Kristina Stinson receives $2M U.S. Dept. of Defense Grant

The grant was awarded from the US Department of Defense - Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (2013-2018) for the project: Restoration of soil microbial function following degradation on DoD lands: Mediating biological invasions in a global change context. Global environmental change includes simultaneous stresses to ecosystems, including climate, pollution, and invasion by toxic, nonnative organisms. Especially sensitive to these changes are the soil fungi, which play a critical role in ecosystem function and native tree growth. This research will employ cutting-edge high throughput gene sequencing approaches and a global change simulation experiment, to test whether and how well soil fungi can be restored after invasion by the toxic nonnative plant, Alliaria petiolata, under predicted scenarios of global change in Massachusetts. This work will advance fundamental ecological research on fungal-mediated responses of key Northeastern tree species to global change, and will help land managers optimize the chances of ecosystem restoration under a suite of ongoing environmental stresses....
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Green Design and Historic Preservation Series Opens to Packed House

Dr. Ben Weil along with PhD candidate Carl Fiocchi with the Building and Construction Technology program and Facilities and Planning’s Ludmilla Pavlova presented “Holdsworth Hall:  Proposed Rehabilitation and Impacts” at last week’s Preservation Series conference at the Campus Center here at UMASS Amherst last week.  The symposium, Green Design and Historic Preservation: Exploring the Building Envelope sponsored by Department of Environmental Conservation, Building and Construction Technology, Department of Architecture & Design, and UMass/Hancock Shaker Village Historic Preservation Program kicked off with a standing room only audience at the Lincoln Campus Center on October 19, 2012. Attending the symposium were architects, engineers, faculty, historic building caretakers, and students.  The five presentations of the afternoon, with content ranging from technical to practical, covered diverse topics, all relating to the building envelope. Topics ranged from a macro view of a building’s impact on climate change to a micro examination of energy flows within individual building components....
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Dr. William A. Patterson has been named the Herbert Stoddard Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

Bill Patterson for being named the Herbert Stoddard Lifetime Achievement Award Winner for 2012 from the Association for Fire Ecology.  AFE presents this lifetime achievement award to those who have made significant contributions to our understanding of fire ecology and fire management in the eastern and southern U.S.  The award will be given at the 5th International Fire Congress in Portland Oregon in December. http://fireecology.org/awards/about-afe-awards/  ...
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Ben Weil Releases Holdsworth Hall Retrofit and Renovation Report for Energy Efficiency

Proposed Holdsworth Hall Retrofit and Renovation would reduce energy usage by 63% and carbon dioxide emissions by 82% The recommendations in this report are the product of a detailed and careful examination and exploration of the building and its operations. Begun as a project in a graduate course taught by Ben Weil, Extension Assistant Professor in Building Energy, the final report was further developed and refined by Weil, and two graduate students in Building Systems, Carl Fiocchi, and Katherine McCusker. The key findings are: (1) very significant energy savings can be achieved at moderate cost, without affecting the basic architectural design, and (2) the building is a complex system, and no change can be considered in isolation. Single measures may achieve savings, but cannot maximize savings or performance without complementary changes in related systems. A final package of recommended measures, reducing the energy consumptions of Holdsworth by 63%, will define a new building system with emergent properties that make for a qualitatively different and...
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