Alaska has been the source of myth and legend in the imagination of Americans for centuries, and what was once the last frontier of American expansion, has become the first frontier in climate change. Between Earth and Sky examines climate change through the lens of impacts to native Alaskans, receding glaciers, and arctic soil. The island of Shishmaref has been home to the Inupiaq people for thousands of years. As sea ice retreats and coastal storms increase the people of Shishmaref are faced with a disappearing island and a 200 million dollar price tag to move their people with an untold cost on their culture and history.…

In coordination with South Bend's Near Northwest Neighborhood and the St. Joseph County Health Department, the Eck Institute for Global Health is hosting two experts from Green & Healthy Homes Initiative in the field of lead abatment and healthy housing. Join the discussion and learn what our community can do to address living with lead right here at home.

Wildfire activity in the western United States increased abruptly in the mid-1980s and has continued to ramp up rapidly over the past two decades. Rising temperatures, earlier snowmelt, more rain and less snow, greater vapor pressure deficits in spring and autumn, forest dieback and increasing forest fire frequency and severity affect these forests. A catastrophic forest fire (Las Conchas fire) occurred in central New Mexico in June and July of 2011 burning 634 km2 with an estimated 46% of the fire being of severe or moderate intensity. Remote sensing was used to link precipitation events occurring in the burn scar to extreme water quality excursions observed in the Rio Grande downstream of the burned catchments. Charcoal, ash, and sediment was routed through intermittent streams and rivers into the Rio Grande after thunderstorms producing black water events. At four sites along the river, in situ sensors captured the responses of water temperature, specific conductance, turbidity, pH, and dissolved oxygen in late summer to these flood events. Runoff from burn scars caused turbidity peaks (to >2500 NTU), dissolved oxygen sags (to 0.0 mg L-1), pH sags (up to 0.75 units) and conductivity changes. These water quality excursions extended at least 50 km downstream. Sensors continuously measuring dissolved nitrate and phosphate in streams and rivers impacted by the forest fire have shown consistent enrichment in nutrients. Nutrient enrichment stimulated stream metabolism once soil erosion and enhanced sediment routing waned. Sudden, dramatic changes to forested catchments from severe forest fires and forest dieback are very likely to be among the strongest impacts of global change on stream and river ecosystems throughout the western United States.…

In addition to the processes structuring free-living communities, host associated microbial communities, so-called microbiomes, are directly or indirectly shaped by the host. This results in a hierarchical data structure where samples are nested under one or several variables representing host-specific features, often spanning across multiple levels of biological organization. Previous statistical tools did not accommodate for this nested data structure, therefore cannot explicitly account for the effect of host-specific features on structuring the microbiome. Acknowledging the multivariate nature of species assemblages, joint species distribution modelling is an extension of generalized linear mixed models, simultaneously drawing on the information from multiple species, revealing community-level responses to how species responds to their environment. I will introduce two models which are under development. Key components of these models are the inclusion of latent factors serving multiple purposes, such as accounting for unmeasured covariates, dimensionality reduction, and model visualization.…

Inaugural Gold Mass and Lecture for Science and Engineering

Celebrating the vital pairing of faith and science in answering the grand challenges that affect our neighbors close to home, as well as those around the world.

Gold Mass
Basilica of the Sacred Heart
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Stacey Gilk, Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine, will give a seminar on Tuesday, November 28 at 4:00 pm in 283 Galvin.