Climate change could drastically reduce aquifer recharge in Brazil

Study shows that most of the country’s underground reservoirs will lose their capacity for renewal, increasing the risk of water shortages in several regions, especially the Southeast and South. One strategy to address the problem is “managed recharge

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo

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Main aquifers in Brazil, considering their water potential 

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Credit: IBGE School Geographic Atlas

The global climate crisis could significantly impact the natural replenishment of Brazilian aquifers, reducing the groundwater supply across the country. This is the conclusion of a study by scientists from the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Geosciences (IGc-USP) and the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). The scientists analyzed the impact of various climate scenarios on water availability by the end of the century. The study was published in the journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment.

Groundwater is water that accumulates below the Earth’s surface in geological formations called aquifers. It slowly infiltrates the soil after rainfall and supplies wells, springs, rivers, and ecosystems. In Brazil, an estimated 112 million people (56% of the population) rely totally or partially on this source.

The IGc-USP and INPE study employed a water balance model based on geoprocessing and corrected climate projection data from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) to estimate temperature, precipitation, surface runoff, and aquifer recharge changes between 2025 and 2100. CMIP6 unifies data from various research centers worldwide and is the most recent model produced by the World Climate Research Program (WCRP).

The research considered two greenhouse gas emission scenarios: one moderate and one pessimistic. “What we found was the possibility of a drastic decrease in aquifer recharge in the country, especially in the Southeast and South regions, which will become drier according to virtually all the climate models analyzed,” says Ricardo Hirata, full professor at IGc-USP and first author of the article.

The results show that the country is expected to experience consistent temperature increases throughout the century, ranging from 1.02 °C to 3.66 °C depending on the scenario and period considered. At the same time, rainfall distribution is likely to become more uneven. The North region and part of the east coast are expected to see a drop in average annual precipitation, while the South and parts of the Northeast (especially Ceará, Piauí, and Maranhão) may experience occasional increases.

“Even in regions such as the Southeast, where the total amount of rainfall isn’t expected to vary greatly, we’ll see a change in the regime, with rainier summers and longer dry periods. Very intense and concentrated rainfall promotes surface runoff and can cause flooding, but doesn’t favor water infiltration into the soil. And without infiltration, there’s no recharge,” says Hirata.

The researcher points out that, even when water penetrates the soil, it can take months to reach the aquifer. “In several of our studies, we’ve seen that it takes water two or three months to travel 10 to 15 meters through the soil and reach the water table. If the rain is too intense and lasts only a short time, that water doesn’t make it there,” he notes.

In the most affected areas, underground recharge may decrease by up to 666 millimeters per year. The most critical situation is expected to occur in the Bauru-Caiuá Aquifer System (located in Brazil’s Central-West region and spanning parts of the states of Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Goiás, Mato Grosso do Sul, and Mato Grosso), with a 27.94% reduction in recharge volume. Other important aquifers, including the outcrop areas of Guarani (in parts of the states of Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Goiás, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul), Furnas (Bahia, Goiás, and Minas Gerais), Serra Geral (Mato Grosso do Sul, São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul), Bambuí Cárstico (Piauí, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Bahia, Goiás, and Minas Gerais), and Parecis (Rondônia, Amazonas, and Mato Grosso), are also expected to suffer significant losses (read more at revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/en/aquifer-depletion-threatens-forests-and-rivers/). 

Lack of attention to the problem

Despite its strategic importance, the underground dimension of the water crisis has received little attention from public policies. “Groundwater continues to be overlooked in the discussion about climate change. When we talk about the climate, we talk about rivers, vegetation, agriculture. But aquifers aren’t on the agenda,” Hirata points out.

He notes that more than half of Brazilian municipalities rely on groundwater for their water supply. “We have a huge water reserve that’s resilient to variations in recharge. Even in years of drought, the aquifer continues to supply water because its storage capacity is so large. This is what happened during the great drought of 2014-2016. Cities supplied by surface water were twice as affected by the water crisis as those supplied exclusively by groundwater,” says Hirata. Brazil has approximately 3 million drilled tubular wells and 2 million dug wells, which extract between 550 and 600 cubic meters of water per second. Eighty to ninety percent of this total is used for private purposes, including agriculture, industry, services, and supplemental residential supply in urban areas.

One example is the city of São Paulo. “Only 1% of the public supply comes from aquifers. But there are about 13,000 private wells in the metropolitan area that account for 11 cubic meters per second. During the water crisis, this supplied 25% of the demand,” Hirata quantifies. Despite the obvious distortion, he argues that private use plays an important social role: “It may seem contradictory, but when the rich use water from wells, there’s more water left in the network for the poor.”

Solutions

The study not only points out problems but also proposes solutions. One promising strategy is managed aquifer recharge (MAR), which uses techniques to promote the infiltration of rainwater or treated sewage. MAR includes direct injection into the aquifer, as is already the case in Madrid, Spain.

The researcher explains that managed recharge can be done with simple structures, such as infiltration basins or small dams, or with more sophisticated direct injection systems. “It’s possible to capture rainwater or even treated sewage and channel it into planned infiltration systems. The soil acts as a biogeochemical super-reactor, capable of purifying the water as it travels to the aquifer.”

In large cities such as São Paulo, some underground recharge occurs involuntarily. “Isotope studies show that about 50% of the recharge in the central region comes from leaks in the water and sewage networks. This shows that urban occupation can also positively affect underground processes,” Hirata points out.

The study was supported by FAPESP through a postdoctoral fellowship awarded to Leila Goodarzi and a direct doctoral fellowship awarded to Fernando Schuh Rörig. They are both members of the team and the Thematic Project “SACRE – Integrated Solutions for Resilient Cities”. 

In October, Hirata will receive an award from the Federal Council of Engineering and Agronomy (CONFEA) for his four decades of work in defense of groundwater. Hirata is the author, with collaborators, of “Groundwater and its Environmental and Socioeconomic Importance for Brazil”.

About São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)
The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration. You can learn more about FAPESP at www.fapesp.br/en and visit FAPESP news agency at www.agencia.fapesp.br/en to keep updated with the latest scientific breakthroughs FAPESP helps achieve through its many programs, awards and research centers. You may also subscribe to FAPESP news agency at http://agencia.fapesp.br/subscribe. 

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Journal

Environmental Monitoring and Assessment

DOI

10.1007/s10661-025-14235-8 

Article Title

Climate change impacts on groundwater: a growing challenge for water resources sustainability in Brazil

 

Sustainable, plant-based diet benefits both human and planetary health

The planetary health diet was associated with a lower incidence of diabetes and reduced greenhouse gas emissions

PLOS

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This graphic was prepared by EAT and is included in an adapted summary of the Commission Food in The Anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems. The entire Commission can be found online at eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission.

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Credit: EAT Forum (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

A diet focused on healthy plant-based foods may lower the risk of type 2 diabetes while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study by Solomon Sowah and colleagues from the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, published September 16th in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine.

Growing research shows that unhealthy foods not only impact your health but are also detrimental to the environment. Diets such as the Planetary Health Diet (PHD) recommend high amounts of healthy plant-based foods and limited animal-derived foods and sugary drinks to improve both human and environmental health. Data on the impact of these types of diets show inconsistent findings, and there is little epidemiological data specifically examining the effect of the PHD on type 2 diabetes or environmental factors, such as greenhouse gas emissions.

In this study, researchers analyzed dietary data from more than 23,000 people in the UK taken at three timepoints across 20 years. They found that higher adherence to the PHD was associated with lower incidence of type 2 diabetes—participants in the top fifth of adherence had a 32% lower incidence of type 2 diabetes compared to those in the bottom fifth. Higher adherence to the PHD was also associated with lower greenhouse emissions—among those in the top fifth of adherence, greenhouse gas emissions were 18% lower compared to those in the bottom fifth.

The researchers recognize that while the study does not show a direct causal link between the PHD and type 2 diabetes, promoting healthier plant-based diets could be an important strategy to simultaneously prevent type 2 diabetes while reducing the negative impact of diet on the environment.

Dr. Solomon Sowah says, “Our motivation for this study was to address the limited evidence regarding the association between the planetary health diet and both type 2 diabetes incidence and greenhouse gas emissions in a European population. We found that the planetary health diet containing higher amounts of wholegrains, fruits and vegetables, and lower amounts of red and processed meat and sugary drinks was associated with lower type 2 diabetes incidence and lower diet-related greenhouse gas emissions.”

Prof. Nita Forouhi, senior author of the study, says, “These findings provide support for the potential of the planetary health diet to make a meaningful contribution to help prevent type 2 diabetes. What's more is that eating in line with the planetary health diet is also linked with a lower environmental impact. So, it offers a win-win to potentially help improve both human and planetary health. Action will be needed from all players, including individuals and policy makers to enable food consumption aligned with this dietary approach.”

 

In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Medicine: https://plos.io/3F9k4he   

Citation: Sowah SA, Imamura F, Ibsen DB, Monsivais P, Wareham NJ, Forouhi NG (2025) The association of the planetary health diet with type 2 diabetes incidence and greenhouse gas emissions: Findings from the EPIC-Norfolk prospective cohort study. PLoS Med 22(9): e1004633. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1004633

Author countries: United Kingdom, Denmark, United States

Funding: see manuscript

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Journal

PLOS Medicine

DOI

10.1371/journal.pmed.1004633 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

 

Disease experts team up with Florida Museum of Natural History to create a forecast for West Nile virus

Florida Museum of Natural History

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An interdisciplinary team of experts have combined their skills and created a statistical model that accurately predicts the activity of West Nile virus in an area up to six months in advance.

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Credit: Photo courtesy of Lawrence Reeves

Key points

• State and local officials in Florida maintain hundreds coops with what are referred to as sentinel chickens, which act as an early alarm system for the presence of mosquito-borne illnesses in an area. This alarm system just got an upgrade.
• An interdisciplinary team of experts, including a zoonotic disease specialist, a museum data scientist and a salamander biologist, have combined their skills and created a statistical model that accurately predicts the activity of West Nile virus in an area up to six months in advance.
• The model was trained using two decades of sentinel chicken data. The original data files were destroyed in a flood, and the study was only possible because a University of Florida professor kept a personal copy in his lab.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- A new study has significant bearing on the hackneyed joke about chickens and their numerous reasons for crossing roads. In Florida, there’s a good chance that the chicken crossed the road because it had completed its year-long conscripted service as a disease sentinel, a sort of early alarm signal for mosquito virus activity across the state.

Mosquito control programs maintain hundreds of chicken coops from the Panhandle down through Miami. Once a week, throughout large portions of the year, officials take a small blood sample from each of several chickens and send them to the Florida Department of Health, where they’re tested for antibodies to common mosquito-borne diseases, such as West Nile virus and eastern equine encephalitis. If the results are positive, the state will warn residents to be especially wary of mosquitos until the danger is past.

There’s no way to know with certainty, but the state’s sentinel program, which has been ongoing for more than 40 years, has likely saved many lives. But the program has its limitations, the most obvious being that warning can only be given after the confirmed virus activity, by which time people may have already been exposed.

Researchers at the University of Florida want to change that. In the study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, they demonstrate that they can reliably predict elevated West Nile virus activity in chickens up to six months before it occurs, which they accomplished by training and testing a statistical model on 20 years’ worth of sentinel chicken data. Their results are an important first step toward forecasting West Nile virus across Florida.

“People have spent years testing these chickens, and one of the main reasons is to get to the point where you can make predictions,” said study co-author Rob Guralnick, curator of biodiversity informatics at the Florida Museum of Natural History. He described the results as an exclamation point to the work that’s been done up to this point.

With this and future models added to their toolkit, health officials may one day soon be able to supplement their reactionary mitigation responses to disease outbreaks with proactive preventative measures.

When health officials want to predict the next big arbovirus outbreak, they look at birds

The study is partially the product of a 2023 Research Opportunity Seed Fund awarded by the University of Florida to forecast a variety of mosquito-borne illnesses in the state, and it almost didn’t happen.

The sentinel records, which had been stored in a basement at the Florida Department of Health, were destroyed by a flood. Luckily, Jonathan Day — a scientist at the University of Florida who studied viruses transmitted by arthropods (called arboviruses) — had the foresight to keep his own copy in big, unwieldy binders.

“One of my colleagues had stored these weekly reports all through his career. They were called arbograms,” said senior author Lindsay Campbell with a straight face before losing her composure and laughing at the pun.

Campbell is an assistant professor at the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory in UF’s department of entomology and nematology. After hearing about the flood, she offered to share the records she’d inherited from her colleague. She also gave the data a digital face-lift with help from Guralnick, whose specialties include efficiently digitizing avalanche-sized reams of analog information.

“I knew from working with the Florida Museum that there were tons of advances in digitizing collections and other types of data,” Campbell said. Together, they created what’s referred to as an informatics pipeline, which automatically converted and organized the chicken data. Manual checks were performed afterward to ensure the transition had gone smoothly.

It’s hard to understate just how important these data are. The sentinel program was already in place when West Nile virus first arrived in Florida in 2001, meaning scientists who study the disease have a detailed record of how the epidemic unfolded. Other states had to piece together how the disease spread from several disparate and less reliable sources.

This was true of New York City back in 1999. The first intimation residents of the city’s Queens borough had that anything was amiss was an unusually large number of dead and dying crows in June and July. A veterinarian directly observed a crow that was unable to walk straight, suggesting it suffered from a neurological illness.

Things happened quickly after that. Within a few months, several types of animals began exhibiting similar symptoms: a wild goose in Queens; multiple bird species — including flamingos and a bald eagle — at the Bronx Zoo; a cooper’s hawk in Connecticut.

Wildlife pathologists hastily worked to find the cause while, unknown to them, humans started getting sick as well. Eight people who lived within a 4-square-mile radius developed severe fevers, brain swelling, muscle weakness and paralysis. By late September, medical doctors and wildlife experts had an answer. The cases represented the first known outbreak of West Nile virus in North America. By then, several more people had contracted the illness, with 59 reported cases in all at summer’s end.

The same pattern soon played out in other states. Dead birds presaged the arrived of West Nile virus throughout 10 counties in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey the following year. The year after that, it had spread to 38 counties across 10 states. In 2002, West Nile virus exploded across the U.S. in what was then the largest outbreak of the disease ever recorded. Thousands of people got sick and hundreds died.

West Nile virus waxes and wanes with the seasons, but it’s remained in the United States since its initial arrival at the tail end of the millennium.

Once a zoonotic virus has become established in a population, it’s nearly impossible to get rid of it. Rather than attempting full-blown eradication, scientists and civil servants have worked hard to track the disease. In Florida, the same animals that once augured imminent outbreak now stand guard as sentinels, only this time it’s chickens instead of crows. Chickens are a good choice because although they can become infected with West Nile virus — and their cells produce antibodies in response — they do not develop symptoms, nor can they transmit the virus to others.

Even with this information at their disposal, the ability to accurately predict where a virus will be active at any point in the future is a difficult task. This is particularly true of zoonotic arboviruses and other zoonotic diseases, because they can often infect multiple hosts.

“West Nile virus is a good example of that, because there are so many birds and mosquitos that can be infected and likely play a role in the transmission cycle. That’s why it does such a good job when it moves into a new area,” Campbell said.

West Nile virus has been documented in 65 mosquito species in North America alone, and though not all of them transmit the virus in nature, it can be difficult to distinguish the active transmission routes from the dead ends. Plus, only some mosquitos feed on humans, but all of them have to get their blood from somewhere.

That means it’s theoretically possible for a mosquito that is only a menace to birds to infect, say, a crow, which could then pass on the pathogen to another species of mosquito that has fewer reservations about where it feeds. These generalist mosquitos, called bridge vectors, are responsible for the spillover of West Nile virus to humans and other animals.

Any model attempting to account for each individual component in this web of complicated interactions would invariably stall in a quagmire of intractable data. Instead, the authors devised something simpler to cut through the noise and find the signal.

Refined model accurately predicts past viral activity

Had the authors been doing this work in the early 2000s, they would have used a simple model that included components for where a disease was active and when that activity occurred. According to study lead author J. Alex Baecher — who formerly modeled the distribution of salamanders before turning his attention to arboviruses for a postdoctoral research appointment — these types of models are useful but limited, because they do not account for interactions.

“They’re essentially snapshots, but the world isn’t static,” he said. “Ecological systems are dynamic, and modeling these systems requires accounting for how conditions in one location and time influence another.”

To connect the dots, ecologists took a page from quantum mechanics and fluid dynamics, in which interaction and randomness factor heavily, and added a component to their models that accounted for these variables.

“This tool has dramatically expanded our capabilities,” Baecher said. “We’re now able to model disease dynamics with higher biological realism, incorporating nonlinear interactions and latent variables that better reflect real-world complexity.”

The authors fed their model with data that included precipitation and minimum and maximum temperatures from the years 2001 to 2019, along with information about land cover across Florida. Then they ran the numbers, and the model spat out its predictions, or — rather — postdictions, since it was actually computing the where and when West Nile virus activity would have shown up in the past.

The chicken data was a crucial component of the analysis. Rather than predicting the future and waiting around for the next outbreak to test their model’s accuracy, they made a 20-year disease hindcast, then used the chicken data to assess its performance.

The results did not disappoint. The retrospective predictions closely aligned with the number of chicken infections and accurately predicted elevated virus activity in general areas where cases occurred in not only humans but horses as well, which number among the many casualties of West Nile outbreaks.

The monthly predictions were the most accurate and had less uncertainty, but the seasonal predictions were still reliable. The combined results gave the authors a sense of which environmental conditions are immediately conducive to elevated virus activity and which work further out in time to set up the stage.

For the monthly predictions, overall higher minimum temperatures and precipitation in an area two months before officials tested chickens had a strong positive association with West Nile virus activity, and high maximum temperatures during the testing month had a negative association. Intermediate levels of precipitation six months prior to testing had the strongest signal at the seasonal scale.

Altogether, this information may give officials a clear picture of what to look for at multiple points ahead of time to help inform management decisions.

The authors said their results are a milestone, but not one to stop at. Rather, they see the model as a tool that can be further refined and added to.

“The bird part is a missing piece in the model, and human behavior is another missing piece, and mosquitos and where they are is another. What we’re really trying to do is wrap these together to understand the mechanics all the way up and down the chain, from the weather patterns that favor mosquitos to the transmission cycle in birds and how that affects humans,” Guralnick said.

Disease forecasting is one of the many ways natural history museums are branching into the health sciences. Pamela Soltis, a distinguished professor and curator at the Florida Museum, recently led a series of workshops funded by the National Science Foundation to encourage and empower museum collection managers and curators to form stronger ties with health officials and disease experts. Efforts to do so are currently underway through the aegis of One Health, an interdisciplinary framework adopted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and multiple other agencies in the U.S. and internationally.

“The concept is that there should be integrated information from all sources, including wildlife, agricultural species and cultivated plants,” Soltis said.

When zookeepers, veterinarians and wildlife experts began to track down the cause of the 1999 West Nile outbreak, there were few direct lines of communication between them and the health professionals who recorded the same outbreak in humans. Both groups launched independent lines of inquiry and arrived at their conclusions at different times roughly two months after the outbreak began. Had they worked together, it may not have taken them as long.

Collectively, the world’s natural history museums hold about 3 billion specimens from across the tree of life, which have the potential to help track pathogens and trace the origin of outbreaks before they develop into pandemics, Soltis said.

She gave Sin Nombre virus, which causes hantavirus pulmonary disease and was first discovered in the U.S. in 1993, as an example. Rodents are the primary host for hantavirus, but humans can become infected by inhaling aerosols from rodent droppings and urine. Researchers tested tissue from newly collected rodents and those preserved at the Museum of Southwestern Biology, 27% of which were positive for the virus. They used their results to determine which species most likely acted as vectors and where the disease was most prominent.

According to Soltis, this is one of the many unanticipated uses of museum collections. Researchers initially began collecting specimens during the Renaissance to document Earth’s biodiversity, but developments like the discovery of DNA, the advent of CT scanning and advances in data science have since vastly expanded the utility of collections and resulted in a variety of seemingly unlikely interdisciplinary collaborations. Their use in disease prevention is an ongoing paradigm shift.

If you live in Florida, one way you can support disease forecast programs is to adopt your very own sentinel chicken! After remaining stalwart for a year in the service of human health, they deserve a little rest and relaxation.

Additional authors of the study are Ashay Anand, Amy Bauer, Yasmin Tavares and Yesenia Sánchez of the University of Florida; and James Thorson of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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Journal

Science of The Total Environment

DOI

10.1016/j.scitotenv.2025.180308 

Article Title

Toward ecological forecasting of West Nile virus in Florida: Insights from two decades of sentinel chicken surveillance

Article Publication Date

9-Sep-2025

 

New UMaine research could help lower prescription drug costs

University of Maine

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Using glucose, which can be derived from wood chips and other woody biomass, to create a critical building block for a broad range of pharmaceuticals at high concentrations to and yields at lower costs was the focus of a new study from the University of Maine. Photo courtesy of the University of Maine. 

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Credit: Courtesy of the University of Maine.

One of the main factors driving prices in pharmaceuticals, such as cholesterol-lowering drugs and antibiotics, is the cost of production and materials. Researchers at the University of Maine Forest Bioproducts Research Institute (FBRI) have discovered a sustainable method to produce the key ingredient in a broad range of pharmaceuticals, which could help address high prescription drug costs in the U.S. 

Among some of the most expensive medications are those that require a chiral center  ― a property in which a molecule cannot be superimposed with its mirror image, like right and left hands. Chirality can direct a drug’s biological effects including efficacy, side effects and metabolization. The price of chiral drugs is greatly contributed to the building blocks used during synthesis, which are costly to produce due to complex reaction and purification pathways. 

In a new study recently published in Chem, FBRI researchers explore a new, cost-reducing pathway to produce one of these crucial building blocks, (S)-3-hydroxy-γ-butyrolactone (HBL), from glucose at high concentrations and yields. 

According to researchers, HBL is a chiral species used for the synthesis of an array of crucial drugs such as statins, antibiotics and HIV inhibitors. Because glucose can be derived from any lignocellulosic feedstock ― such as wood chips, sawdust, tree branches or other woody biomass ― this process opens a new door for the sustainable production of HBL. This approach could also potentially be used to produce other types of important consumer products. 

“If we use other kinds of wood sugars, like xylose that is an unneeded byproduct from making pulp and paper, we expect that we could produce new chemicals and building blocks, like green cleaning products or new renewable, recyclable plastics,” said Thomas Schwartz, associate director of FBRI and associate professor in the Maine College of Engineering and Computing who was a lead author for the paper.

In addition to its use as a chiral species, HBL has been identified as a highly valuable precursor to a variety of chemicals and plastics by the U.S. Department of Energy. Previous attempts to produce HBL sustainably achieved only limited success due to safety issues, ineffectiveness or a lack of cost-efficiency.

“The competing processes either lead to low yields, use hazardous starting materials or are just generally costly because of the chosen production scheme and low output,” said Schwartz. “The commercial process is expensive because you have to add the chiral center to the molecule, which doesn’t occur naturally with most petrochemicals.”

Not only does this new approach result in significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions, but the production costs are also reduced by more than 60% compared to current methods that use petroleum-derived feedstocks. The process can also yield other commercially important chemicals, such as glycolic acid (GA), which presents additional economic opportunities. 

The research included work from students in the UMaine Catalysis Group led by Schwartz and was conducted in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Products Laboratory and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Funding for the project was provided by the USDA, U.S. Forest Service and the National Science Foundation.

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Journal

Chem

DOI

10.1016/j.chempr.2025.102665 

Article Title

Production of biorenewable, enantiopure (S)-3-hydroxy-γ-butyrolactone for pharmaceutical applications