News From the Environmental Studies and Science Department

Pace Sustainability Initiative (PSI) is a student organization that is spearheading sustainable changes on Pace University’s NYC campus.

One of the major struggles in undergraduate research involves mentoring a student through an adequate lit review. I want to tell a story about a lit review gone right.

Carly Sheinberg was awarded the 2018 State of New York Sustainability Leadership Excellence Award for her work as a founding member of the Pace Sustainability Initiative (PSI).

On September 12, 2018, Jen Epstein from Riverkeeper presented research on water quality in the Hudson River Watershed regarding wastewater and micropollutants.

In an event co-hosted with the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, Pace hosted accomplished panelists Ryan Chavez of Uprose, Danny Peralta of The Point CDC, Leslie Velasquez of El Puente, and Anne Toomey, PhD, to discuss how a changing climate is impacting New York City’s most vulnerable residents and some of the actions their organizations are taking to fight this impact.

My summer research, supervised by Dr. DuPuis, was focused on the state of food waste management in urban and suburban areas. The goal is to identify the barriers to properly managing food waste and achieving zero-waste goals. We identified the main players in food waste collection, food waste recycling (composting), and some sources of food waste production.

From June 10th – July 30th, I conducted field work in Southern Trinidad to find out the impact of agriculture on water quality, specifically how agricultural runoff contributes to microbial and nutrient (nitrogen, phosphorus) pollution, and impacts macroinvertebrate communities (an ecological indicator for overall ecological integrity).

Article reposted from Gotham Coyote. This interview was conducted by Olivia Allison Asher, intern with the Gotham Coyote Project and author of The Science Notebook Blog.

I am often amazed at the adaptability of wildlife and their talent for embracing what humans provide. Some human assistance is intentional to reestablish lost habitat or replenish diminishing sources of food. But birds and other forms of wildlife take advantage in ways we never intended.

Assistant Professor Matthew Aiello-Lammens, PhD, co-authored a a paper in New Phytologist about divergent traits and environment relationships among parallel radiations in Pelargonium.

Assistant Professor Monica Palta, PhD, and her colleagues’ accidental wetlands research was featured in a PNAS news article, which provides a thorough and interesting overview of the ecosystem services and disservices facilitated by urban vacant land.

Kelsey Parker ‘18, Environmental Science, has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship. The award will fund her research in Zambia on the effects of the country’s copper mining on soil health and overall sustainability.

Elizabeth Eggimann ‘18, Environmental Studies and Science, contributed to Community of Gardens, a digital archive kept by the Smithsonian Institution.

Assistant Professor Monica Palta, PhD, co-authored a manuscript that was recently accepted for publication. The paper argues that global change is strongly affecting carbon cycling in lakes at northern latitudes, with discernible consequences for lake food webs, fish populations, and humans.

Environmental leaders gather at Pace University to discuss regional water issues and plan for action

As a policy intern, Nadya Hall (Master of Arts in Environmental Policy ‘18) worked with the WCC to develop and implement a series of workshops, exploring how scientists, lawmakers, and citizen activists shape the future of wildlife policy.

Research demonstrates that the industrial livestock system, which produces 95% of the world’s meat, is a major source of the hydrocarbon methane — a potent climate-killing greenhouse gas that cows emit with alarming regularity. Who has the solution, farmers who say soil can sequester carbon, or vegans who say the only good meat is no meat? Science is weighing-in.