Of the 160 projects announced since November 2012, 16 have at least one SNRE faculty member (19 total faculty). In addition to the Q-fever project, here are titles, project summaries and faculty role (with field of study) in the other 15 projects.

Bilal Butt (project lead), assistant professor, Conservation Ecology

Title: Unintended consequences of technology in development: A cross-sectional analysis
Summary: Investigates three questions: How prevalent is the use of technology in rural and urban livelihood strategies among the poor in low- and middle-income countries; what are the political, economic, and social contexts associated with the use of these technologies in these livelihood strategies; and in what ways and under which contexts does the use of technologies reinforce, erode, or maintain pre-existing social relations of production and exchange?

Dan Brown (project member), professor, Environmental Informatics

Title: Environments and activity: GPS-based collection of real-time perception and behavioral data to support modeling
Summary: Examines role of the built and social environment on physical-activity behavior using novel data and methodology to study why obesity levels have increased dramatically over the past three decades. The project will refine and test a methodology to capture survey data on mobile phones where surveys are triggered based on a sensor (e.g., GPS, accelerometer data).

Allen Burton (project member), professor, Conservation Ecology

Title: Tracking water and biodiversity resources in the Great Lakes
Summary: Explores impacts of climate change, invasive species, and toxicants on key water and biodiversity resources in the Great Lakes. Investigates how changing environmental factors influence microbial mats in the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and impacts from metals and synthetic organic chemicals in sediments.

Brad Cardinale (project member), associate professor, Conservation Ecology

Title: Algal biofuel and biodiversity
Project summary: Examines mixed algae cultures for biofuel production by integrating methods spanning from engineering and ecology and genomics.

Bill Currie (project lead), associate professor, Conservation Ecology; Arun Agrawal (team member), professor, Environmental Policy and Planning

Title: Linking people, forests, and the atmosphere to model landscape sustainability
Summary: Seeks to develop an innovative, new proof-of-concept computer model that links human use and alteration of forests, landscape ecological function, and surface-atmospheric exchange of carbon, energy, water, and aerosols.

Raymond De Young (project lead), associate professor, Behavior, Education and Communication; Tom Princen (team member), associate professor, Environmental Policy and Planning

Title: Urgent transitions: Responding to emerging biophysical limits
Project summary:  Explores transitions, related processes that need to occur in response to the growing consensus positing a biophysical limit to perpetual growth. Project grounded in biophysical trends and human capabilities, and pays special attention to local sources and impacts.

MaryCarol Hunter (project lead), associate professor, Landscape Architecture

Title: A “nature pill” for healthy ageing in urban areas
Summary: Articulates a “nature prescription” that supports healthy ageing in urban areas. While many studies show a positive influence of the nature experience on human health and well-being, there is little understanding about how much or in what form the nature experience should be.

Inez Ibanez (project member), assistant professor, Conservation Ecology

Title: Digital humanities approaches to popular periodicals: Quantifying reading trends with time series analysis
Summary: Uses distant reading and digital humanities techniques to study mainstream German periodicals between 1850 and 1918. Computer-based techniques range from the generation of index databases and the digitization of texts to programming, statistical analysis, and dynamic visualization of the data.

Bobbi Low (project member), professor, Conservation Ecology

Title: Complex systems approaches to comparing and contrasting life histories of Rhesuses and humans
Summary: Constructs, analyzes models of the life histories of Rhesus monkeys and humans, using classical life history techniques and more recent complex systems techniques. Models will explore causes and effects of varying parental, nepotistic, and social scenarios and different environments, backgrounds, and social structures.

Gregory A. Keoleian (project member), professor, Sustainable Systems

Title: Learning how to make liquid fuels from algae oil under water
Summary: Seeks to develop a better understanding of the chemistry of hydrothermal catalytic deoxygenation of fatty acids over early transition metal carbide-based catalysts.

Shelie Miller (project member), assistant professor, Sustainable Systems

Title: Hydraulic fracturing of shales: Water contamination risks, treatment options, and fate of fracking fluids
Summary: Seeks to study contaminant release and transport mechanisms, treatment options, and lifecycle assessment of the environmental impacts of fracking fluids in comparison to other oil and gas extraction techniques.

Paul Mohai (project member), professor, Environmental Justice

Title: School siting: Environmental justice, health, and law
Summary:  There are more than 53 million schoolchildren and 135,000 public and private schools in the United States. Are these schools safe and healthy places for children to grow, play, and learn? Or are we exposing children to unhealthy pollution?

Faculty: Joan Nassauer (project lead), professor, Landscape Architecture

Title: The physical environment of post-industrial cities & well-being of their inhabitants
Summary: Synthesizing team members’ existing data, results, and experiences to identify overarching actionable findings and principles about how the physical environment of post-industrial cities can further support the well-being of their inhabitants; identify research gaps that should be explored.

Josh Newell (project lead), assistant professor, Sustainable Systems

Title: Innovatively planning for technological innovation: Water, infrastructure, and sustainability
Summary: Seeks to understand the broad, complex, and potentially unanticipated impacts on humans and the environment that could emerge from the deployment of emerging innovative technologies being designed to address the compelling water, wastewater, stormwater, and related sustainability problems of today.

Ivette Perfecto (project lead), professor, Conservation Ecology

Title: Urban gardens: Constrained auto-generation of spatial pattern and consequences for ecosystem services
Summary: Seeks to determine the underlying ecological, sociological, and economic dynamics that generate spatial patterns of urban farms; examine the ecological dynamics that determine the dynamics of pest species in the gardens; and examine the consequences of this pattern and these dynamics for ecosystem function.