Real Science for Real People:

What Happens Next?

 

By Dr. Beth Ravit

 

Now that I’ve defended my Ph.D. thesis, a number of people are asking me, “What are you going to do now?”  When I went back to school five years ago, it was because Captain Bill and I had a goal - that one day there would be good science available to support the work of non-profit advocacy groups like Hackensack Riverkeeper. We now think that we’re very close to achieving this dream. While doing my research work, I received funding from Rutgers University to develop a plan to start the Rutgers Interdisciplinary Environmental Research Clinic (RIERC). The mission of the Clinic is to give graduate students from multiple academic disciplines the opportunity to work as a team with a non-profit group on an environmental project. In dealing with environmental issues, it’s very important to have a number of academic disciplines involved, because complex environmental problems cannot (and should not) be solved by a single discipline. One of the difficulties has been that typical academic departments tend to focus on one limited area of study. We currently have two pilot projects for the RIERC, and both of them are in the Hackensack River watershed. The biggest project is taking place in the Teaneck Creek Conservancy section (Area One) of Overpeck County Park in Bergen County. We’ve raised money to support the work of two graduate students over the next two years.

The project at the Teaneck Creek Conservancy section of Overpeck County Park in Bergen County will focus on how urban wetlands can increase the rate of denitrification -- the process of sediment microbes that converts nitrogen in the wetland into inert gas that can escape into the atmosphere. (Map courtesy of Pete Kallin, TRC Omni Environmental)

Their research will be focused on how urban wetlands can increase the rate of denitrification---the process of sediment microbes that converts nitrogen in the wetland into inert nitrogen gas that can escape into the atmosphere. This amazing microbial process helps clean up excess nitrogen that comes from fertilizers, animals such as Canada geese, stormwater runoff and airborne depositions from sources like power plants and vehicles. It’s important to remove this nitrogen from streams before they drain into the estuary or coastal waters, where excess nitrogen causes eutrophication (excessive nutrient levels) and algal blooms. We’re also in the process of raising money to add a third graduate student to this project to measure the atmospheric nitrogen deposition. At the end of this research we will have developed an Urban Hydrologic Model that can link hydrology, atmospheric nitrogen deposition and sediment denitrification, and can be used to improve other degraded urban landscapes.

The second project is focused on a site located in the Hackensack Meadowlands. The Research Clinic is working with the Rutgers Environmental Law Clinic to develop a remediation strategy for a highly contaminated 25-acre site. This project includes a graduate student in microbiology studying contaminant degradation, an honors undergraduate in ecology & evolution doing a fish behavior study, a public health chemist analyzing the contaminants, and an honors undergraduate student analyzing microbial DNA, as well as two law students studying possible legal remedies. I’m particularly excited about this collaboration, because we believe that lawyers need to work with good scientists so that environmental rules, regulations, and clean-up strategies are feasible and as effective as possible. We believe that scientists need to work with good lawyers, because many times exciting scientific processes or information remains on the lab bench, rather than out in the “real world” which could be benefiting from this academic knowledge.