Page 8 - DENIN-2015

6 DENIN
Left and top left:
Professor Jeffrey Buler’s landscape ecology class
gains appreciation of the complexities of landscapes in the real world via a field trip in a hot air balloon.
Top middle: Climatologist Dan Leathers and Kevin Brinson, director of the Delaware Environmental Observing System (DEOS), inspect one of the 50 observing stations located across the state.
Top right: Economists Joshua Duke and Kent Messer collaborate with geologist Holly Michael to develop groundwater models that take into account both physical and human use aspects of the resource.
Monitoring & Forecasting
Acquisition of precise and accurate real-time data through monitoring, as well as transformation of these data into a fundamental understanding of environmental change, is essential to developing predictive models and new strategies for responding to these challenges. The Institute facilitates the necessary interplay of the observational science, the engineering required to make the observations and build the models, and the policy innovations necessary to meet these challenges.
Detecting environmental changes while they are still small is essential to heading off irreversible damage. Our researchers are developing tiny, portable sensors that are convenient to deploy and sensitive to minute changes in the chemistry of soil, water, and air. These sensors can then funnel measurements to a network of monitoring systems that aggregate the data for use by other researchers, policy makers, and educators. Thanks to researchers affiliated with DENIN, Delaware has one of the densest networks of environmental monitoring stations and technologies in the nation.
Human Impacts
Hardly an inch of the Earth’s surface remains unaffected by human presence, while human health and well being remain inextricably bound to the health of the natural systems on which we depend for food, water, and other resources. Economists, social scientists, policy specialists, and humanists affiliated with DENIN are conducting groundbreaking research, often in collaboration with natural scientists and engineers, to shed light on the impacts wrought by environmental changes on individuals and communities and how we respond to these risks and challenges.
Social science and humanities components
are embedded in all of our core research areas whenever possible. For example, hydrogeologists and economists are developing joint models
to describe how physical changes in a shared resource such as groundwater intertwine with human responses to those changes such as price and regulation, which together determine the use and quality of the resource. Our sociologists and ethicists are examining how the potential release of toxic chemicals from brownfields inundated by coastal flooding would affect the often- disadvantaged communities surrounding these sites and the state’s obligations to respond.