Track 1) Water resources for a growing planet, pollution

Water is our most precious resource, needed for sustaining all life, yet has also become our most threatened resource with pollution, overuse, and increased urbanization of areas threatened by floods (e.g., Kusky, 2003). Wars have been and will be fought over the ability to obtain fresh water, and water rights pose difficult political issues in places where it is scarce, like the American West and Middle East. Since we live in a finite world with a finite amount of fresh water, and the global population is growing rapidly, it is likely that fresh water will become an increasingly important topic for generations to come. Less than 1% of the planet’s water is groundwater, yet the volume of groundwater is 35 times the volume of freshwater in lakes and streams. Americans and other nations have come to realize that groundwater is a vital resource for their nations survival, and are only recently beginning to appreciate that much of the world’s ground water resources are being overpumped or have become contaminated by natural and human-aided processes. Forty percent of drinking water in the United States comes from groundwater reservoirs, with 80 billion gallons of groundwater pumped out of these reservoirs every day. Our group has been involved in devising new, cutting-edge remote-sensing and GIS techniques of assessing surface and ground water potential and resources around the world for the past 15 years, publishing scientific articles, books, and reports to U.S. and foreign government agencies on water resources and relationships to biodiversity and human patterns of use (e.g., Kusky et al., 1995, 1999, 2004; El-Baz et al., 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002; Robinson et al., 2006). One of the research tracks in the program will build on this experience, data collections, and rapid increase in computing power to derive innovative methods of assessing water resources and use, benefiting society in the most fundamental of ways.

St. Louis sits at and near the junction of four of the nation's largest river systems, the Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois and Ohio. Being at this critical location provides students a natural field laboratory to investigate relationships between different Earth Systems, and SLU maintains several biological and ecological field stations in the region. Courses in affiliated programs include many hands-on field experiences for students, and some of the tracks include local field investigations for research. Students in the program may choose to investigate the causes of regional variations and relationships in aquatic biodiversity, conservation, and genetic variability, and link these studies with environmental influences on the rivers, modeling their data in a GIS. Rivers and streams of North America’s Central Highlands physiographic province (southwestern and midwestern USA) adjoining the St. Louis area harbor one of the most diverse aquatic biotas in the world; these aquatic ecosystems have been ranked internationally as among the most diverse and imperiled ecosystems in the world (Lydeard and Mayden 1995). The diversity within this region is related to the varied geological history of the landscape. Although the river systems in the highlands or gulf coast drainages have never been glaciated and were only partially inundated by the Cretaceous sea (thus minimizing extinctions of species and communities), their component biotas have been strongly impacted by the geological processes acting on the landscape as a whole. Thus, studies of the environmental influences on fish ecology need to integrate biological, geological, climate, and genetic data, and the best way to do this is using an Earth Information System that integrates GIS and genetic data. Center faculty and students are currently examining genetic variability in 45 fish species with disparate dispersal patterns and conservation status as a base line.

Remote sensing and GIS are powerful tools for monitoring change in ecological systems. For instance, satellite image change detection techniques can be used to monitor deforestation (Kusky et al., 2004, 2006), or vegetation changes and urban expansion, through successive satellite imaging and a GIS, or linking these ecological changes with ground based measurements of changes in the biota. One such project we are involved with through collaborations with the St. Louis Zoo is helping to track changes in endangered lemur populations in Madagascar using a GIS and satellite image database, together with data on the health of the lemur populations. Remote sensing and GIS, along with specimen data, will also be critical for finding critical habitats for imperiled species in the Central Highlands. There are many research projects in these fields that students could become involved with, being mentored from University faculty and professional (Ph.D.) biologists and ecologists from the zoo and affiliates.