It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, September 07, 2023
New battery holds promise for green energy
Redox-flow battery eliminates costly and inefficient membrane
IMAGE: UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI CHEMISTS HAVE DEVELOPED A NEW REDOX-FLOW BATTERY THAT DOES NOT USE A COSTLY AND INEFFICIENT MEMBRANE.view more
CREDIT: ANDREW HIGLEY/UC
Jimmy Jiang envisions a future where every house is powered by renewable energy stored in batteries.
In his chemistry lab, Jiang and his students at the University of Cincinnati have created a new battery that could have profound implications for the large-scale energy storage needed by wind and solar farms.
Innovations such as UC’s will have profound effects on green energy, Jiang said. Batteries store renewable energy for when it’s needed, not just when it’s produced. This is crucial for getting the most out of wind and solar power, he said.
“Energy generation and energy consumption is always mismatched,” he said. “That’s why it’s important to have a device that can store that energy temporarily and release it when it’s needed.”
Traditional car batteries contain a mix of sulfuric acid and water. And while they are inexpensive and made from readily available materials, they have severe drawbacks for industrial or large-scale use. They have a very low energy density, which isn’t useful for storing megawatts of power needed to power a city.
And they have a low threshold for electrochemical stability. Jiang said that means they can blow up.
“Water has a voltage limit. Once the voltage of an aqueous battery exceeds the stability window of 1.5 volts, the water can decompose or be split into hydrogen and oxygen, which is explosive,” he said.
But Jiang and his students have developed a battery without water that can generate nearly 4 volts of power. Jiang’s novel design does so without a membrane-separator, which are among the priciest parts of these kinds of batteries, he said.
“Membranes are super expensive,” Jiang said. “We developed a new type of energy storage material that improves performance at a lower cost.”
Likewise, membranes are inefficient, he said.
“They can’t separate the positive and negative sides completely, so there is always crossover,” he said.
The group has submitted provisional patent applications, he said.
“There is still a long way to go,” Jiang said.
But he said we are hurtling toward a battery revolution in the next 20 years.
“I am confident about that. There is a lot of intense research going into pushing the boundaries of battery performance,” he said.
His students are equally enthusiastic. Doctoral student and study co-author Rabin Siwakoti said the battery offers higher energy density.
“So even a small battery can give you more energy,” he said.
“We’ve managed to eliminate the membrane in a battery, which is a huge component of upfront costs. It’s as much as 30% of the cost of the battery,” co-author and doctoral student Jack McGrath said.
Co-author Soumalya Sinha, a visiting professor at UC, said countries are racing to develop cheaper, more efficient batteries.
“This design significantly decreases material costs,” he said. “We’re trying to achieve the same performance at a cheaper cost.”
Other contributors include lead author and UC postdoctoral researcher Rajeev Gautam, doctoral student Xiao Wang and UC doctoral graduate Amir Lashgari.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — This summer, viral misinformation claimed that the Amish did not vaccinate against COVID-19 and, as a result, had a death rate 90 times lower than the rest of the United States. Now, a Penn State study is the first to provide geographically broad and population-wide evidence that while the Amish-populated counties across the nation tend to have lower vaccination rates than other populations, they are not entirely unvaccinated.
The Amish are a distinctive Christian subculture that traces its roots to the 16th century Protestant Reformation. According to Cory Anderson, author on the study and postdoctoral fellow in Penn State’s Population Research Institute, part of the Social Science Research Institute, medical documents typically don’t include patients’ religious beliefs, making it difficult to study the Amish and other religious groups from medical records.
Additionally, the researchers said, a low number of COVID-19 tests were taken in the Amish community during the pandemic, so assessing data on COVID-19 cases or deaths among this population is difficult.
“While there is relatively little quantitative data analysis on Amish vaccination, some local studies have suggested that Amish were vaccine hesitant before COVID-19,” Anderson said. “With new population data on COVID-19 now available, we wanted to determine vaccination rates in counties with high Amish populations.”
The researchers conducted an analysis of county-level data in Amish-prevalent counties. As the counties only showed the vaccination rates of the entire population, analyzing Amish-prevalent counties gave the researchers an estimation of Amish vaccination rates.
“We examined over 350 counties spanning 10 Amish-populated states from February 2021 — when the vaccines became available — through October 2022 to determine COVID-19 vaccination rates and other social demographic data from a variety of sources including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Religion Census, U.S. Census, American Community Survey, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Lab,” said Shuai Zhou, postdoctoral associate in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University and former graduate student under co-author Guangqing Chi, professor of rural sociology and demography at Penn State.
They found that Amish populated counties had an approximately 1.6% lower COVID-19 vaccination rate than counties without significant Amish populations. Given that only three counties had an Amish population of more than 20%, this rate is notable, the researchers said. The results suggest that higher percentages of Amish in a county significantly decrease the county-level vaccination rate while controlling for other covariates expected to also predict lower vaccination rates, such as political ideology, rural/non-rural status, household income and evangelical Protestant affiliation.
Specifically, on average, while holding all other variables constant in the model, the researchers found that 10% more Amish population corresponded to 16% less in the monthly county-level COVID-19 vaccination rate. All though not explicitly noted in the paper, the researchers’ calculations suggested that in October 2022, Amish-populated counties exhibited an average daily vaccination rate of .06%, compared to the national average rate of .08%.
“The results support our hypothesis that Amish affiliation independently predicts vaccine hesitancy,” Anderson said. “This finding supports our hypothesis that Amish are under-vaccinated for COVID-19, although not at the rate some recent commentators have suggested.”
Anderson, who is part of the Amish community, said he saw at the beginning of the pandemic the Amish were side-stepping many preventative measures and hypothesized COVID-19 vaccination rates would be lower than the rest of the population. However, widely circulated commentary that no Amish were vaccinated were unsubstantiated.
The findings underscore the failure of public health outreach efforts to convince the Amish to accept COVID-19 preventative measures and vaccines, according to Chi.
“Health service providers working with the Amish need to realize that it takes time to build a collaborative and trustful relationship with them, and humility goes a long way,” Chi said.
According to Anderson, the Amish community is unrepresented in higher education, therefore scientific knowledge about these communities is coming out of institutions they are not a part of.
“This has repercussions on their response when scientific knowledge is translated into public health policy,” Anderson said. “Academia should continue to invest in resources to collaborate with this population.”
Learning more about this community is important, Anderson said, because the Amish population is growing, and as it grows, the Amish will migrate to new places throughout North America.
“Their impact will be felt on rural communities, where population density is low and public resources are slim,” Anderson said.
With this study complete, Anderson and his team will continue to analyze data to discover deeper cultural changes during the pandemic.
“Challenging times have a way of bringing to the forefront cultural patterns that are buried deeply when life is routine,” Anderson said. “Challenging times reveal what a community is made of and can shape the culture moving forward.”
Support for this work was provided by the Population Research Institute, which is supported by an infrastructure grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and Social Environments and Population Health training grant, and U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture Multistate Research Project. Further support was provided by a seed grant from the National Institute on Aging-supported Interdisciplinary Network on Rural Population Health and Aging.
IMAGE: CYCLOTRON RADIATION EMISSION SPECTROSCOPY (CRES), SEEN HERE, IS THE KEY TO A TOTALLY NEW METHOD THAT AIMS TO PIN DOWN THE MASS OF THE ELUSIVE NEUTRINO.view more
CREDIT: ALEC LINDMAN, THE PROJECT 8 TEAM
The humble neutrino, an elusive subatomic particle that passes effortlessly through normal matter, plays an outsized role among the particles that comprise our universe. To fully explain how our universe came to be, we need to know its mass. But, like so many of us, it avoids being weighed.
Now, an international team of researchers from the United States and Germany leading an ambitious quest called Project 8 reports that their distinctive strategy is a realistic contender to be the first to measure the neutrino mass. Once fully scaled up, Project 8 could help reveal how neutrinos influenced the early evolution of the universe as we know it.
In 2022, the KATRIN research team set an upper bound for how heavy the neutrino could possibly be. That milestone was a tour-de-force accomplishment that has been decades in the making. But these results simply narrow the search window. KATRIN will soon reach and may one day even exceed its targeted detection limits, but the featherweight neutrino might be lighter still, begging the question: “what’s next?”
The ultimate success of Project 8 hinges on an ambitious plan. Rather than try to detect the neutrino—which effortlessly passes through most detector technology—the research team has instead gone after a simple measurement strategy that can be summarized as follows:
We know the total mass of a tritium atom equals the energy of its parts, thanks to Einstein. When we measure a free electron generated by beta decay, and we know the total mass, the “missing” energy is the neutrino mass and motion.
“In principle, with technology developments and scale up, we have a realistic shot at getting into the range necessary to pin down the neutrino mass,” said Brent VanDevender, one of the principal investigators of Project 8 at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Why Project 8?
These researchers chose to go after an ambitious strategy because they have worked through the pros and cons and concluded that it could work.
Talia Weiss is a nuclear physics graduate student at Yale University. She and her Project 8 colleagues have spent years figuring out how to accurately tease out the electron signals from electronic background noise. Christine Claessens is a postdoctoral associate at the University of Washington who earned her Ph.D. on Project 8 at the University of Mainz, Germany. Weiss and Claessens performed the two final analyses that placed limits on the neutrino mass derived from the new technique for the first time.
“The neutrino is incredibly light," said Weiss. “It’s more than 500,000 times lighter than an electron. So, when neutrinos and electrons are created at the same time, the neutrino mass has only a tiny effect on the electron’s motion. We want to see that small effect. So, we need a super precise method to measure how fast the electrons are zipping around.”
Project 8 relies on just such a technique, one conceived over a decade ago by physicists Joe Formaggio and Ben Monreal, then working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An international team rallied around the idea and formed Project 8 to convert the vision into a practical tool. The resulting method is called Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy (CRES). It captures the microwave radiation emitted from newborn electrons as they spiral around in a magnetic field. These electrons carry away most—but not all—of the energy released during a beta decay event. It’s that missing energy that can reveal the neutrino mass. This is the first time that tritium beta decays have been measured, and an upper limit placed on the neutrino mass, with the CRES technique.
The team is only interested in tracking these electrons because their energy is key to revealing the neutrino mass. While this strategy has been used previously, the CRES detector measures that crucial electron energy with the potential to scale up beyond any existing technology. And that scalability is what sets Project 8 apart. Elise Novitski is an assistant professor at the University of Washington and has led many aspects of the newly published work.
“Nobody else is doing this,” Novitski said. “We're not taking an existing technique and trying to tweak it a little bit. We're kind of in the Wild West.”
In their most recent experiment, built at the University of Washington in Seattle, the team tracked 3,770 tritium beta decay events over an 82-day trial window in a sample cell the size of a single pea. The sample cell is cryogenically cooled and placed in a magnetic field that traps the emerging electrons long enough for the system’s recording antennas to register a microwave signal.
Crucially, the team registered zero false signals or background events that could be confused for the real thing. That’s important because even a very small background can obscure the signal of neutrino mass making interpretation of useful signal more difficult.
From chirps to signals
A subset of Project 8 researchers, led by PNNL experimental physicist Noah Oblath, but involving a dozen others across multiple institutions, have also developed a suite of specialized software—each delightfully named after various insects***—to take the raw data and convert them to signals that can be analyzed. And project engineers have put their tinkering hats on to invent the various parts that make Project 8 come together.
“We do have engineers who are crucial to the effort,” Novitski said. “It’s kind of out there from an engineer’s point of view. Experimental physics is kind of at the boundary of physics and engineering. You have to get particularly adventuresome engineers and practical-minded physicists to collaborate, make these things come into being because this stuff is not in the textbooks.”
Getting to the finish line
Now that the team has shown their design and experimental system works using molecules of tritium, they have another pressing task ahead. A subset of the full team is now working on the next step: a system that will produce, cool and trap individual atoms of tritium. This step is tricky because tritium, like its more abundant cousin hydrogen, prefers to form molecules. Those molecules would make the ultimate goals of the Project 8 team unachievable. The researchers, led by physicists at the University of Mainz, are developing a testbed to create and trap atomic tritium with intricate arrays of magnets that will keep it from even touching the walls of the sample cell—where it is almost certain to revert to molecular form.
This technology advance, and scaling up the whole apparatus, will be the critical steps to reaching and ultimately exceeding the sensitivity achieved by the KATRIN team.
For now, the research team, which has contributing members from ten research institutions, is working on testing designs for scaling up the experiment from the pea-size sample chamber to one a thousand times larger. The idea there is to capture a lot more beta decay events using a bigger listening device—going from the size of a pea to a beachball.
“Project 8 is not only a bigger and better CRES experiment, it is the first CRES experiment and was the very first to ever use this detection technique,” Oblath said. “It had never been done before. Most experiments have a 50- or 100-year history, at least of the detection technique that they're using, whereas this is really brand new.”
Project 8 is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, the National Science Foundation, the German Research Foundation PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence, and internal investments by all collaborating institutions.
***The software suite specially developed by investigators working on Project 8 includes Morpho, Locust, Katydid, Psyllid, and Dragonfly.
Thousands of studies examine how plant diversity structures predator communities and shapes herbivore pressure. This body of evidence has led to at least 23 separate quantitative syntheses encompassing a wide range of approaches to understanding plant diversity effects. Yet the sheer quantity of primary literature and inconsistency among these syntheses prevents a confident understanding of consensus in plant diversity outcomes.
Amid the 23 syntheses, robust patterns have stood the test of time: divergent outcomes frequently result from insect diet breadth, spatial scale, and plant relatedness variation. “Clarifying these persistent drivers enables us to identify and explore remaining sources of variation in plant diversity effects across trophic levels,” note authors K. D. Holmes and C. K. Blubaugh.
They find that plant diversity consistently attracts more abundant and diverse communities of predators. Herbivore diversity tends to increase in response to plant diversity treatments, while herbivore abundance and plant damage generally decrease. However, these net effects often mask nuanced responses to plant diversity that depend on ecosystem, scale, and specialization. For instance, specialist herbivores often respond negatively to plant diversity, while generalists more often mount positive or neutral responses.
The authors conduct a historical review of the past three decades of syntheses, reporting their approaches, scopes, and findings across trophic levels. They examine core ecological variables that shape the varying outcomes across studies, identify consistent patterns across these ecological factors, and explore mechanisms that explain incongruence between syntheses. Finally, they discuss the complex species interactions and analytical approaches that will be key in resolving context dependency and improving the ability to predict reliably whether biodiversity functions or fails to deliver ecosystem services.
The authors also present a chronological and conceptual history of the 23 meta-analyses and global syntheses of plant diversity effects, focusing on major developments in this literature, and interpret outcomes for the most commonly reported responses of arthropods and plants, principally, the abundance and species richness of herbivores and predators and productivity and damage in plants.
Spatial context is key to understanding impacts of diversity at different trophic levels. Studies conducted at greater spatial scales often show a dilution of effects on herbivores but reveal conflicting effects on predators. Plant arrangement is also important, with agricultural studies showing that alternating rows of crops reduces pest populations, while surrounding crop fields with floral borders better supports predators. Meanwhile, research in forests has demonstrated that the arrangement of plant diversity interacts with other elements of plant and herbivore natural history, such as insect diet breadth and plant relatedness, to predict outcomes. Despite the complexity of outcomes, syntheses show that diversifying plant communities hold great promise for enhancing the resilience of managed ecosystems.
The plethora of syntheses on plant diversity effects reflects the challenge of understanding relationships in complex multitrophic communities, an urgent need for improved predictability in biodiversity-based tools for pest control in agroecosystems, and the rapidly expanding literature. Despite achievements in research and synthesis, the sheer number of meta-analyses with conflicting results means that outcomes of plant diversity for herbivorous insects are not generalizable. “Scrutinizing potential mechanisms underlying variation in outcomes across meta-analyses is vital,” the authors write, “especially now as ‘meta-meta-analyses’ have begun to emerge from this explosive body of work that further pool and simplify results.”
By distilling the varied results of the 23 syntheses, the authors pave the way for stronger and more precise recommendations for how biodiversity may be most effectively leveraged to promote delivery of ecosystem services. “Fine-tuning management of biodiversity will be essential to meet the ever-growing global need to design sustainable agriculture solutions that support both high plant productivity and diverse plant-arthropod communities,” they note.
IMAGE: THE DEVICE IS AN ARRAY OF PIEZOELECTRIC TRANSDUCERS THAT ENABLES BATTERY-FREE UNDERWATER COMMUNICATION.view more
CREDIT: COURTESY OF FADEL ADIB, ET. AL.
MIT researchers have demonstrated the first system for ultra-low-power underwater networking and communication, which can transmit signals across kilometer-scale distances.
This technique, which the researchers began developing several years ago, uses about one-millionth the power that existing underwater communication methods use. By expanding their battery-free system’s communication range, the researchers have made the technology more feasible for applications such as aquaculture, coastal hurricane prediction, and climate change modeling.
“What started as a very exciting intellectual idea a few years ago — underwater communication with a million times lower power — is now practical and realistic. There are still a few interesting technical challenges to address, but there is a clear path from where we are now to deployment,” says Fadel Adib, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Signal Kinetics group in the MIT Media Lab.
Underwater backscatter enables low-power communication by encoding data in sound waves that it reflects, or scatters, back toward a receiver. These innovations enable reflected signals to be more precisely directed at their source.
Due to this “retrodirectivity,” less signal scatters in the wrong directions, allowing for more efficient and longer-range communication.
When tested in a river and an ocean, the retrodirective device exhibited a communication range that was more than 15 times farther than previous devices. However, the experiments were limited by the length of the docks available to the researchers.
To better understand the limits of underwater backscatter, the team also developed an analytical model to predict the technology’s maximum range. The model, which they validated using experimental data, showed that their retrodirective system could communicate across kilometer-scale distances.
The researchers shared these findings in two papers which will be presented at this year’s ACM SIGCOMM and MobiCom conferences. Adib, senior author on both papers, is joined on the SIGCOMM paper by co-lead authors Aline Eid, a former postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, and Jack Rademacher, a research assistant; as well as research assistants Waleed Akbar and Purui Wang, and postdoc Ahmed Allam. The MobiCom paper is also written by co-lead authors Akbar and Allam.
Communicating with sound waves
Underwater backscatter communication devices utilize an array of nodes made from “piezoelectric” materials to receive and reflect sound waves. These materials produce an electric signal when mechanical force is applied to them.
When sound waves strike the nodes, they vibrate and convert the mechanical energy to an electric charge. The nodes use that charge to scatter some of the acoustic energy back to the source, transmitting data that a receiver decodes based on the sequence of reflections.
But because the backscattered signal travels in all directions, only a small fraction reaches the source, reducing the signal strength and limiting the communication range.
To overcome this challenge, the researchers leveraged a 70-year-old radio device called a Van Atta array, in which symmetric pairs of antennas are connected in such a way that the array reflects energy back in the direction it came from.
But connecting piezoelectric nodes to make a Van Atta array reduces their efficiency. The researchers avoided this problem by placing a transformer between pairs of connected nodes. The transformer, which transfers electric energy from one circuit to another, allows the nodes to reflect the maximum amount of energy back to the source.
“Both nodes are receiving and both nodes are reflecting, so it is a very interesting system. As you increase the number of elements in that system, you build an array that allows you to achieve much longer communication ranges,” Eid explains.
In addition, they used a technique called cross-polarity switching to encode binary data in the reflected signal. Each node has a positive and a negative terminal (like a car battery), so when the positive terminals of two nodes are connected and the negative terminals of two nodes are connected, that reflected signal is a “bit one.”
But if the researchers switch the polarity, and the negative and positive terminals are connected to each other instead, then the reflection is a “bit zero.”
“Just connecting the piezoelectric nodes together is not enough. By alternating the polarities between the two nodes, we are able to transmit data back to the remote receiver,” Rademacher explains.
When building the Van Atta array, the researchers found that if the connected nodes were too close, they would block each other’s signals. They devised a new design with staggered nodes that enables signals to reach the array from any direction. With this scalable design, the more nodes an array has, the greater its communication range.
They tested the array in more than 1,500 experimental trials in the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Falmouth, Massachusetts, in collaboration with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The device achieved communication ranges of 300 meters, more than 15 times longer than they previously demonstrated.
However, they had to cut the experiments short because they ran out of space on the dock.
Modeling the maximum
That inspired the researchers to build an analytical model to determine the theoretical and practical communication limits of this new underwater backscatter technology.
Building off their group’s work on RFIDs, the team carefully crafted a model that captured the impact of system parameters, like the size of the piezoelectric nodes and the input power of the signal, on the underwater operation range of the device.
“It is not a traditional communication technology, so you need to understand how you can quantify the reflection. What are the roles of the different components in that process?” Akbar says.
For instance, the researchers needed to derive a function that captures the amount of signal reflected out of an underwater piezoelectric node with a specific size, which was among the biggest challenges of developing the model, he adds.
They used these insights to create a plug-and-play model into a which a user could enter information like input power and piezoelectric node dimensions and receive an output that shows the expected range of the system.
They evaluated the model on data from their experimental trials and found that it could accurately predict the range of retrodirected acoustic signals with an average error of less than one decibel.
Using this model, they showed that an underwater backscatter array can potentially achieve kilometer-long communication ranges.
“We are creating a new ocean technology and propelling it into the realm of the things we have been doing for 6G cellular networks. For us, it is very rewarding because we are starting to see this now very close to reality,” Adib says.
The researchers plan to continue studying underwater backscatter Van Atta arrays, perhaps using boats so they could evaluate longer communication ranges. Along the way, they intend to release tools and datasets so other researchers can build on their work. At the same time, they are beginning to move toward commercialization of this technology.
This research was funded, in part, by the Office of Naval Research, the Sloan Research Fellowship, the National Science Foundation, the MIT Media Lab, and the Doherty Chair in Ocean Utilization.
###
Written by Adam Zewe, MIT News
Paper: “Enabling Long-Range Underwater Backscatter via Van Atta Acoustic Networks”
“Enabling Long-Range Underwater Backscatter via Van Atta Acoustic Networks”
New research highlights opportunities to protect carbon and communities from forest fires
The Nature Conservancy, University of Montana, and USDA Forest Service identify “opportunity hot spots” where proactive forest management can keep carbon in forests and protect communities from wildfires in the West
USDA FOREST SERVICE - ROCKY MOUNTAIN RESEARCH STATION
IMAGE: TREE THINNING-ONLY TREATMENTS ARE LESS EFFECTIVE AT REDUCING WILDFIRE SEVERITY THAN TREATMENTS THAT ALSO ADDRESS SURFACE FUELS. PHOTO SHOWS THE AFTERMATH OF OREGON’S 2021 BOOTLEG FIRE BURNING THROUGH A MIXED CONIFER FOREST WHERE THE KLAMATH TRIBES HAD WORKED WITH THE US FOREST SERVICE TO THIN TREES AND APPLY PRESCRIBED FIRE. IN SOME AREAS, PRESCRIBED FIRE HAD NOT BEEN APPLIED YET. THINNING ONLY WAS NOT AS EFFECTIVE AT REDUCING WILDFIRE SEVERITY AS COMBINING THINNING WITH PRESCRIBED FIRE.view more
CREDIT: STEVE RONDEAU (PHOTOGRAPHER), KLAMATH TRIBES NATURAL RESOURCES DIRECTOR.
MISSOULA, Mont. Sept. 6, 2023 — As the climate and wildfire crises have intensified, so too have concerns regarding the loss of carbon captured and stored in forests from decades to centuries of tree growth. A new study describes where to optimize ongoing wildfire mitigation efforts and reduce carbon loss due to wildfire, benefitting communities and climate at the same time.
New research published in the journal EnvironmentalResearch Letters highlights widespread “opportunity hot spots” in the western United States for using proactive forest management, such as forest thinning, prescribed fire, and cultural burning, to reduce the risk of losing carbon to future wildfires.
The study, a collaboration among The Nature Conservancy, University of Montana, and USDA Forest Service, evaluated where living trees and the carbon they store are at risk of burning in the future. They then compared these areas to areas highlighted in the Forest Service’s Wildfire Crisis Strategy, identifying where human communities most vulnerable to wildfire. Areas of overlap highlight “opportunity hot spots” where action can reduce the risk from wildfire to both carbon and communities.
“Our approach can help land management agencies plan where to invest in proactive forest treatments that simultaneously reduce wildfire-caused carbon loss and protect communities from wildfire,” says the study’s lead author, Jamie Peeler, landscape ecologist and NatureNet Postdoctoral Science Fellow with the University of Montana. “It also could be applied to reduce risk from wildfire to other important values such as municipal water, culturally important plants, recreation, and wildlife habitat.”
USDA Forest Service Chief Randy Moore added, “This type of science collaboration strengthens our efforts to support land managers in designing and implementing effective projects with multiple benefits, making good work even better. It also is key in informing our overall efforts to address the wildfire crisis facing our nation’s forests by doing the right work, in the right place, at the right time.”
During a wildfire, most carbon loss occurs when litter, duff, and downed woody material is consumed by the fire – but over time, trees killed during a fire decompose, producing another source of carbon loss. The study identifies locations where communities and agencies can consider implementing proactive forest management to reduce negative impacts from wildfires, including carbon loss.
Proactive forest management can reduce the number of trees killed in wildfires by reducing excess fuels, reducing the negative impacts of a century of fire suppression and global warming. It also can keep more living trees on the landscape after wildfire, to continue to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere and provide seeds for future forest.
“The need for proactive forest management in California, New Mexico and Arizona is particularly urgent, given that a large portion of their forested area is highly vulnerable to wildfire-caused carbon loss,” says the study’s co-author, Travis Woolley, forest ecologist for The Nature Conservancy in Arizona.
“As governments take action to address the escalating climate and wildfire crises, they do not need to choose between climate- and wildfire-mitigation goals,” says Kerry Metlen, senior forest scientist for The Nature Conservancy in Oregon. “In the western US, opportunities are widespread to achieve both objectives with strategically placed proactive forest management.”
Figure identifies opportunities for using proactive forest management to simultaneously mitigate the greatest risk from wildfire to carbon and human communities in the western US. Researchers observed that 64 high of the 308 opportunity hot spots to reduce carbon overlapped previously published maps of 140 high-risk firesheds for human communities. Those 64 firesheds are depicted in gold to emphasize that improving reciprocal relationships between humans and forests can support multiple ecological, social, and cultural values concurrently. (*note the analysis was completed prior to announcing additional WCS high risk firesheds in November 2022, bringing the total to 250.)
CREDIT
Authors: lead author is Jamie Peeler
About University of Montana
Founded in 1893, the University of Montana is a top-ranked research university and its impact is felt locally and globally. Grizzlies go on to find success abroad and at home, known for their unbridled curiosity and creativity unmatched on either side of the Rockies. The University of Montana strives to be both accessible and accountable – respected worldwide and responsive at home. What’s made at the University of Montana is remaking the world.
About USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station
The Rocky Mountain Research Station is one of five Forest Service research stations serving federal and state agencies, international organizations, Tribes, academia, non-profit groups, and the public. RMRS researchers work in a range of biological, physical, and social science fields to promote sustainable management of the nation's diverse forests and rangelands. The station develops and delivers scientific knowledge and innovative technologies with a focus on informing policy and land-management decisions. Working out of 15 laboratories across the Western U.S., RMRS researchers work in collaboration with a range of partners, including other agencies, academia, nonprofit groups, and industry.
About The Nature Conservancy
Founded in the U.S. through grassroots action in 1951, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has grown to become one of the most effective and wide-reaching environmental organizations in the world. Thanks to more than a million members and the dedicated efforts of our diverse staff and over 400 scientists, we impact conservation in 79 countries and territories: 37 by direct conservation impact and 42 through partners.
IMAGE: ENERGY TRACKING DIAGRAMS DRAWN BY PHYSICS TEACHERS IN A STUDY EXAMINING EQUITY IN ENERGY. THE AUTHORS DEVELOPED THE DIAGRAMS IN ALIGNMENT WITH THE NEXT GENERATION SCIENCE STANDARDS TO SHOW THE MOVEMENT OF ENERGY WITHIN A POWER PRODUCTION SYSTEM. THEIR LATEST WORK ASKS PHYSICS TEACHERS TO EXPAND THE ANALYSIS FROM FACTORS WITHIN AN ENERGY SYSTEM (POWER PLANT) TO THE VARIETY OF INTERCONNECTED SYSTEMS OUTSIDE, FROM RAW MATERIALS TO THE STATE OF THE LAND AFTER DECOMMISSIONING.view more
CREDIT: CREDIT: RACHEL E. SCHERR, LANE H. SEELEY, AND KARA E. GRAY
WASHINGTON, Sept. 6, 2023 – Large-scale energy generation projects depend on economics and politics as much as they do on the availability of natural resources and raw materials. Power plant output also extends far beyond electricity, producing a variety of scientific, ethical, ecological, and cultural impacts across multiple scales, ranging from local to regional, state, national, and global effects.
Researchers from the University of Washington Bothell and Seattle Pacific University discussed the importance of contextualizing physics principles. In The Physics Teacher, a journal co-published by AIP Publishing and the American Association of Physics Teachers, they outlined how teachers implemented case studies to teach about energy and the realities of power plants.
“During the pandemic, a lot of us had a reexamination of the education that we were offering, a chance to really look at why it is important and what its purpose is,” author Rachel Scherr said. “Ultimately, science education should be providing a basis for decision making, and we should be enabling students to participate in scientifically responsible decisions that affect their lives and their communities.”
Scherr and her collaborators share their latest updates on a multi-year project geared toward supporting physics educators in new forms of teaching about energy that connect students with the realities of physics beyond the classroom. Their study examined how a set of teachers applied this holistic approach to analyze the social and cultural impacts of Plant Scherer in Georgia. The authors also accounted for student experiences in a course investigating dams in the Skagit River Hydroelectric Project, including research on relicensing, local resistance, salmon relocation engineering, and tribal restoration projects.
“We’ve been supporting teachers for a few years now to really think about the equity issues related to power plants and the role of equity in community decision making,” Scherr said. “Equity has to do with not just the power plant itself, but the relationship of the power plant to the lands and waters and air that surround it, as well as human, plant, and animal communities.”
Their work exemplifies that removing abstraction from physics education—and reconnecting power plants to the rest of the planet—prepares students to engage in community decision making and understand energy in its many social and cultural contexts.
“Technology, infrastructure, and energy resource decisions are partly scientific decisions, and classes that prepare young people to participate in decision making is a shared value for scientists,” Scherr said.
“There is so much to be gained from placing these kinds of analyses in their context, where they have consequences for people and for the natural world. It’s a natural extension that helps to make the physics we learn meaningful.”
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The article, "Energy in its material and social context: Power plants," is authored by Rachel E. Scherr, Lane H. Seeley, and Kara E. Gray. It will appear in The Physics Teacher on Sept. 6, 2023 (DOI: 10.1119/5.0111211). After that date, it can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0111211.
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Dedicated to the strengthening of the teaching of introductory physics at all levels, The Physics Teacher includes tutorial papers, articles on pedagogy, current research, and news in physics, as well as history, philosophy, and biography. See https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/pte.
About AAPT AAPT is an international organization for physics educators, physicists, and industrial scientists with members worldwide. Dedicated to enhancing the understanding and appreciation of physics through teaching, AAPT provides awards, publications, and programs that encourage teaching practical application of physics principles, support continuing professional development, and reward excellence in physics education. AAPT was founded in 1930 and is headquartered in the American Center for Physics in College Park, Maryland.
