InSites is a quarterly newsletter that highlights the personalities and projects of the Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI) of The University of Tennessee. WMREI is an affiliate of the EERC.
WMREI was created in 1985 as a state-funded Center of Excellence. Research areas include solid-, hazardous-, and nuclear-waste management; waste minimization; and pollution prevention.
Biotechnology is the focal point of the institute's technical research, while issues involving public attitudes and federal/state policies related to waste-management issues are the primary concerns of the institute's policy research.
For additional information about InSites, or to be added to our mailing list, please write InSites, WMREI, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, call 865-974-1156, or fax 865-974-1838. Or, if you prefer, email us.
Table of Contents
FRONT-LINE
MICROBES, By Kris Christen Synergy,
Environment and Resources, By Elise LeQuire THE
INVADING GREEN ARMY By Elise LeQuire UT
Symposium Hopes to Clear the Air Staff
Citings
FRONT-LINE MICROBES
A new military security initiative being tackled by three University of Tennessee
(UT) laboratories could one day churn out microbial or plant sensors genetically
engineered to detect explosives or dangerous chemical or biological agents,
alerting soldiers to possible dangers lurking on the battlefield.
The goal of the $1-million project, which is being funded by the U.S. Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center, is to develop a type of biosurveillance web that could be set up in areas of possible troop deployment to monitor for such hazards on a real-time basis, as well as evaluate how toxic they may be to troops.
Such biosensors could be extremely useful in detecting harmful diseases or environmental contaminants that might otherwise go undetected for weeks, thereby mitigating harm and damage, says Robert Moore, associate dean of research with UT’s College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM). Moore is coordinating the project with UT’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology (CEB) and UT’s Agriculture Experiment Station. Additionally, such a system could prove equally important in tracking contaminant movements through air and soils.
The Biosurveillance, Agricultural, and Environmental Security Initiative, still in the basic research phase, builds on CEB’s patented biosensor technology. The biosensors are made up of a tiny computer chip layered with living, bioluminescent microorganisms genetically engineered to emit light when they come into contact with the targeted substance. These detectors were initially developed for monitoring a wide range of environmental contaminants. Now, in the military intelligence arena, the researchers hope to take the technology a step further and use it to detect harmful bacteria, as well as the changes a particular substance might cause in gene behavior.
“We’re trying to develop a new capability for the military to understand the environmental exposures that troops are seeing in the field in terms of chemical and biological exposures in food, water, and generally in the military environment,” explains Gary Sayler, CEB’s director. Ultimately, the military wants to better “understand what their battle fighters are being exposed to and predict how that could affect the quality of what they’re able to do.”
FIRST TARGETS
In developing a proof-of-concept, the researchers are homing in on polyaromatic
hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are associated with industrial production and waste
and especially diesel exhaust fumes. “Any time you’re in an area where there
are large troop convoys moving through, diesel fumes are everywhere, and these
troops are going to be exposed to high concentrations of these particulates
in a stressful environment,” says Terry Schultz, an environmental toxicologist
with CVM’s Department of Comparative Medicine.
Here, toxicogenomics, one of Schultz’s specialty areas, could reveal the specific mechanism in these chemicals that causes chronic respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Using this tool, Schultz’s group is examining the effects of these compounds on cells associated with the immune system. If they can identify the different genes that are either up or down regulated upon exposure to these chemicals, Schultz is hopeful that they’ll be able to tease out so-called “fingerprints” of the genomic expression for each particular PAH that could then be compared to the prints of other chemicals.
“We’ve hypothesized, but not proven, that we’ll get different prints for chemicals that have different mechanisms of toxic action,” Schultz says. By using model compounds, such as PAHs, he and his colleagues are developing a database of gene expression profiles or fingerprints that could be used to predict the relative hazard of other chemicals, without having to do any additional testing.
On another front, researchers at UT’s Agriculture Experiment Station are working on adapting CEB’s biosensor for use in plants and algae. Such phytosensors could theoretically be sown from an airplane to passively monitor wide swaths of territory for potentially dangerous chemicals, says Neal Stewart, a plant molecular geneticist with UT’s Department of Plant Sciences. According to Stewart, the power of using plants or algae as sensors lies in their ubiquitous nature in the environment, their ability to concentrate and sequester contaminants in tissues, and their responsiveness. Whereas animals can walk away when they detect contaminants in the environment, plants and algae respond biochemically by turning on various genes. “We’re trying to use what nature has given us here,” he explains. In other words, if they can engineer sensors in these plants and algae to emit a sensing signal, such as light, when they come into contact with a particular contaminant, and that signal could be monitored remotely, possibly even via satellites, “we might be able tell what’s there, maybe even at what concentration, without ever having to hit the ground,” Stewart says.
In this way, plants could prove useful in detecting the chemicals leaching from a land mine. Similarly, algae placed downstream of a suspicious facility might be able to alert military intelligence analysts as to what’s being produced there.
The researchers have a number of challenges to overcome in building such a biosurveillance web, not least of which is developing a sensor system that can work in all kinds of conditions, such as high heat and low humidity. “Those are very difficult conditions for the sensor to deal with, and we have to optimize for that,” Sayler notes. Stewart and his group also face signifi- cant challenges in getting the bioluminescence genes to work in higher organisms and produce enough light to actually be detected remotely. Likewise, Schultz and his colleagues face the complexity of factoring out one chemical effect from another in the hodgepodge mixtures of numerous chemicals present in any given environment.
WIDESPREAD APPLICATIONS
If they’re successful, these technologies could result in a low-cost, real-time
technique for covert, wide-area surveillance monitoring, with a unique capacity
for detecting large numbers of contaminants at minute concentrations, according
to Sayler. “If we can do these things, it’ll be inexpensive, you won’t require
large equipment, and you could have lots of simple sensory elements out in
the environment,” he says.
And apart from military intelligence applications, these technologies have a range of other possibilities as well, from detecting bacterial pathogens in food and pinpointing pollution sources and their effect on people or crops to use in agricultural and homeland security applications.
“This could be used at large gatherings or athletic events just as you now sometimes have sensors positioned in the region to sample the air,” Moore points out.
Similarly, phytosensors planted in fields could conceivably be designed to produce a light signal if they encounter an agroterrorism agent or a certain plant disease, such as soybean rust. This serious pest, which has caused widespread crop losses in Southern Africa and South America, entered the United States in 2004. This technology, combined with precision agriculture global positioning systems, “could help us monitor where that’s going on and how it’s affecting farmers’ crops,” Stewart says.
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Contact Robert Moore, CVM, The University of Tennessee, 2407 River Drive, Knoxville, TN 37996-4550, call 865-974-0227, or e-mail rmoore1@utk.edu.
Synergy, Environment and
Resources
PHYSICALLY, THE KNOXVILLE CAMPUS OF the University of Tennessee (UT) stretches
across a broad swath of the city, from the Conference Center at Henley Street—headquarters
of the Energy, Environment and Resources Center (EERC)—to the banks of the
Tennessee River. A wide web of relationships, however, transcends the formal
departmental divisions and physical boundaries of brick and mortar.
The EERC’s Faculty Associates Program was established in 2002 to encourage closer interactions among the Center’s own researchers and faculty members pursuing environmental agendas that cross traditional departmental lines, from forestry to sociology, agricultural economics to political science.
Faculty Associates represent a select group of UT faculty members chosen from a wide diversity of disciplines from the campus at large, says Jack Barkenbus, EERC’s executive director. “The Associates Program is an advisory body that gets together on an ad hoc basis to help give EERC insight and direction,” he says. The faculty associates also help spread awareness of EERC’s activities to the larger research community. “These are our ambassadors across campus,” Barkenbus says.
Officially established just three years ago, the program taps into deeper collegial roots, however. Mary E. Rogge, for example, one of the eight current associates, sought contacts at UT for her nontraditional focus on children, poverty, and environmental degradation even before accepting a faculty position in the College of Social Work.
“Just learning about the existence of EERC and the whole constellation of folks interested in environmental issues was very exciting for me,” says Rogge, an associate professor of Social Work.
More recently, Rogge has collaborated with a group of researchers that spans several departments and includes Kimberly L. Davis, EERC senior research associate and assistant director of the Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI).
The multidisciplinary project aims to promote community awareness, neighborhood empowerment, and environmental health and justice in neighborhoods in Chattanooga affected by industrial and commercial pollution of Chattanooga Creek.
Rogge and Davis were able to find funding through WMREI for preliminary work on the project and are currently seeking federal funding under an environmental justice initiative with the National Institutes of Health (HIH). Rogge says the Faculty Associates Program helps keep her current on activities at the state and national level and to translate that into action at the community level.
Associate William M. Park, a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at UT’s Institute of Agriculture, likewise has a long record of joint research efforts with EERC.
“In 1989, I started collaborating with EERC on the 18-month project that provided solid-waste management policy recommendations for the state,” he says. Park’s current research interests also mesh with long-term EERC projects, including the effects of land-use change on the rural-urban fringe, open-space preservation, and resource conflicts on the Cumberland Plateau. He has worked on joint projects with Mary English, an EERC research leader with a long-term interest in smartgrowth issues. English served as guest lecturer in an honors seminar Park taught on farmland protection and urban sprawl in the fall of 2004.
David L. Feldman brings to the program a focus on environmental ethics and the decision-making process. Before assuming his current position as head of UT’s Department of Political Science, Feldman was a senior research scientist at EERC. Recently, his interest in the ethical dimensions of the political process has taken a new direction, exploring the role of religious organizations in environmental protection.
He co-authored an article, “Faith Based Environmental Initiatives in Appalachia: Connecting Faith, Environmental Concern, and Reform,” published in Worldviews - Environment, Culture, Religion. Feldman also serves as the director of UT’s Southeast Water Policy Initiative and was instrumental in helping state legislators forge Tennessee’s Interbasin Water Transfer Act of 2000 and the Water Supply Information Act of 2002.
An associate professor in the Department of Sociology and senior research fellow with UT’s Southeast Water Policy Initiative, Robert Emmet Jones, who has more than a decade of collaboration with EERC, is a pioneer in the new, interdisciplinary field of environmental sociology. He has worked on joint projects with EERC staff to explore the future of the Oak Ridge Reservation and on water issues in Cumberland County, Tennessee.
In 2003, Jones co-authored an article, “Green Migration into Rural America: The New Frontier of Environmentalism?” published in the international journal Society and Natural Resources, which examines survey data from 135 counties in southern Appalachia.
“People coming into the region generally have more concern for the environment and seem to be a little more knowledgeable about these issues,” Jones says. This awareness can present the potential for either conflict or collaboration, depending on the underlying economic structure, history, and values of the population.
Bruce Tonn’s ties to EERC also span several years and many projects. Tonn, a professor in UT’s Department of Political Science with a background in urban and regional planning, is currently working with EERC and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to assess an economic development plan for Cocke County. The goal is to provide employment opportunities in rural areas where labor costs and land values are low, while implementing the latest manufacturing technologies in sustainable energy, such as geothermal heat pumps, solar water heaters, and better insulating materials.
“This would be an energy Silicon Valley of sorts,” Tonn says. “With the looming international energy crisis, I think the market is going to be huge in the next 20 years.” Tonn, who frequently collaborates with EERC Research Scientist Jean Peretz, also finds EERC administrative support in getting budget and grant proposals together helpful.
Robert A. Bohm, professor and head of the Department of Economics, has been affiliated with EERC since its founding in 1973. His research interests have focused on the role of economic incentives in shaping environmental policy in the United States and abroad. His work on the economic aspects of municipal recycling and regulation of hazardous waste has been funded by a number of federal agencies, private foundations, and WMREI.
Donald G. Hodges, a professor in the Department of Forestry, Wildlife, and Fisheries, came to UT in 1999 and has been a Faculty Associate since 2002. Hodges, whose research focus includes land-use change and public and private land management, also finds the appointment a good opportunity to come together with researchers at EERC and with faculty in other departments.
For Richard J. Jendrucko, a professor in Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering, the Faculty Associates Program broadens his perspectives outside his own area of expertise, industrial environmental engineering.
“EERC presents me with projects I would not have done on my own. Two of those took us to Beijing and Hong Kong on international technology-transfer missions,” he says.
In fact, EERC has a long track record of fostering international synergistic collaboration among researchers, from Sweden to Southeast Asia. Barkenbus, EERC’s executive director, is planning a threemonth journey in spring of 2005. “I will be going to Greece and Turkey, starting in March under the auspices of a Fulbright fellowship, trying to connect scientists working in both countries on issues of sustainable development,” he says.
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Visit the EERC Web site at http://eerc.ra.utk.edu/ and click on the “Staff” link, or call 865-974-4251.
Whether transported in the gear of travelers arriving from their homeland or purchased on the open market, plants have traveled everywhere people go, migrating, settling, and at times invading their new habitat.
Some of these plants have become unwanted pests. In the southeastern region of the United States, the Southern Appalachian Man and the Biosphere (SAMAB) has designated 12 of these among the “least wanted” for their tendency to escape from their desired habitat and outcompete native plants, causing economic and ecological damage to the region’s public and private forests. (See “Know the Enemy” on page 5.) They also threaten farmland, yards, and recreational areas.
SURVIVAL OF THE FEISTIEST
The common names of many of these invasive plants reveal their foreign origins:
Chinese yam, Oriental bittersweet, and Japanese stiltgrass, for example. But
many of the more recognizable invasives, such as privet and honeysuckle, also
have Asian or Eurasian origins.
“Many of these species came as ornamentals,” says J. (Jack) Warren Ranney, research ecologist at the University of Tennessee’s (UT) Energy, Environment and Resources Center (EERC). “These plants were brought from areas with a climate similar to that of the eastern United States, so their transplantability and viability makes for a higher probability they will escape.”
Ranney has led EERC’s efforts to collaborate with SAMAB, volunteers, and local, state, and federal agencies to inventory, monitor, and manage nonnative invasive plants.
“This is a national priority for federal land managing agencies. States, communities, and volunteer groups are increasingly involved in addressing the threat these plants pose to natural areas, greenways, and homeowner landscapes,” Ranney says.
Though Ranney officially retired at the end of 2004, he plans to continue fostering volunteerism in the fight against invasives, using the many resources he has developed, including flash cards, posters, and educational programs that help volunteers learn to identify problem plants.
In 2002, Ranney began working with a volunteer group, the Asheville Weed Team, to organize a strategy to fight invasives in western North Carolina. He is currently mustering support for similar volunteer groups in Knox County and Pittman Center, near Gatlinburg. His efforts have not gone unnoticed.
“Recently I had a call from the Kingsport and Jonesboro areas, so more and more folks are interested in this,” Ranney says. “We are getting some good publicity for helping on that, which is what I was aiming for all along.”
A BITTERSWEET INVADER
Andy Brown, president and environmental planner with Equinox Environmental
Consulation and Design, Inc., in Asheville, North Carolina, says one of the
worst threats in the Asheville region is Oriental bittersweet. Brown is program
coordinator for SAMAB’s Southern Appalachian Volunteer Environmental Monitoring
group (SAVEM), which is funded through a consortium of organizations, including
the National Forest Foundation, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the Tennessee
Valley Authority (TVA), and UT.
SAVEM recruits and trains volunteers in monitoring protocols and coordinates volunteer monitoring efforts. In 2004, the group focused on the bittersweet in Bent Creek Experimental Forest, owned by the U.S. Forest Service, using manual control and herbicides.
Wildcrafters, who incorporate the plant with its attractive foliage and berries into decorative wreaths, have lobbied the North Carolina Department of Agriculture to remove Oriental bittersweet from the state’s noxious weed list.
“Now it can be trafficked again in 18 counties in western North Carolina,” Brown says. The berries can be dispersed far from the homeowners’ landscapes by birds that eat the seeds. “We have evidence of this plant taking over natural areas where ginseng was abundant,” Brown says.
Brown underscores the importance of education and outreach. “People should just pay attention. When you go to a nursery to buy, ask the nursery grower if this plant is native or exotic. Try to use native plants,” he says. “If a plant is not native, ask if it is invasive. Some of these plants do stay contained, while others are more invasive.”
OUT OF BOUNDS
Ranney has also participated in volunteer monitoring projects along the Appalachian
Trial Corridor with SAMAB and Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP).
“Most of the problems in the park are on the boundaries and at old home sites,” says Kristine Johnson, supervisory forester with GSMPN, though some plants such as garlic mustard may be carried in on hikers’ boots or through contaminated soils in campground areas. Johnson sits as a board member for the Tennessee Exotic Pest Plant Council, of which Ranney is the current vice president.
The exotic plant volunteer group at Pittman Center, near Gatlinburg, has worked to help identify species on the Park boundary and those at risk of having seeds blown in or spread by birds in the Park, Johnson says.
“While oriental bittersweet is becoming a problem in the Park near Gatlinburg, with new infestations discovered each year, the greatest threat is in the Fontana area, where extensive populations of bittersweet on TVA property have spread for decades onto nearby Park land,” she says.
Other volunteers also help with Park projects, including AmeriCorps volunteers and student interns from the Student Conservation Association.
TROUBLE IN PARADISE
James H. Miller, research ecologist at the Southern Research Station of the
U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service in Auburn, Alabama, also commends
Ranney for his tireless efforts to organize a network of volunteers to help
protect the magnificent ecological diversity of the forests.
“Most nations have destroyed theirs,” Miller says. “With the use of volunteers, Jack is forging the collaborative network crucial to combating invasives like no other scientist.”
Invasive plants increasingly hinder the regeneration of forests, decimate the diversity of forest communities, and degrade recreational opportunities.
“These species often increase wildfire intensity, decrease ground-water recharge, and disrupt soil formation,” Miller says. “They create habitats and soils we have never seen before.”
Some species can gang up and become extremely aggressive, such as combined infestations of kudzu, privet, and honeysuckle, in overwhelming the native ecology.
The arsenal of control includes hand pulling and uprooting (which is labor intensive), the careful application of the appropriate herbicide, biocontrol, and, in the right conditions, prescribed burning, often in combinations.
Miller cautions that control treatments that result in severe mechanical soil disturbance such as razing an area with rootrakes and backhoes is ineffective, causing soil disruption and erosion. In fact, many of these species thrive in disturbed soils. Others, such as Japanese knotweed and privets, can propagate from very small fragments of stems and roots.
Though the ecological damages are evident in the loss of native species, the economic toll invasives exact is harder to gauge. In 1999, Cornell ecologist David Pimentel estimated the overall economic damages of all invasive species at $138 billion per year, of which about $34 billion is due to invasive plants. Miller and Ranney are seeking to collaborate with economists to fill some gaps in survey data and impact analysis in the southeastern region.
Miller has also authored a handbook, recently reprinted, useful to those wishing to learn more about these species: Nonnative Invasive Plants of Southern Forests: A Field Guide for Identification and Control. Ranney contributed to this book by serving as an overall reviewer.
Know the Enemy |
|
The
Southern Appalachian Man and the Biosphere (SAMAB), in its Some of these—privet,
mimosa, and honeysuckle, for example— “It’s staggering, but we need to be more strategically focused on the dimensions of other plants,” says J. (Jack) Warren Ranney, research ecologist at the University of Tennessee’s Energy, Environment and Resources Center. SAMAB has also posted five species on its warning list. These are plants with a really bad rap sheet in other regions, where they have proven devastating to forests and agricultural lands. These are highly aggressive, difficult to eliminate once established, and could pose a very serious regional threat in the future. Forewarned is forearmed, however. “If we find an isolated spot of these newcomers, we need to take immediate action” to stop the invasion before it is too late, Ranney says. A first line of
defense is the ability to identify these potentially dangerous plants.
More information on the 12 focus area species and the five on the warning
list is available at SAMAB’s Invasive Species Focus Area Web site: |
The Usual Suspects: |
| Chinese yam, cinnamon vine, air potato | |
| Garlic mustard | |
| Japanese honeysuckle | |
| Japanese knotweed | |
| Japanese stilt grass, Asian stilt grass, Nepal grass | |
| Kudzu | |
| Mimosa, silk tree | |
| Multiflora rose | |
| Oriental bittersweet | |
| Princess tree, empress tree, royal paulownia | |
| Privet, Chinese and European | |
| Tree of heaven, Chinese sumac, stink sumac | |
| Five Unwelcome Newcomers: | |
| Purple Loosestrife
(Lythrum salicaria): Introduced as a landscaping plant, poses a severe threat to wetlands. |
|
| Cogongrass (Imperata
cylindrical: Invades open lands and disturbed sites, poses a severe fire hazard. |
|
| Chinese Silvergrass
(Miscanthus sinensis): This plant is already here and poses a severe threat to fields, balds, and open wood lands |
|
| Porcelainberry (Ampelopsis
brevipedunculata): Resembles a wild grape, already present in Knoxville and Asheville and entering aggressive stages. |
|
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Visit SAMAB’s Web site “Invasive Species Focus Area” at http://samab.org/Focus/Invasive/about.html or contact Jack Ranney at jwranney@utk.edu or Andy Brown at andy@equinoxenvironmental.com. Miller’s field guide can be requested free from pubrequest@srs.fs.usda.gov or 828-257-4830.
UT Symposium Hopes to Clear the Air
The Energy, Environment and Resources Center (EERC) at the University of Tennessee (UT) along with UT’s Howard Baker Center for Public Policy and the Joint Institute for Energy and Environment (JIEE) will sponsor Cleaning America’s Air: Progress and Challenges on March 9 in the Tennessee Auditorium on UT’s Knoxville campus. The symposium will explore the creation and evolution of the Clean Air Act (CCA) as well as other air-quality issues and will feature, among other noted speakers, former Vice President Albert Gore, Jr.; Senator Howard Baker, one of the creators of the CCA; William D. Ruckelshaus, a former EPA administrator who implemented the Act; and Betsy Child, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation. The symposium is part of UT’s Environmental Semester, which began in January and runs through the spring.* * *
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