How will a warmer climate affect tree growth? What will happen to Earth’s ecology as more trees die? Grad students Henry Adams and Daniel Griffin are pursuing answers to big questions that face our planet. Questions like these have earned Adams and Griffin prestigious EPA fellowships to help them pursue the answers.
The UA’s Bureau for Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) performs research, teaches, and reaches out to educate and improve the quality of life across Arizona, the nation and the world. Anthropologist Diane Austin and her students are leading an effort to bring technology and communities on both sides of the border together to save water, protect precious rivers and turn waste into a resource.
UA researchers are combining a centuries old practice of growing fish and aquatic plants together (aquaculture) with our successful hydroponics program. The result is called aquaponics. It produces more and better crops and saves water. Waste from the fish fertilizes the vegetables and the water is recycled over and over. This new technology can be used in places where water is scarce and may change the future of crop production.
Earlier this year, UA students with the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture became one of 20 teams from around the world to earn a spot in the Solar Decathlon sponsored by the U.S. Dept of Energy, culminating with building a home on the National Mall. Project manager Matt Gindlesparger shares their story and that of SEED[pod], the inspired, inventive sustainable-living home they built from the ground up.
A UA-led research team has found that as the climate warms, plants are flowering at higher elevations in the Santa Catalina Mountains. Their work was made possible by a volunteer naturalist who hiked the same trail one to two times per week for more than 20 years, collecting information about flowering plants.