The Nitrogen Cascade: From the Nooksack to the Globe
WHEN
Thursday, December 2, 2021
4:30-5:30 p.m. PT
LOCATION
Online
Zoom
PRICE
Free
Check out this video to watch the The Nitrogen Cascade: From the Nooksack to the Globe.
Nitrogen (N) fertilizers have helped fuel the agricultural revolution and feed an exponentially growing human population since the 1950s. However, any excess nitrogen — that which the crops don’t capture — can escape into the environment and cause a variety of environmental and human health problems, from local air and water pollution to global climate change. And managing nitrogen use is tricky: because N is transformed by a variety of biological and chemical processes in air, soil and water, reducing N release at one point in this “nitrogen cascade” may just cause greater release at other points.
David's lab is working on these issues at a variety of scales. Locally, grad students are working to model the impact of riparian buffers on nitrogen retention along the Nooksack River and its tributaries. That is, can planting trees and shrubs along creeks, primarily intended to help improve salmon habitat, also help prevent excess nutrients from causing eutrophication in Bellingham Bay? Regionally, we’re part of the Nooksack-Fraser Transboundary Nitrogen (NFTN) Project, a multi-agency, cross-border collaboration seeking to understand sources, sinks and impacts of nitrogen in the U.S. and Canadian parts of the Nooksack Watershed, Lower Fraser Valley, and Salish Sea. Globally, NFTN is part of the project “Towards an International Nitrogen Management System” (INMS), based at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. We are one of seven global demonstration regions seeking to better understand N benefits, impacts, and management under a variety of social, cultural, and economic conditions. In this talk, I’ll describe the progress that we’re making and how these different scales of inquiry help inform one another.
More information about the speaker series is available here.
We have moved to a new event system! We encourage you to create a new profile and login when you register for this and future events, however, you are not required to login to register. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at alumni@wwu.edu and we will help you update your information. Thank you for joining us, and we'll see you soon!
We are excited that we will be live-streaming from a WWU classroom for the webinar for our off-campus audience. Due to the pandemic, only WWU students will be in-person for the presentation but we look forward to welcoming you all to class virtually.
David Hooper
Speaker
David Hooper is a Professor of Biology at Western Washington University. His research focuses on questions of how plant communities and global environmental changes influence the cycling of carbon and nitrogen through ecosystems. He has worked in temperate forests in the Northeast U.S. and Europe, grasslands in California and China, Arctic tundra in Alaska, and watersheds of the Pacific Northwest. He received a BA in Chemistry from Middlebury College, and then was a ski bum, environmental policy mediator, and dogsled musher in Colorado, before working as a research assistant at the Ecosystems Center in Woods Hole, Mass, where the complexity of the nitrogen cycle first began to intrigue him. He then received a Ph.D. in Biology from Stanford University and did post-doctoral research in Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, before coming to Western in 1998.
Questions and Accommodations
Stefan Freelan is the coordinator of the Huxley Speaker Series. Send email to stefan@wwu.edu or call (360) 650-2949 if you have any questions or comments.
There will be auto-captions available for this event. To request closed captions, please mark the request on the registration form. Advance notice of three days to one week is appreciated.