Mark Rudnicki was in the Houghton area in July of 2011, to visit his wife’s family who live in the area. He and his wife have two sons. Mark teaches at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT where he is an associate professor of forest ecology in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment.
Jim Hohnberger was a summer visitor to the School. Jim has many good memories of his time at Michigan Tech, such as great instructors and a fantastic learning environment. Jim lives in Polebridge Montana.
Forest Industry Safety Training Alliance (FISTA) trainer Lee Schaumann, assisted by Jim Schmierer conducted a Level 1 Basic Chainsaw Safety training at the Ford Center facility at Alberta, 9 miles south of L’Anse, MI for Michigan Tech students and staff on Saturday, 11/12/11. Participants learned about personal protective equipment, chainsaw maintenance, hazard awareness, safe chainsaw operation, proper notching, bore cutting, and tree felling techniques. The afternoon was spent practicing what was learned in the field in the adjacent Research Forest. Another training is planned for Spring semester 2012.
A 70-acre jack pine stand on the Michigan Tech Research Forest in the Baraga Plains that includes direct seeding trials from the 1970s was thinned in 2011 to approximately 300 trees per acre (roughly 12’x12′ spacing) to improve vigor, reduce ladder fuels and fuel loads, and improve quality. The yield was 20 tons per acre on average and included mostly chips with a few loads of pulpwood. Samples were taken pre-treatment to develop nutrient profiles of the stand that can be monitored over time. Several Michigan Tech FERM students and a visiting group from Purdue toured the timber harvesting operation.
This fall, students in FW4810 “Integrated Resources Management” (a.k.a. “capstone”) completed a wall-to-wall inventory on the Alberta and Baraga Plains tracts of the Ford Research Forest. Changes to capstone to emphasize landscape-scale assessments allowed for a unique opportunity to synergize teaching and management on our working forest. The data from the inventory will form the foundation of capstone management projects during the fall semester.
Faculty members Robert Froese and Mike Falkowski designed the inventory, and a total of 356 permanently monumented field plot centres were installed by graduate student Tim Gebuhr during August. A high-precision GPS coordinate was collected for each plot center, so the data from the inventory are also available for research applications that demand high-accuracy spatial referencing, such as remote sensing based models of forest inventory. Examples of such applications are the new Forest Biomass Information System for Michigan (http://fbis.mtu.edu).
For more information, contact Dr. Robert Froese, Director of Reserch Forests, at froese@mtu.edu.
The Biotechnology Research Center has announced the recipients of its fall travel grants:
- Graduate student Tayloria Adams (ChE): $500 toward a poster presentation at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers annual meeting held in Minneapolis, in October.
- Graduate student Aytug Gencoglu (ChE): $500 toward a podium presentation at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers annual meeting held in Minneapolis, in October.
- Graduate student Seyyed Hessam Mir Shah Ghassemi (ME-EM): $500 toward a podium presentation at the Electrochemistry 2011 meeting held Boston, in October.
- Undergraduate student Hallie Holmes (Biomedical Engineering): $500 toward a podium presentation at the Biomedical Engineering Society annual meeting held Hartford, Conn., in October.
- Graduate student Beini Jiang (MATH): $500 toward a poster presentation at the WORLDCOMP ’11 Meeting held in Las Vegas, in July.
- Graduate student Robert Larson (KIP): $500 toward a poster presentation at the Experimental Biology 2011 Conference held in Washington, DC, in April.
- Graduate student Kaela Leonard (ChE): $500 toward a podium presentation at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers annual meeting held in Minneapolis, in October
- Graduate student Saikat Mukhopadhay (Physics): $500 toward a poster presentation at the International Conference on Theoretical and Applied Physics to be held in Kolkata, India, in December.
- Graduate student Haley Rupp (SFRES): $500 toward a poster presentation at the WoW 2011 Symposium held in Vancouver, British Columbia, in June.
- Graduate student Alicia Sawdon (ChE): $500 toward a podium presentation at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers annual meeting held in Minneapolis, in October.
- Graduate student Christopher Schwartz (KIP): $500 toward a poster presentation at the Experimental Biology 2011 Conference held in Washington, DC, in April.
- Graduate student Katherine Snyder (Biomedical Engineering): $500 toward a poster presentation at the ORS 2011 annual meeting held in Long Beach, Calif., in January.
- Graduate student Chungja Yang (ChE): $250 toward a poster presentation at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers annual meeting held in Minneapolis, in October.
- Graduate student Huan Yang (KIP): $500 toward a poster presentation at the Experimental Biology 2011 conference held in Washington, DC, in April.
The Ford Center is home to the School’s Research Forest. Research on sustainable forestry, silviculture and ecological processes has been conducted on the property since 1954. Several on-going, long term studies are being conducted on the Ford Center’s lands. New research projects are continually being initiated. Funding is being actively pursued by School faculty and staff, and students.
Adjunct Assistant Professor Sigrid Resh and co-PI Research Assistant Professor Evan Kane have received $149,397 from the US Department of Energy for a two-year project, Interactive Effects of Climate Change and Decomposer Communities on the Stabilization of Wood-Derived Carbon Pools: Catalyst for a New Study.
| Assistant Professor Audrey Mayer, who holds a joint appointment in the School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science and the Department of Social Sciences, was quoted in a news story in the biweekly magazine Science News, commenting on two papers in the journal Science that examined the factors that influence the shift from forests to grasslands. Science published a Perspectives column by Mayer about the research in the same issue of Science. See Trees. |
by John Gagnon, promotional writer
 Professor Kathy Halvorsen has just completed what she calls “the greatest honor” of her career–membership on a select national committee on bioenergy that examined the economic and environmental impacts of increasing biofuels production. Halvorsen, who has a dual appointment in the Department of Social Sciences and the School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science, served more than a year on the committee, which comprised 16 experts from academia and industry. The committee, part of the National Research Council (NRC), began its deliberations in January of 2010. The NRC is part of the National Academies, which advise the nation on science, engineering and medicine. Halvorsen studies the relationships between people and the environment. She earned a position on the committee because her research has addressed forest policy dimensions of bioenergy development, as well as the attitudes of landowners who would have to supply the feedstock for biofuels. The dialogue among the group was intensive. “We discussed, discussed, and discussed. We wrote, and wrote, and wrote,” Halvorsen said. (The result is a book: see below to download a free copy.) Halvorsen says that biofuels are a decidedly complicated matter. “There are many dimensions intermingled,” she says. They involve energy, agriculture and the environment; they have social and technological implications; they impact an “almost infinite” number of ecological systems around the globe; they affect both the consumers who would use the product and the landowners who would supply the feedstock; simply put, they comprise the “most complex energy source.” How this industry might evolve is murky, for there is no measure; the US doesn’t have the plants to produce advanced cellulosic biofuels on a commercial scale. As well, the initiative is controversial. Halvorsen says, “There are very strong advocates for biofuels. There are equally strong sentiments against biofuels. Some argue that it will reduce greenhouse gases. Others argue the we can’t produce biofuels without negative impacts.” Corn, then, to fuel instead of food? One concern: “Will food costs go up and increase hunger globally?” Yet, the need is paramount: the US imports 55 percent of the nation’s consumption of crude oil and is not on a congressionally-mandated course to achieve a substantial increase in advanced biofuels by 2022. There are a host of uncertainties between now and then, Halvorsen says: * We don’t know much about growing, harvesting and storing cellulosic ethanol feedstock on a commercial scale. * We don’t know how well conversion technologies will work nor what they will cost. * We don’t know how landowners will alter their production strategies. In sum, she says, “It’s impossible at this point to come up with quantitative answers to these questions.” One certainty: the drivers for expanding this technology include crude oil prices; feedstock costs and availability; appropriate and efficient technology; changes in land use; and government policy. Halvorsen sums up the committee’s work as having framed the dialogue: “Our hope is that this scientific evaluation sheds some light on the heat of the debate, as we have delineated the issues and the consequences as we see them, together with all the inherent uncertainty.” The NRC committee’s report is titled, “Renewable Fuel Standard: Potential Economic and Environmental Effects of US Biofuel Policy.” To download a free copy, see Biofuels. |