. The group met in North Carolina at Coweeta experimental forest. Throughout the four days, Yarnold met with scientists, environmental journalists and policy makers. The meeting focused around forestry and hydrology. For Yarnold, the biggest take away was understanding how to reach different audiences (children, college students, general public) and disperse this information. Held annually, the Leadership Meeting is an opportunity for SEEDS student leaders to engage in a dialogue about the connections between science and society.


IES senior wins honor from the Midwest Regional Chapter of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. Carbon Fellow Patrick Canniff ('16) received the Best Platform Presentation award for his research with Assistant Professor Tham Hoang at the 23rd annual meeting of the Midwest Regional Chapter of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry in March. Canniff has been conducting research on the effects of microplastics on aquatic organisms. Results from his research found that the water flea Daphnia magna ingested significant amounts of microplastics which poses threats to its growth and reproduction, impacting the population dynamics of this zooplankton.


IES student named 2016 NOAA Hollings Scholars.  IES student Trent Henry (’18) was awarded the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hollings Scholarship. The scholarship provides him with two years of support with a full summer of research at a NOAA facility during 2017. Henry has been working with Assistant Professor Reuben Keller on setting and collecting both macroinvertebrate and crayfish traps in an effort to monitor invasive species in lakes and streams. Throughout this academic year, Henry was supported by a Mulcahy Fellowship, and he used this time to sort samples collected during the summer. This month he will travel to Sacramento, California to  present his research and results at the annual meeting of the Society for Freshwater Science. Soon after his return he will travel to Maryland for his Hollings Scholarship orientation.

IES in the News

IES Tilapia featured in DNAInfo article. Urban Agriculture Coordinator Kevin Erickson was interviewed by DNAInfo to discuss the Tilapia that IES breeds in our aquaponics system. Under Erickson’s supervision, the Urban Agriculture program has begun to sell some of this fish at the Loyola Farmers Market. Read the full article here.

Worldview at the Climate Change Conference.  IES hosted WBEZ's Worldview for a live broadcast during our third annual Climate Change Conference. Worldview listeners learned about our Searle Biodiesel Lab and our Urban Agriculture Program from student interns and received a conference preview from experts who spoke on the International Policy Panel at the conference. That panel focused on the anticipated international policy that is developing as an outcome of the landmark COP21 agreement.  Listen to the entire broadcast, here.

Voice of Vietnam Interviews IES Assistant Professor Tham Hoang. Ecotoxicologist Dr.Tham Hoang was interviewed on the Voice of Vietnam regarding the massive die-off of fish that occurred in four provinces of north-central Vietnam at the beginning of April. The news show asked Hoang extensively about his understanding of environmental toxicology and he shared some ideas for methodology regarding identifying the toxins that killed the fish. As a result of this interview, he has been contacted by Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh City for collaboration on this issue.

Events

IES Plant Sale. Monday, May 23 from 3 to 7 p.m. at Loyola Plaza near the CTA Red Line. Buy your garden organic starter plants--herbs, vegetables and garden annuals from Loyola's Urban Agriculture Program! We will also be selling native, pollinator and indoor tropical house plants.

Farmers Market. Opening day of our 2016 Farmers Market season will be June 6. After that join us every Monday until October 17 to buy fresh produce, baked goods and local organic meats at the Loyola Plaza near the CTA Red Line.

LUREC Restoration Work Day. Every second Saturday of the month at Loyola's Retreat & Ecology Campus. Upcoming Dates: June 11, July 9 and August 13, 2016. If you are interested in pulling shrubs, working on the farm and restoring the ecology of the wetland at LUREC, join us for a work day. General public is welcome. Sign up with Dr. Roberta Lammers-Campbell.


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Institute of Environmental Sustainability
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773.508.2130 · IES@luc.edu · LUC.edu/sustainability






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