Three leading Ohio State experts, including CFAES Dean Bruce McPheron, will talk about the battle for Lake Erie, and for all of Ohio’s water sources, at June 3’s Columbus Metropolitan Club Luncheon. It’s open to both club members and the public.
Month: May 2015
Benefits of recycling? There’s an app for that
An Ohio State student team has developed a new app called RecycleNow to help cities and other local governments quantify the social, economic and environmental benefits of recycling programs, according to a story by the Big Ten Network’s Matthew Wood. Neil Drobny, director of CFAES’s Environment, Economic, Development, and Sustainability major and coordinator of Ohio State’s Energy and Sustainability Cluster, helped the project get rolling. “The ultimate goal,” he said in the story, “(is) to get cities to recycle more.”
3 research-based ways to cut runoff, boost water quality
South Dakota State University scientists working on a project led by CFAES’s Rattan Lal, Distinguished University Professor in the School of Environmental and Natural Resources, say no-till farming, cover crops and rotational grazing can help farmers reduce surface runoff to improve soil and water quality.
Data for their study, some 40 years’ worth, came from USDA and CFAES’s North Appalachian Experimental Watershed in Coshocton, Ohio.
Starting next week, 35 ways to learn more about sustainable farming
Organizers have announced the 2015 Ohio Sustainable Farm Tour and Workshop Series, whose 35 dates go from June 3 to Oct. 24. Presenting the series are the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association, the Clintonville Farmers’ Market, and CFAES’s Sustainable Agriculture Team.
‘Because they are important to farmers, and farmers are important to us’
Two CFAES programs whose efforts improve water and farming — Field to Faucet and Farm Science Review — have received a $1 million boost from Beck’s Hybrids.
There will be rubber
CFAES’s Katrina Cornish writes in Ohio’s Country Journal about her research to develop a special dandelion species as a domestic rubber source: “Our results indicate that Ohio farmers should quite soon be able to grow this new crop on a large enough scale (several million acres) to make the United States self-sustainable for natural rubber production, and then expand to allow this country to become a rubber exporting country.” Weeds, ironically, are a challenge: “We need to kill the common dandelions without killing the rubber dandelions.” Read the story …
This is not a rock concert, it’s a bleeding splish splash show
The June 11 breakfast program by the Environmental Professionals Network (see our previous post) takes place at the Battelle Darby Creek Metro Park Nature Center near Columbus. The center houses, among other things, a totally cool 53-foot indoor living stream. In the video above, watch some of the stream’s residents have a nosh themselves. Turtle cameo in 3 … 2 …
Here be madtoms; or, how to dig this stream scene
Central Ohio’s Big Darby Creek, shown here, which is a National Scenic River and is a home, for example, of the endangered Scioto madtom, is the focus and setting of the June 11 breakfast program by the Environmental Professionals Network. (Photo: Analogue Kid licensed under CCA 2.5 via Wikimedia.)
Register by Friday for Endangered Species Act workshop
Register by this Friday, May 22, for a May 29 workshop on the Endangered Species Act. The workshop is for natural resource professionals who work with the act — and with endangered species like the Kirtland’s warbler shown here. CFAES scientist Jeremy Bruskotter, one of the event’s organizers, said the Endangered Species Act is more important than ever due to persistent threats like climate change and new issues such as white-nose disease in bats. Congress passed the act in 1973. Details and a link to online registration. (Photo: Joel Trick, USWFS.)
‘A champion of Lake Erie’
Laura Arenschield of the Columbus Dispatch profiles Ohio Sea Grant’s recently retired director, Jeff Reutter.