The Upstate Institute announces the award of grants to support faculty scholarship on, or directly pertaining to, the upstate region of New York. The Upstate Institute serves to promote scholarly research that relates to the region’s social, economic, environmental, and cultural assets. Institute projects promote community collaboration and civic engagement through the creation of knowledge and enhance community capacity throughout the region.
Catherine Cardelús, Assistant Professor of Biology, received funds for “Above and Belowground Responses to Acid Rain Mitigation in Adirondack State Park.”
Catherine Cardelús, Assistant Professor of Biology, received funds for “Above and Belowground Responses to Acid Rain Mitigation in Adirondack State Park.” She will work with a team of students to examine the effect of calcium addition on forest nutrient recovery to learn whether “liming” might be a potentially effective mitigation strategy to fight the effects of acid rain in the Adirondack Park. She and her students will collect leaf litter and measure tree growth several times during the coming year at four established test plots near Webb, New York. They hope to learn whether limed plots have more available nitrogen, and whether plants in those plots retain their leaves significantly longer and are therefore more productive.
Adam Burnett and William Peck received start-up funding to develop a project that will examine lake-effect snow patterns in Upstate New York. During the winter they recruited volunteers to sample precipitation from over a dozen locations in central New York, and coordinated collecting to sample snow from several lake-effect snow bands. Over seventy snow samples were collected from twenty storms. They will measure stable oxygen and hydrogen isotopes of these samples to learn about the path the moisture has taken and the conditions of snow formation in order to better understand lake-effect storms and other weather events. This project has also been funded by the Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute.