Worldwide, 19 million children under five suffer from severe acute malnutrition, and 400,000 children die each year of hunger. Governments and relief agencies carefully monitor severe droughts, food price spikes and other disasters, so they can geographically target emergency food where needed; however, every dollar spent on early warning systems is a dollar not spent on food, and budgets are always tight.  

Credit: Provided

Hongdi Zhao, a doctoral student in applied economics and management, is developing a dynamic sampling model that takes into consideration the crucial trade-offs between monitoring and food relief distribution, in order to maximize returns, minimize waste and save lives. The model would be useful for organizations such as Kenya’s National Drought Management Authority, she said.

“Government and humanitarian agencies generally face a tight budget between investing in data collection for early warning systems and the provision of relief food in emergencies,” Zhao said. “Machine learning-based predictions of child malnutrition can be used to aid in early warning and response planning, and free more funds for relieving human suffering.”

Zhao is one of 36 graduate students who have received support from the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability to conduct research on accelerating energy transitions, reducing climate risk, increasing food security, advancing one health or protecting biodiversity. 

This is the seventh year that Cornell Atkinson has offered Graduate Research Grants (GRG), thanks to continuing generous support from Cornell alumni and supporters, said Verne Thalheimer, associate director and director of student and postdoctoral programs at Cornell Atkinson. 

“The GRG program is important for a number of reasons in addition to providing research funding,” Thalheimer said. “It further develops the next generation of sustainability scientists, contributes to important research that benefits people and the planet, and provides our graduate students with the opportunity to gain valuable experience with proposal writing, grants administration and reporting the results of their work. Those are applied skills which can be used both within and beyond careers in academia.” 

Eighteen students have earned GRG awards and another 18 were awarded Sustainable Biodiversity Fund (SBF) awards. This fund – supported by the Toward Sustainability Foundation and now in its 14th year – provides grants to graduate students from any discipline whose research will help “conserve biodiversity, its global ecosystem services and four billion years of irreplaceable evolutionary history,” said Alison Power, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and SBF program lead. 

Some of the other projects funded this year will explore: 

Credit: Provided

How disease-carrying mosquitoes are adapting to climate change. 

Climate change is expanding the range of some disease-carrying mosquitoes including Aedes albopictus, a highly invasive species that spreads the viruses that cause dengue, chikungunya and Zika. Disease transmission models do not account for the likelihood that mosquitoes are behaviorally selecting habitats to improve survival. In the wild, mosquitoes likely change their behavior to avoid unfavorable conditions (e.g. seeking shaded environments when it is too hot). Anna Shattuck, a doctoral student in entomology, will determine if mosquitoes are behaviorally selecting the microhabitats they experience to improve survival. She will also determine if being infected by a disease, such as dengue, changes a mosquito’s habitat preferences, potentially increasing the transmission of the disease. Then she will update model predictions for dengue transmission under different climate change scenarios to include mosquito behavior. By understanding the effects of behavior on mosquito-borne disease transmission, she hopes to improve current control strategies to reduce disease risk in the face of climate change.

Credit: Provided

Whether geohistorical data can inform changes in oyster populations

Oysters support a multi-billion-dollar harvest industry, they buffer shorelines from erosion and sea-level rise and they improve water quality via filtration. However, due to climate change, disease and human pressures, oysters and their benefits are disappearing. By 2011, the world lost an estimated 85% of its oyster reefs, including significant declines in Eastern Oysters along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States. Jaleigh Goben, a doctoral student in earth and atmospheric sciences, is studying changes in oyster populations over time in Florida’s Guana River. She has collected 5-10 footlong core samples of oysters buried within the reefs and plans to use geochronology to estimate how old the shells and reefs are. Goben will then reconstruct body sizes and densities of past oyster populations to establish geohistorical baselines and better understand how populations have changed over the last several decades to centuries. This fills a critical information gap because oyster monitoring data only exists since 2014. Goben will apply these oyster metrics to quantify how much filtration oysters were able to provide over that time, which will inform restoration efforts at the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve to improve local water quality in the Guana River.

Credit: Provided

How chemical pesticides impact plant-soil microbiomes

Chemical pesticides provide crops with protection against threats like pathogens and herbivores, but in most cases they also come with environmental costs. Seed chemical treatments are inconspicuous pesticides applied to the seed’s outer coating comprising a highly toxic mixture of fungicides, nematicides and insecticides. Little is known regarding the effects of seed chemical treatments on plant-soil-microbe interactions, specifically for arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, which aid plants in accessing crucial nutrients. Juan Pablo Jordán, a doctoral candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology, will assess the interactive effects of seed chemical treatments and field soil origin on: microbial dynamics in maize seedlings, secondary metabolism and plant resistance to insect pests. Jordán hopes his insights will inform development and adoption of synergistic relationships in agricultural landscapes.

Descriptions of all funded graduate research projects are available at the Cornell Atkinson website. 

Krisy Gashler is a freelance writer for Cornell Atkinson.