Month: December 2016

Bernardo Vazquez Bravo is a Ph.D. student in Environmental Engineering focusing on drinking water disinfection.

As part of the Smart Water Disinfection project, he is working to understand more precisely how widely-used modern virus inactivating methods like chlorine and ultraviolet (UV) irradiation treatments work. He and the team want to know the exact change a particular treatment makes to a virus to stop it from being infectious.

His focus is on UV irradition. Ultraviolet light can be produced at a variety of wavelengths, and he is running tests to find out which wavelength is the most effective at inactivating viruses. After exposing viruses to UV light radiation, he gives his samples of UV-damaged viruses to lab partner Kelley Goncalves for further tests to try to discover the particular biomolecular effects of the intense light treatment.

“The idea is that by having that understanding, you can develop better technologies that are targeting specific components of the viruses so you can have more cost-effective treatments,” he said.

Bernardo grew up in the city of Puebla, the capital city of the Mexican state with the same name. Both of his parents grew up in smaller, rural communities, which colors his perspective on water challenges with first-hand experience.

“It was fun to me to go to my grandparents’ houses because it was different than what we had at home in the city. But through that I got to experience the challenges people have in the rural communities: fetching water from the river, having access to a latrine, and relying on agriculture as the main economic activity,” he said.

“Now that I’m working on this project that is trying to address those challenges in the water, health, sanitation, and energy nexus in a sustainable way — those experiences I had when I was little motivate me to develop something that could benefit the people living in conditions similar to those I remember in the communities where my parents grew up.”

He completed his undergraduate degree in civil engineering at the Universidad De Las Americas Puebla (UDLAP) in Cholula, Puebla in 2009. A Master’s degree in Environmental Engineering followed from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012.

His interest in water grew when Illinois’ Professor Benito Marinas partnered with Bernardo’s academic adviser at UDLAP, Professor Benito Corona, to develop an international collaboration on water issues. The first projects, which Bernardo eagerly participated in, started in 2008 and took him to several states in Mexico. The group grew to include interest in sanitation and energy as well as drinking water quality and ventured overseas to Kenya, Tanzania, India, and most recently Uganda.

After graduating, he kept up his connection with Marinas while he worked outside academia for one year, and was ultimately invited to the Illinois campus to continue to extend the work.

It presented a mix of feelings for both he and his parents.

“They were very excited. They say that through me they have been able to travel to many different places in the world. But, yes, they were also nervous,” he said. “I was, too. When I arrived I couldn’t even have a conversation (because my English wasn’t very good). That language barrier was one of the key aspects to overcome, because all the classes were on a new topic for me — I hadn’t studied water very much before — and everything was in English. It was very challenging.”

In his research, Bernardo sees the opportunity to be creative and “think outside the box.” He is excited by the chance to look at the problem of drinking water quality from a new perspective and give something a try that hasn’t been done before.

The interdisciplinary team he’s working with might hold the key to that. “If I only focused on developing this very effective, nicely engineered technology — if I don’t have the social sciences or a business model built into the plan of action — it’s not going to be sustainable,” he said, “The main thing I have learned being involved in this project is in order to tackle all these problems, you need to be working in an integrated team.”

Back to the Smart Water Disinfection Project page

Allison Gardner is a Ph.D. Candidate in Entomology researching the effects of habitat quality on the reproduction of mosquitoes. In particular, she studies how different species of leaves caught in a storm drain — a favorite breeding place for mosquitoes — can help or hurt efforts to control the population of the disease-carrying insects.

A single leaf can mean life or death for newly-hatched mosquito larvae, she said. Leaf litter found in stagnant pools of water where mosquitoes lay eggs is decomposed by a small army of microorganisms, and different types of microorganisms prefer to feed on different kinds of leaves. When the mosquito larvae hatch, they feed on the microorganisms to grow.

“It turns out that the microbes that grow off (particular types of leaves) are different, and not all of them seem to be equally good resources for the mosquitoes,” Gardner said. “You’ve got some leaf species that are really good for the mosquitoes — they’ll grow quickly and emerge at very high densities. And then you have other leaves that seem to actually even kill mosquitoes for one reason or another.”

It is these killing leaves that are most interesting to her and her team. Quite by accident during a previous research project, she discovered that the leaves of the Illinois-native blackberry plant are very attractive to mosquitoes as a place to lay eggs, but are lethal to the larvae. Now, as part of the iSEE-funded mosquito control research team, she’s working on ways to harness the “attract and kill” properties of blackberry leaves and a few other species.

“We’re going for an approach to mosquito control that could either supplement or actually even displace the need for insecticides in these sorts of systems with this native plant,” she said. “This attract and kill strategy is often used for agricultural pests and forest pests, but to our knowledge it hasn’t really been explored for vector control — especially larval mosquito control. We think it could be a way we could try to improve the efficacy of existing mosquito control strategies.”

Her research year is cut neatly into two halves: summers in the field and winters indoors analyzing her data. From June to September, she works with undergraduate students to add different mixtures of leaves to storm drain mosquito nurseries and measure their effects on mosquito egg laying behavior and the numbers of surviving larvae. During the winter months, she teaches applied statistics classes and focuses on writing up the results of her summer observations.

“Working with the students has really been a highlight of the experience for me. I find that even if I am thinking about the same ideas every summer, when I bring in a new group of students, it’s all brand new for them, so it keeps the whole process fresh for me,” she said. “I (also) really do enjoy the teaching aspect and how research and teaching wind up playing off each other when you bring your research into the classroom and in turn get ideas that you can apply to your research.”

Gardner conducted her first study on mosquitoes when she 14 years old. A unique three-year program at her New York high school paired students interested in science with opportunities to work in a laboratory environment. She cut her research teeth under the mentorship of Theodore Andreadis, now director of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. She completed a project in trapping and identifying species of mosquitoes.

“I think it made me a lot better at writing, presentation, organization,” she said. “A lot of the organizational strategies that I was taught in high school are still things that I do now, in terms of writing statements of goals for each semester and writing notes before every meeting with the professor and such.”

After high school she attended Williams College in Massachusetts and completed a History degree. “That was a bit of a detour, but an interesting one, and a probably very valuable one because of the writing skills and debate skills you get from that kind of background,” she said.

Afterward Gardner joined Illinois professor Marilyn O’Hara Ruiz’s lab to study the transmission of West Nile virus by the Culex pipiens mosquito in the Chicago area and earned a Masters in Pathobiology.

One of her greatest learning experiences as an iSEE researcher, she said, is the development of community and collaboration in her diverse research group.

“People are all kind of speaking different languages when you come into the meeting,” she said. “It’s been interesting to me to see the process of how people learn to share a common language in the group to talk about research problems and how people contribute ideas that are really outside your area of expertise, but you’re able to come together and get to accomplish something that any one person in the group wouldn’t have been able to do on their own. It’s really the first experience I’ve had in truly interdisciplinary work.”

After completing her Ph.D., Gardner hopes to head back to New England and continue her research and teaching.

“I’m interested to go back there with the new set of skills I’ve learned at Illinois and fix problems in the local ecosystem that I grew up in,” she said.

Return to the Stormwater & Mosquito Control Project page

Andrew Mackay is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Entomology with a broad interest in arthropods and public health. He joined Associate Professor Brian Allan’s lab in 2012, just as Allan was starting to turn his mind toward human-made stormwater infrastructure and how it interacts with disease-carrying insects.

The traditional storm drain that carries rainwater away from urban streets allows some water to pool at the bottom of the catch basin — prime territory for mosquito reproduction. Mosquitoes lay their eggs in the stagnant water, and the larvae that hatch eat the microorganisms that grows on the litter in the water. New designs for stormwater management — dubbed “green infrastructure” for their goal of a more natural water ecosystem — have the potential to reduce the water sitting around for mosquitoes to breed in.

“I don’t know that anyone else was really looking at this in any kind of mechanistic way,” he said. “We developed some working hypotheses, the main one being that the net effect of putting more of this green infrastructure in will be a reduction in the quantity or quality of aquatic habitats available for mosquitoes. And we think that will have a net positive impact on public health.”

The perfect opportunity for team members to test their ideas came in 2012, when the City of Aurora began plans to install green stormwater infrastructure in several of its municipal districts. One of the projects was to install catch basins with a new design, he said.

A stormwater catch basin is the mouth of the storm sewer system. Beneath the metal grates that line most city streets is a concrete chamber that collects rainwater water and lets the trash and other debris swept down the drain settle out before the water heads through the pipeline toward a river or other natural water body.

The traditional (sometimes called “grey”) stormwater catch basin design is completely enclosed; no water escapes into the ground. The green design used by Aurora placed the basin over a bed of gravel. Holes were drilled in the floor to allow water to constantly flow into the ground, shrinking or eliminating the pools in which mosquitoes can lay their eggs.

For four years covering time before, during, and after Aurora’s stormwater system overhaul, Andrew led teams of students in field work to sample the water in traditional and green stormwater systems in Aurora and to trap adult mosquitoes in the area. They finished their field work in summer 2015. Now, in the lab, Andrew and what he called a “small army” of undergraduate students count the number of mosquito larvae in the preserved water samples and from that count, draw up a table of mosquito population over time.

“Preliminary data seems to support the hypotheses… We seem to see at least a modest effect on mosquito abundance,” he said.

Mackay blames serendipity for his discovery of medical entomology — the study of the bugs that makes humans sick.

“I had a broad interest in biology in high school. Then, I got my first student position working in a lab with mosquitoes. I had a fantastic mentor, Reinhart Brust — a graduate of the University of Illinois, in fact — and the research was really interesting; that really drew me in,” he said.

Mackay completed Bachelors and Masters degrees in Entomology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg under Brust’s guidance before moving to the States to complete a Ph.D. in Entomology at Louisiana State University in 2007.

In 2008, he took a position with the Center for Disease Control’s Dengue Branch in San Juan, Puerto Rico, researching outbreaks of that disease. While the medical professionals treated those infected, Andrew would trace the largest sources of the disease-transmitting mosquitoes and work to bring their populations down to reduce human contact and spread of the disease.

“I remember one occasion when we were sent to the Marshall Islands when they had a large outbreak of dengue. It was both one of the most stressful experiences I’ve had and also very rewarding because I felt that we were actually making a substantive contribution to the public health response,” he said. “It was a very enriching experience and very interesting experience to see this disease cycle in a very different setting.”

Going forward, he anticipates future conversations about the applications of green infrastructure in improving public and environmental health.

“Perhaps we can identify issues from the other side to form organized mosquito control programs — ways in which they may need to change their practices to adapt in changes in how stormwater management is practiced,” he said. “If you put in infrastructure that has less capacity to produce mosquitoes, that may reduce the need for chemical control, and it may provide long-term control of these mosquitoes by simply reducing the presence of standing water.

“I think there’s a large interest and commitment in both public and private entities for adopting these methods. I think the relevance of green infrastructure to mosquito production will be significant in the future.”

Return to the Stormwater and Mosquito Control project page

As part of the iSEE-funded Stormwater and Mosquito Control Project, Medical Entomology Ph.D. student Elijah Juma is examining how decaying leaves in stormwater affect the habitats — and the life cycles — of mosquitoes.

In Summer 2016, Elijah undertook his first field season under the direction of project PI Brian Allan, an Associate Professor of Entomology, and Juma Muturi, the Director of Medical Entomology at the Illinois Natural History Survey (INHS).

One goal of this expansive project is to offer solutions for controlling mosquito populations and resulting diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, West Nile Virus, and Zika, which are a threat to human health worldwide. This threat is in part due to mosquitoes’ tendency to lived and breed in human-made aquatic habitats formed by stormwater that has collected in discarded automobile tires, other debris, and urban drainage systems that carry water off of roads and sidewalks.

Elijah examines the role of leaf detritus in the habitats mosquitoes use for breeding. Decaying leaves that accumulate in stormwater attract a variety of microbial communities. These microbes — bacteria and viruses — aid the decay and act as a primary nutrient source for mosquito larvae, thus making collections of stormwater an attractive habitat and breeding ground for the insects.

Comparing the microbial composition in the aquatic habitat to that inside the mosquito gut allows Elijah to observe any significant changes or differences that take place between the external and internal environment of the mosquitos. His goal is to compare the changes of the gut community across different mosquito life stages (larvae, pupae, adult) and different habitats (tree holes and artificial containers like old tires).

Elijah collected larvae, pupae, and samples of water from two sets of storm drains near the Urbana-Champaign campus where the mosquitoes live and breed from May through August 2016. His samples of larvae and pupae were raised to adulthood at the Medical Entomology Field Lab, where a special environmental chamber mimics the local temperature, humidity, and cycle of night and day.

Once the mosquitos reach adulthood, their sex and species are determined and then they’re dissolved and centrifuged to extract and concentrate the gut microbes. Microbes were also collected and processed from the water samples for further analysis. These samples are used for Elijah’s research and for additional studies directed by INHS, a division of the Prairie Research Institute.

During his first season of collection, he learned some important lessons about field work with mosquitoes.

“Because of ecological dynamics, the species of mosquito I am targeting (Ochlerotatus triseriatus, carrier of La Crosse encephalitis virus, a neuroinvasive disease in the upper Midwestern U.S, Culex restuans and Culex pipiens, the primary carriers of West Nile Virus in the U.S., and Aedes japonicas, a possible carrier of these viruses) may not be present in the numbers I had hoped,” he said. “I realized that the numbers are not constantly high. You may find one species is present in relatively high numbers, while another target species is very low for that particular season. There are always changes in species evenness and richness.”

Therefore, Elijah needed to sample the same habitats repeatedly in order to obtain the right sample size.

“Since mosquitoes have a generation time of at least seven days, it’s not advisable to sample more than once a week,” he said. “For the next planned field sampling, I intend to widen my sample to more natural habitats such as retention ponds and ditches, both to compare dynamics of mosquito gut microbial community composition between different habitat types and to get the required sample size.”

As he goes about collecting samples, he hopes that his analysis will give Stormwater and Mosquito Control project researchers more information about which plants a) leave behind litter that can affect mosquito production by influencing the chemistry of the aquatic habitats; and b) alter the abundance and composition of the microbial communities, which in themselves act as food for the growing larvae — and play a role in nutrient cycling through decomposition of the organic matter.

Elijah’s interest in mosquito research began while studying Biological Sciences and Parasitology at the University of Nairobi in Kenya, his home country. He plans to return when he completes his education in the United States.

“It would be a disservice to my motherland to become qualified here in the United States and not return home. There are many entomologists in America, and Africa needs more,” he said. “Mosquito research is very relevant to the (public health) situation in Africa.”

— Lois Yoksoulian, iSEE Communications Graduate Intern

Back to the Stormwater and Mosquito Control Project page

Stuti Shrivastava is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Plant Biology, and alongside more than 20 student and faculty researchers at the University of Illinois, she is working to create crops in silico — computer modeling that will accurately predict plant responses to environmental changes.

In a world where climate change already affects many people’s ability to grow food globally, a detailed computer model that analyzes the nutritional and growing condition needs of crops may help scientists breed and genetically modify new crops better suited to altered climates. To achieve this computerized vision of plants, several Illinois departments — including Chemistry, Biomolecular Engineering, Crop Sciences, and Plant Biology —  are examining the different levels at which a plant reacts to the conditions of its environment: the atomic and protein level, the interactions between genes and proteins, whole systems within the plant, and finally, the whole plant within its environment.

The overall goal is to tell the story of adaptation inside the plant from the time its surroundings change, Stuti says. As a member of the Amy Marshall-Colón Lab, she studies the second-level step: how the presence (or lack) of a nutrient turns genes on and off in plant cells — called gene expression.

Genes dictate the life-giving chemical operations within plant cells. What Stuti and her team want to know is how the gene expression switch gets flipped from off to on (or vice versa) as environment changes.

For example, think of a plant growing in ideal conditions that suddenly has its water supply cut off, she said.

“The plant is going to respond accordingly to drought and send out signals to say to its cells, ‘We are in a state of drought, and we need to respond so that we survive and hope for the drought period to end,’ ” she said. By observing patterns between the environmental conditions and gene expression levels, she’ll identify the “first responders” that tell the plant to (continuing the example) curl up its leaves to save itself from drying out.

Gene expression data is measured in snapshots of chemical markers present in a plant at a given time point.

“You know what’s happening exactly at that time point, but you don’t know how that system is responding before or after that particular time point. You have to collect samples at close time points to actually look at (a trend),” she said.

Just like a stop-motion movie or sketched flipbook, the more images you have to run together, the smoother the image or data trend appears. Stuti works with gene expression data from an existing publication (Krouk et al. (2010)) amassed for a study of gene behavior in response to nitrogen, a vital plant nutrient. The readings were taken quite close together at three-, six-, and nine-minute intervals from the time experimental conditions were initiated, and captured the chemical reactions right from the start.

“How are the genes responding?” she asks of her data. “Are they being regulated in such a way that some genes turn on, perform their regulatory reaction, and then shut down, or do they have a continuous expression in the background? What is the backstory behind them?”

The large amount of data available — and the varied ways to analyze it — fascinates her.

“You can take that data and analyze it in one way and get some results and then reanalyze your data using some other methods and you’ll still get meaningful outputs,” she said. “There’s so much complexity in biology: Not only humans but in plants and fungi and bacteria … everything is so complex. We are trying to understand the whole processes and pathways behind these interactions. There is always some new idea coming up that you think is interesting and you should explore further.”

At the end of the day, Stuti wants to “do something important enough that helps everybody grow.”

“My parents are doctors,” she said, “I’ve seen them dedicate their lives to the field of medicine. They are treating patients, and it is their way of making a change in the world. I’m still going to make an impact and change the world in some positive way. Research is my way of doing that. The end goal is helping people,” she said.

Stuti’s childhood home is Lucknow, India. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology from the Flinders University of South Australia in 2009 and an M.S. in Biology from New York University before coming to Illinois.

She feels she owes her interest in the intersection of life and computational biology studies to her 11th-grade teacher, Dr. Anjulika Joshi.

“She took real pains to teach this new field to the class (and) to make sure that we would understand each and every basic detail and from there on I got interested in this field. I felt that this is exactly what I wanted to do. Actually every time I move one step forward in my life, I send her an email or talk to her to let her know what I’m doing now and to say thank you,” Stuti said.

Return to Crops in silico project page

Erik Stanek is a Masters student in Illinois’ Crop Sciences program. As a member of the Agroforestry for Food project funded by iSEE, he’s determining the role mixed-species farms of trees and shrubs may play in the future of central Illinois agriculture — and in feeding the nation.

The core idea of agroforestry is relatively simple: Corn and soybeans are resource-intensive crops that have to be planted every year. Replacing traditional row crops with nut- and fruit-producing trees that are long-lived has environmental benefits like carbon dioxide storage, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and lower uses of fertilizer, fuel, and other resources. The iSEE research team established a 30-acre plot of more than 10,000 plants in May 2015 to test different combinations of species in the hopes of maximizing crop yield and environmental benefit.

“A lot of the research done so far has been aimed at answering the question ‘Can we make a temperate agroforestry system work?’ We haven’t really collaborated with a farmer to ask ‘Would you actually do it?’ ” Erik said. “We’ve consulted people, certainly … but most of (them) are quite innovative, so it’s not a fair sample to claim that people in general will adopt agroforestry. The idea is the people we’re trying to survey now are not conservationists necessarily, but rather your traditional farmer.”

Erik’s part of the agroforestry research expands the project beyond the test plot and into real farmers’ fields to study the feasibility of adoption by central Illinois growers.

His research walks farmers through the entire design process for a woody mixed-crop system — including site landscape assessment, crop selection, market analysis for potential crops grown, management plan creation, and 3-D visualizations of the site. With all the information and designs in hand, the farmer decides whether or not to buy in. If he or she does, the researchers have earned a remote case study to add to their research data. If not, they’ve still gathered valuable feedback that can inform the research questions or experiment design at the agroforestry test plot, Erik said.

“If we go through all the farmers on our list and not one of them wants to adopt and they raise clear issues, then we need to rethink what we’re doing because that saves us five to 10 years of our time,” he said.

Erik grew up in Mokena, a Chicago suburb he describes as being “on the cusp of urban sprawl.” While his father trained for marathons by running through a nearby forest preserve, young Erik would bike alongside him.

“That’s where I grew a passion for nature,” he said, “riding all those trails.”

His interest in agriculture also was rooted in his childhood. Until he was 11, he spent summers at his grandparents’ home in southwest Iowa, the heart of corn country.

“That time inspired a lot of independence and an interest in rural communities on top of my love of nature from being back at home,” he said. “I think those two things really add up well to what I am studying now.”

Finding that area of study was a bit of a challenge, he admits. He started his college career with a “save the earth!” attitude, but couldn’t find any one subject within his natural resources degree that truly resonated with him. He bounced between professors, but “nothing really stuck,” he said. In 2014, he studied abroad in the Netherlands at one of the top agricultural schools, Wageningen University, and took a course in agroforestry.

“That opened my eyes to what I believe to be the most impactful thing I can study and pursue as a career to make a difference ,” he said. And, apparently, it also ignited a passion for travel. On subsequent trips, he’s visited the Czech Republic, Germany, France, Belgium, the Swiss Alps, Italy, and Nicaragua.

Back in the States, he found a spot as an undergraduate researcher in Agroforestry for Food project leader Sarah Taylor Lovell’s lab. He graduated from Illinois in December 2015 with a B.S. in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, then jumped right into a Masters to continue his work with agroforestry.

“I like interacting with people and understanding social and environmental issues on landscape scales,” he said. “That’s what really got me interested in this project. Within this project it’s exactly that: getting the word out there about what we’re doing to people who will actually begin to adopt it. It’s our lab’s way of dipping our feet into the water of saying, ‘can we make this work outside the research world?’ We are asking, ‘Are we ready?’ It’s kind of like our training wheels.”

Agriculture is always shifting its best practices, he said. “Many people think it’s always been 100 percent corn, all the time. Well, in our lifetime, maybe. However, not too long ago, our grandparents had cattle, pigs, goats, pasture, and fruit trees; the widespread shift to corn didn’t happen until the early 1970’s when the government said to plant row crops ‘hedgerow to hedgerow’. I don’t see the current state of agriculture lasting forever.

“What intrigues me about agroforestry for food is it is a simple, achievable solution to a variety of problems facing our environment and rural communities. However, there is still so much to learn about how these systems can be optimized, implemented, and marketed efficiently. I think that’s what draws me into this research so much.”

Return to Agroforestry for Food project page

Kevin Wolz is a Ph.D. student in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology (PEEC).

At the Agroforestry for Food site, a project seed-funded by iSEE, he is most interested in the possible benefits of mixed-species cropping. Instead of planting just one species of nut- or fruit-bearing tree on any given acre (on its own better than corn or soybeans because trees sequester carbon and need less fertilizer and nitrogen), there might be benefits to planting three or four tree and shrub species all next to each other in a repeating pattern. In theory, he says, mixed-species acres should see a larger harvest, higher wildlife diversity, and healthier soils than than one-crop acres, but he won’t know the extent of benefits until the trees are more mature in several years.

To track the overall environmental effects of the single- and mixed-species agricultural ecosystems, he measures soil moisture and chemistry and plant growth — a job that can be intimidating on a 12,000-plant project, he says. He’s looking for the balance of nutrients in the soil: How much nitrogen or carbon, for example, is coming into the planted system, and how much is leaving? How well do the plants grow in this system, and how much sellable crop do they provide?

As an undergraduate at Illinois, Kevin completed dual Bachelor’s degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Integrative Biology.

“I love doing both [biology and engineering]. They’re very different perspectives on the world and on research. Engineers will try to find a problem – what issue is society having right now? – and how can use what we currently know to solve that problem? Biologists are more about what don’t we know, what don’t we understand, what is something that isn’t acting how we thought it would – and exploring that sometimes for the sake of exploring it,” he said.

While these fields might sound totally unconnected to some, he sees a clear meeting of the two in agriculture.

“I view agriculture basically as engineering. You have a system that needs to accomplish two different things — healthy ecosystems and food — on the same acre of land. As an engineer at heart, I look at it as an optimization problem,” he said. “You have this whole toolbox of plants, and you can arrange them and use them in any way you want. Then what informs how you do it is biology.”

Kevin grew up in the southwest suburbs of Chicago near a large forest preserve area. His love of biology and the natural world, he says, can be traced to many happy childhood days exploring the woods. In high school, he got involved with the local restoration community and participated in making degraded forests healthy again.

When he arrived on the Urbana-Champaign campus, he hoped to do more of the same.

“I quickly realized that restoration doesn’t work here,” he said. “There are no degraded prairies or degraded forests to restore because there are (virtually) none left, and all the land here is worth so much money for agriculture — and it needs to make a profit. Restoration inherently costs money; it doesn’t make anyone any money.”

He didn’t give up on his goals for healthier ecosystems, however. He became interested in sustainable agriculture systems as a way to restore the natural balance of the land while also making money on the restored land. He started working with the original 2012 woody polyculture site during his junior undergraduate year.

“What really inspired me more than anything to continue studying sustainable ag are several farmers I’ve met who are doing this kind of farming. They’ve inspired me to hit the books to try to study to make it better to learn how to do it,” he said.

The greatest observation he’s made so far is how rapidly a polyculture planting can reinstate healthier environmental conditions.

“It’s absolutely amazing how in just two years how dramatically the whole biogeochemistry can shift. People look at this corn and soy system as ‘we’re so screwed. It’s too late.’ But you could just stop that, switch to this and within two years you’re back to ideal conditions. It’s mind-boggling!” he said. “That gives me hope that if we could get more people to do this then we could have a lot of impact pretty darn quick, which is awesome.”

In the short-term, Kevin is excited to finish his Ph.D. After that, he wants to strike a balance in his career between practical application and academia — perhaps as a professor or consultant with some land of his own for a polyculture farm. He looks forward to the day when he can drive by the Multifunctional Woody Polyculture site and say, “One day I was planting what looked like sticks in the ground. Now look at it!”

Return to Agoforestry for Food Project page

Ron Revord is a Ph.D. student studying plant breeding and genetics. Specifically, he focuses on the development of a new variety of hazelnut tree that will thrive and be profitable in mixed-species agricultural systems.

A featured plant in many of the test plots at the iSEE Agroforestry for Food project’s research site, the hazelnut can be an important part of the agricultural ecosystem. When processed, hazelnuts produce large amounts of oil that can have similar industrial applications as soybean oil. However, the hazelnut species currently available at nurseries are not bred for Midwest conditions, he said.

Modern soy has been engineered through breeding and genetic modification over decades to fight disease, repel pests and produce lots of food. To a large extent, hazelnuts have not been bred like this — but must be to become economically viable.

Ron is the beginning of that breeding program. In partnership with Rutgers University and sponsored by the Agroecology and Sustainable Agriculture Program, Ron identifies specific genetic markers for disease resistance and high crop production in a test group of hazelnut plants. When two plants with the identified desirable genes are bred together, he screens the offsprings’ genes to see if they possess enough of the desired traits. This eliminates some of the time-consuming trial and error in creating the next generation of plants — and researchers will need to create many generations to finally get all the required genes into one plant.

“Because of our collaboration with Rutgers University, we’re only seven or so years away from having a viable variety for commercial hazelnut production in the Midwest. That may come off as a lot of years … but there are zero varieties right now,” Ron said. Although hazelnuts have been selectively bred in the past, it was never with a Midwestern agricultural application in mind. He is starting nearly from scratch.

Growing up in Frankfort, Illinois — a southwest suburb of Chicago — Ron never imagined he’d be trying to engineer the agriculture system of the future, although he did figure he’d have a career in science. His father was a hobby aerospace enthusiast, and one of his favorite classes in high school was an AP Biology course.

Ron completed a Bachelor’s degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Illinois in 2012. Unlike the majority of students in the MCB major, he wasn’t interested in a medical application of biology. Instead, he was looking for “something more applicable to big-world problems today.”

He found that something in sustainability. For the last two years of his undergraduate experience, Ron conducted undergraduate research on native biofuel crops with DoKyung (D.K.) Lee’s laboratory at the Energy Biosciences Institute’s energy farm. His time spent with this lab group deepened his interest in the feasibility of mixing ecology and agriculture.

During his senior year, he completed a tour alongside then-junior Kevin Wolz of Midwest farms practicing various forms of perennial mixed-species farming.

“In Wisconsin, we’d travelled through the typical fields when all of a sudden we were surrounded by 20-year-old orchards, and it’s different. It’s like an epiphany,” he said. “You see a real plot of species planted or intercropped that grow together on a mechanized commercial scale. You know this approach can’t universally transfer to other crops and environments right away, but with empirical research, wider use seemed viable.”

“That was the ah-ha moment that focused a career path for me.”

Ron jokingly describes himself as having an irrational love for the hazelnut. “What makes me love doing this work is it makes me feel I am having that broader societal impact,” he said. “If those breeding objectives for the hazelnut are met, there’s this whole new crop that farmers can adopt and produce profitably and have all of these subsequent environmental benefits they’re not currently having.”

He gets frustrated when woody polyculture isn’t taken seriously in the Midwest, even though it is a globally applied approach to agriculture. He tries to put a positive spin on it, saying that it just makes the science more challenging because of the extra scrutiny.

“You have to take a dynamic, nondirect approach to problem solving. I guess I do like that,” he said.

He is also encouraged by the progress made by the Woody Polyculture Project team so far.

“We were nonexistent last spring. The idea for the Woody Perennial Polyculture Site was nonexistent two and a half years ago,” he said. “And now the silly ideas we had by touring farms are a major research objective at a tier-one institution. There’s certainly not a lack of motivation from that fact.”

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