Achievement

A new project was initiated in August 2010 to study phytoremediation of contaminated groundwater at a former industrial facility located south of Buffalo, NY in partnership with Motorola and a New York State regulatory agency. The five-year project will engage the ERIE program in multiple ways. In 2010-2011, the project provided post-traineeship support for a Geography IGERT student who will work closely with environmental engineers to design the phytoremediation program. Also, the project was used as the case study in a practicum course involving IGERT students from four academic departments. Innovative research methods include distributed temperature sensing (DTS) to quantify stream/groundwater exchange, data loggers and pressure transducers to quantify diurnal fluctuations in tree-influenced evapotranspiration, and various social and educational evaluations that extend the scope of "restoration" beyond narrowly posed groundwater questions.