This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project involves the renovation of laboratories in the south wing of the Bowman-Oddy Laboratories Building at the University of Toledo, in Toledo, Ohio. Constructed over 40 years ago, these laboratories currently serve as the research facility for faculty from the Department of Environmental Sciences. The renovated space will become the Center for Biosphere Restoration Research. The new Center will conduct interdisciplinary, collaborative research on the ecosystem processes that drive the biosphere and on the impacts of human activity. The design encourages the development of holistic approaches to research. Examples include: the linking of field ecology with remote sensing and predictive models; and the collaboration of soil biochemistry with plant ecological physiology to gain greater understanding of the plant‐soil system.
The renovation will include: interior construction and renovation of laboratory case-work; refurbishment of electrical, plumbing, heating, cooling, air-handling, and hood ventilation; and network wiring. NSF is contributing part of the overall cost of a portion of the renovation that is associated with research and research training.
The following are examples of areas of research to be conducted in the Center: how forest management practices can be used to enhance carbon sequestration while maintaining the productivity of the forest for timber and recreational use; the ecological principles underlying community assembly of insect populations in managed environments and their implications for the ecology of agricultural systems in tropical forests; a search for ecological markers predictive of the sustainability of the ecosystem services provided by wetland and aquatic ecosystems; the study of fluxes from the natural landscape that are related to the carbon cycle; the role of environmental factors such as fire, drought and climate variations on heterotrophic and autotrophic soil respiration, and hence on the carbon sequestration potential of forest ecosystems; the evolution of soil microbial communities under varying inputs of litter quality, carbon dioxide concentrations, temperature, and exogenous nitrogen in order to predict the ability of soils to sequester carbon under varying environmental conditions; how extreme heat stress, elevated carbon dioxide, and water availability affect photosynthetic productivity; developing and deploying genetic and biomolecular techniques for the in situ detection and community fingerprinting of environmental bacterial pathogens; the study of the persistence of environmental contaminants such as hormones and antibiotics from concentrated animal feeding operations, pharmaceuticals and personal care products that are residual in sewage sludge applied to agricultural lands, and acrylamides arising from waste created by the greenhouse industry; the development of electrochemical devices for environmental sensing.
The award will help the university to maintain a vibrant program of graduate and undergraduate research in the environmental sciences. In addition to providing infrastructure for research and research training, the renovation will provide a resource that will be used for summer research programs involving school teachers. The upgraded research capabilities will enhance the collaborations of Center faculty with partners at other academic institutions and at government agencies with environmental portfolios.
At the time of the ARI-R2 programs initiation, The University of Toledo had approximately 21,000 GSF of unrenovated space in its main science complex, Wolff Hall/Bowmen-Oddy Laboratories. The identified space was devoted partially to laboratory instruction, partially to environmental research, and partially to office space. As a result of other facilities reconfigurations on campus, it became possible to move the instructional activity out of this area and create the Center for Biosphere Restoration Research (CBRR). This $7M dollar project to create CBRR from space that in large part had not been renovated since the construction of the building in 1967 was obtained from institutional sources and though the support of the ARI-R2 program. The renovation of both the research laboratory space and adjacent teaching laboratory space to create a 12,500 NASF collaborative research laboratory complex was the objective of the $3.5M. The award funded the creation of six laboratories devoted to various areas of environmental research focusing on terrestrial systems. The construction process started with the demolition of existing structural components down to the reinforced concrete wall and floors and the hallway walls. In this shell were constructed six new more spacious laboratories that now house the research activities of eleven investigators. The Environmental Sample Testing Laboratory is an industry standard sample testing facility that houses a high performance liquid chromatograph and electrospray tandem mass spectrometer. It is supported by a glass sterilization and storage area and walk-in freezer and refrigeration units and has physically separated sample preparation and analysis units. The Environmental Chemistry and Sensor Development Laboratory is devoted to the development of advanced separation techniques using polymeric ionic liquids and nano-scale selective electrochemical detection technologies. Supporting this laboratory is an ISO level 4 cleanroom. The Environmental Microbiology Laboratory is devoted to the study of the ecology of pathogens in both human and natural environments through the genetic finger printing of organism communities. It is supported by an ISO level 4 cleanroom and a growth chamber and refrigeration support space and meets biosafety level 2 standards. The Ecological Biochemistry Laboratory that is devoted to the study of soil and plant biochemistry related to response of communities and organisms to environmental stress. Supporting this laboratory is a sample preparation support space and a growth chamber room. Also supporting this research are two walk-in growth chambers located on the second floor. The Ecology and Ecosystems Science Laboratory is devoted to the study over many scales of the impact of human activity on natural systems. Supporting this laboratory is an electronics workshop used for the maintenance and calibration of field instruments. Finally we pass to the Ecological Simulation and Modeling Laboratory which is computing facility devoted mathematical modeling of ecological and geophysical processes both at the community scale and global scale using GIS data. In addition to the laboratories, the university funded the creation of a sample receiving and processing facility on the first floor Bowman-Oddy Laboratories that includes space to house the gamma ray spectrometer that serves the ecosystems science laboratory. The processes of design development and selection of a construction manager at risk (CMR) began simultaneously in September 2010. Due to the complexities of fully negotiating the CMR contract, construction did not start until September 2011. Once the construction phase was underway progress was rapid and the entire project that included construction of 5 teaching laboratories, 2 department office areas, 5200 NASF of office space, and the facilities mentioned above was completed in mid-May of 2012. By June 2012 research activities were well underway. The positive impact of the new facility on the productivity of the faculty researchers involved is demonstrated by the over 100 journal submission and conference presentations reporting on research that at least in part took place in the new facility. Broader Impacts: The overarching goal of the project was to enhance research at The University of Toledo that builds societies potential to better manage human-originated disturbances of the natural environment. In this sense, the expected impacts of the project were necessarily quite broad. However, a specific broader impact that we hoped to achieve was to improve the ability of the center investigators to provide research experiences to high school student, high school teachers, and undergraduates. Clearly one of the most important means to mitigate human impacts on the environment is through education both of the general populace and of individuals who might be interested in careers in environmental sciences and related technologies. By the measures we have chosen we can report a marked increase in the number of undergraduates involved in for credit research projects in the Center laboratories. This fall there was 100% increase in the number of students involved in undergraduate research over that average of previous years.
