By Kelly Tillotson

Laurie Drinkwater

Steven Wolf

A $1.6 million grant from the National Sciences Foundation will help a team led by two CALS researchers determine the impact of agricultural pollution.

Laurie Drinkwater and Steven Wolf, in the departments of Horticulture and Natural Resources, respectively, are leading a study that will examine feedback between environmental and institutional changes. The grant comes from the NSF program “Biocomplexity in the Environment — Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems.”

As principal investigator, Drinkwater will lead a team of scientists from five other institutions to study the correlation between biogeochemical processes in agriculture and institutional process. Wolf, as co-principal investigator, will lead the social science effort for the institutional analysis with assistance from members within the Natural Resources program.

Currently, a “dead zone” of more than 5,000 square miles exists in the Gulf of Mexico that is so oxygen-depleted that fish and other organisms cannot live there. Nitrogen runoff from agricultural activities in the Midwest draining into the Mississippi River, then into the Gulf of Mexico, causes most of this pollution. The study will try to determine whether institutional changes made in response to the pollution are linked temporally and geographically to the sources of the pollution. To address these questions, the researchers will develop and synthesize data on pollution, farming practices, and institutional innovation such as regulatory change, research and development activities, educational efforts, or coordination mechanisms such as inter-organizational networks.

The collaboration of biophysical scientists and social scientists to answer complex, large-scale environmental management problems is a novel approach and makes this research on the cutting-edge of science today. Honing that edge with Wolf will be a doctoral candidate and post-doctoral associate from the Department of Natural Resources; with Drinkwater are researchers from the World Resources Institute, Louisiana State University, University of Illinois, Michigan State University, and the Institute for Ecosystem Studies.

Honing that edge with Wolf will be a doctoral candidate and post-doctoral associate from the Department of Natural Resources. Drinkwater’s team consists of researchers from the World Resources Institute, Louisiana State University, University of Illinois, Michigan State University, and the Institute for Ecosystem Studies.