Melanie ArmstrongThe National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded Western Colorado University over $2 million in research grants, to both the Clark Family School of Environment and Sustainability and the geology program of the Natural and Environmental Sciences Department.
NSF awards are competitive, said Janice Welborn, director of sponsored programs and grants at Western. The university is managing over $8 million in federal, state and private funding, she said.
“When we compare ourselves to big universities, R1 (very high research activity) institutions, it doesn't look like much to them, but for our size and where we're located, I think we're really leveraging the environment that we live in,” Welborn said. “We've got some really great people working in research.
Melanie Armstrong, interim dean of the Clark Family School of Environment and Sustainability, received nearly $2 million of the funding for her proposal to facilitate interdisciplinary training for 32 master’s students, half of whom will receive tuition and stipends from the grant.
Her proposal leveraged access to the 1.7 million acres of federal public lands that surround Western’s campus. Armstrong, who is also the public lands coordinator for Western’s Masters of Environmental Management program, said she wanted to take advantage of the resources present in the Gunnison Valley, using them to address issues related to public lands not only locally, but throughout the West.
“Large-scale, global environmental change is bringing such a rapid change to public lands that the management decisions that might have shaped agency approaches 50 years ago just don't even apply anymore,” Armstrong said.
In addition to addressing a changing climate and surges in outdoor recreation, her project will focus on giving students the tools they need to translate their studies in science across other disciplines.
“We are already doing this work to prepare students for professional careers, and to use all of the skills that they can acquire to get their science knowledge out into the world,” Armstrong said. “And so our proposal then is to bring this into those public lands questions that we're already wrestling with.”
Although the department has experienced “tremendous success” building relationships between Western and Gunnison County public lands, students still face financial obstacles when pursuing a graduate degree. Armstrong said turning to federal funding agencies seemed like a logical step forward.
“We are really concerned with the notion that we're out in the world doing good work and having a positive effect on communities in our environments, and yet that work is paid for by students,” Armstrong said. “We've been seeking ways that we can find other funding sources that can support the work that we do without burdening our students with debt.”
Armstrong said receiving the award is an exciting moment, not only for the Clark School but for her colleagues across campus. Applying was an “obvious fit.”
“Western is on people's minds, not just because of the quality undergraduate education that we've had for so many years, but because we are leading important conversations,” she said. “We need people in rural communities, like Gunnison, that are situated close to our public lands, to have a chance to really address the issues that are so important to us here.”
NSF also awarded Geology professor, geomorphologist and paleoclimatologist David Marchetti two mult-university or collaborative grants.
His first proposal will study sediment cores from Fish Lake, both a headwater stream of the Colorado River and the largest natural alpine lake in Utah. After analyzing the cores for charcoal, pollen and other minerals, Marchetti will then reconstruct the paleoenvironment — what kind of plants have been around the lake, when glaciers were present and when fires moved through the area.
The second proposal was granted in partnership with the University of Utah and the University of Michigan. This project will take a closer look at soil carbonates, which can reveal what the desert ecology was like in the past. Dating techniques can answer questions like how much grass was present versus tree material and how fast carbon dioxide cycled out of the soil, Marchetti said.
“In both of these studies we are able to go back in time” to a period when mountain glaciers still covered much of Canada and the western U.S.
“There are time periods when the Earth's climate had similar carbon dioxide to what it was before humans started putting more in the atmosphere,” Marchetti said. “We can look at those times in the past, beyond the last ice age to sort of get a good sense of what might change in the future.”
Overall, the recent success in winning grants from the NSF is particularly important to supporting Western’s goals of inclusivity and environmental sustainability, said Western Vice President Julie Baca.
“The grants give our faculty the opportunity to grow innovative programs in a way they wouldn’t be able to with baseline funding,” Baca said.
(Bella Biondini can be contacted at 970.641.1414 or bella@gunnisontimes.com.)
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