Science Policy Report

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14 December 2016

In This Issue:

Policy News

International Corner

Research, Education, Extension Funding Opportunities

Science News

Policy News

After weeks of wrangling, Republican leaders unveiled a stopgap spending bill last Tuesday that would fund the government through April 28 at current levels and provide extra money for military operations, flood relief, retired coal miners and President-elect Donald Trump's security. The Republican-controlled House easily passed the continuing resolution (HR 2028) Thursday, by the lopsided margin of 326-96. However, the bill’s fate was cast in doubt when Senate Democrats threatened to hold up a vote over health benefits for retired coal miners. After making a show of support for the miners' cause, Democrats concluded that their concern about the bill wasn't worth shutting down the government and the Senate cleared the stopgap spending bill late Friday evening.

In what may be the most unlikely meeting of the presidential transition process so far, former vice president, former Democratic presidential nominee, former senator and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore met with President-elect Donald Trump last week. Gore has spent decades warning about the dire consequences of unchecked, man-made climate change, while Trump has regularly called climate change "a hoax" during the campaign. Politico reported previously that Ivanka Trump, who is expected to play some of the social roles typically occupied by the first lady, is interested in making climate change one of her signature issues. Read the full article.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), in collaboration with Federal agencies and private-sector stakeholders, is announcing new steps to promote the long-term health and sustainable use of one of America’s most important natural resources: its soil. The new actions being announced today aim to advance scientific understanding of soils to better care for them and their ability to support food security, climate mitigation, ecosystem services, and public health. These efforts focus on three key areas: 1) promoting interdisciplinary research and education, 2) advancing computational tools and modeling, and 3) expanding sustainable agricultural practices. Read the full article.

Donald Trump’s transition team has issued a list of 74 questions for the Energy Department, asking agency officials to identify which employees and contractors have worked on forging an international climate pact as well as domestic efforts to cut the nation’s carbon output. The questionnaire requests a list of those individuals who have taken part in international climate talks over the past five years and “which programs within DOE are essential to meeting the goals of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan.” Energy Department spokesman Eben Burnham-Snyder said Tuesday the department will not comply. Read the full article.

In the predawn hours Saturday, the U.S. Senate passed a bill to bolster innovation and research activities at the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and various research and education programs managed by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The legislation’s bipartisan appeal allowed it to win unanimous approval shortly before the Senate adjourned for the year after passing a spending bill that freezes agency budgets through April 2017 and avoided a government shutdown. But procedural objections by one senator prevented the Senate from acting quickly enough to send the bill to the House of Representatives before its members left town last Thursday. That means the bill won’t be going to President Barack Obama’s desk to be signed into law. Still, supporters are hoping that the hard-fought compromise serves as a template for quick action after the new Congress convenes in January 2017. Read the full article.

The White House science office hasn’t been very productive under President Barack Obama, says the chairman of a key congressional research spending panel. And Representative John Culberson (R–TX) says he’d like to see it downsized. Culberson, whose House of Representatives subcommittee oversees the budgets for NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has never been a fan of John Holdren, Obama’s science adviser. And his latest comments are likely to further heighten anxiety among scientific leaders about how the U.S. research enterprise will fare under President-elect Donald Trump. Read the full article.

The House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology's Twitter account retweeted a Breitbart News article that is unscientific and steeped in opinion on Thursday. The article claims the science behind global warming is "in its final death rattle." An important committee in the United States House of Representatives, the committee's 38 members are in charge of all energy, environmental, marine, civil aviation and astronautics research and development. Read the full article.

President-elect Donald J. Trump plans to name Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, to lead the Energy Department, an agency far more devoted to national security and basic science than to the extraction of fossil fuels that is Mr. Perry’s expertise. In choosing him to be secretary of energy, the president-elect is elevating him to a cabinet post that Mr. Perry once said he wanted to eliminate. Texas is rich in energy resources, and Mr. Perry is an enthusiastic supporter of extracting them. But it is not clear how that experience would translate into leading the Energy Department. Read the full article.

President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday nominated Scott Pruitt, the attorney general of the oil and gas-intensive state of Oklahoma, to head the Environmental Protection Agency, a move signaling an assault on President Obama’s climate change and environmental legacy. Pruitt has spent much of his energy as attorney general fighting the very agency he is being nominated to lead. Read the full article.

International Corner

China’s crop of agricultural data is growing, but the influential commodities player continues to face a stubborn problem: lack of trust in the data’s reliability. In its latest effort to make more clear what is going on in its agricultural sector, the Chinese government has begun releasing estimates and forecasts on the production and consumption of five agricultural commodities. But Beijing’s numbers differ from those of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, widely seen as the standard-bearer of agricultural data. Read the full article.

Africa is showing itself to be one of the continents most affected by climate change, with severe droughts, floods and storms expected to increasingly threaten the health of populations and economies. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the recognized global authority on climate science – has predicted that Africa will warm up to 1.5 times faster than the global average. Many African countries are already under high levels of water stress, and rain-fed agriculture accounts for 95% of farmed land in sub-Saharan Africa. As climate change, population growth and water pollution increase pressure on freshwater resources, the food and beverage sector, which uses 70% of global freshwater supplies, primarily for growing crops, can play a critical role, by working with farmers to help them manage water more efficiently. Read the full article.

Scientists working for the Canadian government have successfully negotiated a clause in their new contract that guarantees their right to speak to the public and the media about science and their research, without needing approval from their managers. “Employees shall have the right to express themselves on science and their research, while respecting the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Sector … without being designated as an official media spokesperson,” the new clause states. The ethics code says that while federal employees may talk about their own work, they should not publicly criticize government policy. Read the full article.

Like his farming neighbors, Bilal Khan plants wheat in late October or early November each year, and harvests and sells his winter crop a few months later. But this year, there are no wheat stalks are to be seen on his 3 hectares (5 acres) of land in Rawat, a town some 12 miles (20 km) from Islamabad, Pakistan's capital. Instead, Khan is growing onions, potatoes, cauliflower, cabbage and carrots. In late October, the Pakistan Meteorological Department informed Khan and other farmers that no rain was forecast for the crucial wheat-growing months of November and December in parts of northern Pakistan that rely solely on rain-fed agriculture. Read the full article.

Research, Education, Extension Funding Opportunities

The Division of Earth Sciences (EAR) awards Postdoctoral Fellowships to recent recipients of doctoral degrees to carry out an integrated program of independent research and education. The research and education plans of each fellowship must address scientific questions within the scope of EAR disciplines. The program supports researchers for a period of up to two years with fellowships that can be taken to the institution of their choice (including facilities abroad). The program is intended to recognize beginning investigators of significant potential, and provide them with research experience, mentorship, and training that will establish them in leadership positions in the Earth Sciences community. Because the fellowships are offered only to postdoctoral scientists early in their career, doctoral advisors are encouraged to discuss the availability of EAR postdoctoral fellowships with their graduate students early in their doctoral programs. Fellowships are awards to individuals, not institutions, and are administered by the Fellows. Deadline, January 10. Read the full announcement.

The U.S. Forest Service requests proposals to substantially expand and accelerate wood energy and wood products markets throughout the United States to support forest management needs on National Forest System and other forest lands. This Request for Proposal focuses on the following priorities to: Reduce hazardous fuels and improve forest health on National Forest System and other forest lands; Reduce costs of forest management on all land types; Promote economic and environmental health of communities. Funding will be awarded to two separate categories: Expansion of Wood Energy Markets and Expansion of Wood Products Markets. Deadline, January 23. Read the full announcement.

The U.S. Geological Survey will award up to $2 million in cooperative agreements to support participation in the National Ground-Water Monitoring Network (NGWMN). The NGWMN is designed as a cooperative groundwater data collection, management, and reporting system that will be based on data from selected wells in existing Federal, State, Tribal, and local groundwater monitoring networks. The Network is envisioned as a long-term collaborative partnership among Federal and non-Federal data providers that will help address present and future groundwater management questions facing the nation. The NGWMN will provide the data needed to determine regional and national trends in groundwater levels and groundwater quality, and facilitate the evaluation of transboundary groundwater resources. Cooperative agreements will provide support for both new and existing data providers in the NGWMN. The USGS will fund new data providers to (1) select and classify sites within existing monitoring programs, (2) set up web services that will link the data to the NGWMN Portal, and (3) produce a report describing this process. Deadline, January 27. Read the full announcement.

The Five Star and Urban Waters Restoration Grant Program, an initiative of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, seeks to develop nationwide community stewardship of local natural resources, preserving these resources for future generations and enhancing habitat for local wildlife. The focus is on ecological improvements, including wetland, riparian, forest, and coastal habitat restoration; wildlife conservation; community tree canopy enhancement; and water quality monitoring and stormwater management. The program requires the establishment of diverse partnerships of at least five organizations (nonprofit organizations, local and state government agencies, Indian tribes, and educational institutions) that contribute to project success. Projects must also integrate meaningful outreach, education, and training into the proposed on-the-ground activities that advance local watershed and conservation goals. Grants for this program are available nationwide, but additional funding is available for specific geographic priorities. Deadline, January 31. Read the full announcement.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) announced $3 million in available funding for robotics research, application, and education for agricultural systems that benefit consumers and rural communities. This funding is made available through the National Robotics Initiative (link is external) (NRI), a federal research partnership that includes NIFA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Department of Defense, and Department of Energy. The goal of the NRI program is to speed the development and use of robots that work alongside or cooperatively with people in agriculture. This latest funding opportunity supports research on the scalability and variety of collaborative human-robot (co-robot) interactions. Areas of focus include collaborative robots/humans teams, robots that can be easily customized, and infrastructure that lowers barriers to entry into the field of co-robots. Additionally, the program encourages research to introduce robotics in educational curricula and research to better understand the long-term social, behavioral, and economic implications of co-robots across all areas of human activity. Deadline, February 2. Read the full announcement.

The overarching goal of INFEWS is to catalyze well-integrated interdisciplinary and convergent research to transform scientific understanding of the (food-energy-water) FEW nexus in order to improve system function and management, address system stress, increase resilience, and ensure sustainability. The NSF INFEWS initiative is designed specifically to attain the following goals: 1) Significantly advance our understanding of the food-energy-water system through quantitative, predictive and computational modeling, including support for relevant cyberinfrastructure; 2) Develop real-time, cyber-enabled interfaces that improve understanding of the behavior of FEW systems and increase decision support capability; 3) Enable research that will lead to innovative solutions to critical FEW systems problems; and 4) Grow the scientific workforce capable of studying and managing the FEW system, through education and other professional development opportunities. NSF and USDA/NIFA are interested in promoting international cooperation that links scientists and engineers from a range of disciplines and organizations to solve the significant global challenges at the nexus of FEW systems. Deadline, March 6. Read the full announcement.

Science News

Roadside ditches are common strategies for preventing roads from flooding, but they can lead to downstream water quality issues, including nutrient pollution. Grassed ditches may have beneficial nutrient removal processes occurring, but conditions promoting nutrient removal could also drive greenhouse gas production. In the November–December 2016 issue of the Journal of Environmental Quality, researchers report on a field study in a suburban watershed in upstate New York where they compared nutrient cycling processes in grassed roadside ditches to those in adjacent lawns. The team found that the ditches had high potential denitrification, a biological process that removes excess nitrate, though very wet ditches also had high emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Read the full article.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected William E. Easterling to serve as head of the Directorate for Geosciences (GEO), which supports fundamental research spanning the atmospheric, earth, ocean and polar sciences. Easterling comes to NSF from Penn State, where he has been dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences since 2007. As dean, Easterling led strategic planning for research initiatives focusing on the food-energy-water nexus, clean carbon energy, additive manufacturing, big data challenges in forecasting, risk and uncertainty in environmental decisions, and more. Easterling will begin his NSF appointment in June. Read the full article.

The Nature Conservancy and General Mills unveiled the Soil Health Roadmap at the annual BSR Conference. Developed by an interdisciplinary team of Conservancy scientists, economists and agriculture experts and made possible through support from General Mills, the Roadmap makes the business case for investing in sustainable soil health practices to achieve unprecedented economic benefits for U.S. farmers and businesses, as well as significant conservation outcomes for generations to come. The Soil Health Roadmap outlines 10 key steps spanning science, economy and policy priorities to achieve widespread adoption of adaptive soil health systems on more than 50 percent of U.S. cropland by 2025. Read the full article.

A recently released national assessment of the nation's lakes has found that 4 in 10 lakes have too much nitrogen and phosphorus. Excess nutrients can cause algae blooms, lower oxygen levels, degrade habitat for fish and other life, and lower water quality for recreation. The National Lakes Assessment also found an algal toxin – microcystin – in 39% of lakes, but below levels of concern. Low concentrations of the herbicide atrazine were found in 30% of lakes. The assessment is part of a series of National Aquatic Resource Surveys designed to provide information about the condition of water resources in the U.S. The surveys are conducted in partnership with states and tribes to provide national-scale assessments of the nation’s waters. Read the full article.

The way Americans eat has become a source of potential social, economic and political friction as people follow personal preferences reflecting their beliefs about how foods connect with their health, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center. The new food divides are encapsulated by how people assess the health effects of two kinds of food: organic and genetically modified (GM) foods. The survey of 1,480 American adults finds that 55% of Americans believe organically-grown produce is healthier than conventionally-grown varieties, while 41% say there is no difference between organics and conventionally-grown produce. Four-in-ten Americans (40%) say that most (6%) or some (34%) of the food they eat is organic. Read the full article.

What do farmers want more—to build soil organic matter (SOM) for long-term soil quality or to mineralize organic matter to feed their crops? The answer is usually both. Nutrients are stabilized or sequestered into organic matter from crop residues and amendments and subsequently mineralized or released for plant uptake. Collectively, these processes determine SOM permanence and influence both soil quality and productivity. Total organic matter is commonly measured in standardized soil testing, but the majority of this pool cycles slowly over time. In the September–October 2016 issue of the Soil Science Society of America Journal, a team of 12 scientists from nine institutions across the United States explore the relationship between two soil health tests that measure the active pool of organic matter. Read the full article.

By century's end, the number of summertime storms that produce extreme downpours could increase by more than 400 percent across parts of the United States -- including sections of the Gulf Coast, Atlantic Coast, and the Southwest -- according to a new study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The study, by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, also reports that the intensity of individual extreme rainfall events could increase by as much as 70 percent in some areas. Read the full article.

The Soil Health Institute (SHI) and Datu Research today announced a $626,000 grant from the Walton Family Foundation to quantify the economic risks and rewards of soil health management systems used in farming. Management practices that improve soil health can increase resilience to drought, improve water quality, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and enhance sustainability. However, quantifying the economic impact of such practices is key for increasing farmer adoption, and such impacts are largely not yet quantified.  SHI will conduct a systematic review of scientific literature that evaluates economic risk and yield impacts of soil health-promoting practices, such as no-till, zone tillage, reduced tillage, cover crops, crop rotation, manure/biosolid application, and other management practices. Read the full article.

The Edward C. Roy Jr. Award For Excellence in K-8 Earth Science Teaching is designed to recognize one teacher of grades K-8 (or the United Kingdom equivalent) each year for his or her leadership and innovation in Earth science education. The award consists of a $2,500 prize for the winning teacher and a grant of up to $1,000 to enable the recipient to attend the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) Annual Conference in March 2017 to accept the award. The winning teacher and his or her school each will receive a plaque of recognition. Deadline, January 20. Read the full announcement.

Sources: USDA; NSF; NFWF; USGS; USFS; AGI; ScienceInsider; NPR; Politico; White House; Reuters; The New York Times; Washington Post; NBC News; Harvest Public Media; Farm Futures; Nature; Fox News; EurekaAlert; Growing Louisiana; Cordis; Wall Street Journal; The Guardian;

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