June 2020 | Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment | Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation

Researchers from the University of Illinois have been awarded $1.2 million as part of a larger study to help the U.S. Corn Belt maximize crop production.

The Illinois faculty team includes, from left, Ximing Cai, Madhu Khanna, Stephen P. Long, and Reid Christianson.

As part of a $10M, five-year study led by the University of Maryland that will identify innovative ways of increasing land and water use efficiency, U of I scientists will study:

Climate variability that includes the rapid switch between floods and droughts, which usually leads to waterlogging in the crop planting stage and water stress in the crop growth stage, especially during the flowering stage of corn;
Biofuel development and landscape change, including adopting more efficient bioenergy crops such as sorghum and perennial grasses like Miscanthus and switchgrass — as well as socio-economic impacts and environmental impacts (water quantity and quality); and
Nutrient loss, a longstanding issue in the Midwest, and whether it can be positively or negatively affected by climate variability and agriculture landscape change.

The Illinois team includes iSEE Associate Director Ximing Cai, the Lovell Endowed Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering; iSEE Associate Director Madhu Khanna, the ACES Distinguished Professor of Agricultural & Consumer Economics; Stephen P. Long, the Ikenberry Endowed University Chair of Crop Sciences and Plant Biology; and Reid Christianson, Research Assistant Professor of Crop Sciences.

The goal of the overall project — funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and also including Colorado State, the University of Minnesota, the University of Nebraska, and FamilyFarms Group — will be to develop a Dashboard for Agricultural Water use and Nutrient management (DAWN). The project lead is Xin-Zhong Liang, Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science at the University of Maryland. Read Maryland’s news release >>>

Vector biologists, geneticists, policy experts, and bioethicists are concerned that current government oversight and scientific evaluation of genetically modified mosquitoes do not ensure their responsible deployment.

Six people at the 2019 Critical Conversation on genetically modified mosquitoes talk around a table. — iSEE Critical Conversation attendees participated in roundtable discussions about genetically modified mosquitoes throughout the one-day workshop in May 2019.

On Wednesday, June 3, 2020, organizers and participants in the 2019 iSEE Critical Conversation published a piece in The Conversation titled “Genetically Modified Mosquitoes could be Released in Florida and Texas Beginning this Summer — Silver Bullet or Jumping the Gun?”

Based on discussions at the iSEE event — and further research and discussions since — the authors noted that “Genetic engineering offers an unprecedented opportunity for humans to reshape the fundamental structure of the biological world. Yet, as new advances in genetic decoding and gene editing emerge with speed and enthusiasm, the ecological systems they could alter remain enormously complex and understudied.”

The paper was written for The Conversation by Brian Allan, Associate Professor of Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Chris Stone, Medical Entomologist and Director of the Medical Entomology Lab at the Illinois Natural History Survey (INHS); Holly Tuten, Vector Ecologist at INHS; Jennifer Kuzma, Goodnight-NCGSK Foundation Distinguished Professor of Public and International Affairs and Co-Founder of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University; and Natalie Kofler, Levenick iSEE Resident Scholar in Sustainability Leadership at the University of Illinois and Founder of Editing Nature.

In May 2019, the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign convened 35 participants from academic, government and nonprofit organizations from around the world with expertise in mosquito biology, community engagement, and risk assessment. A primary takeaway from that Critical Conversation, the authors wrote, was “an urgent need to make regulatory procedures more transparent, comprehensive and protected from biases and conflicts of interest.” iSEE Critical Conversations are sponsored by the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund.

In the article, the authors recommended several steps — including an official registry for GM organisms as well as independent, funded research into the risks of releasing them.

“The objective to reduce or even eliminate mosquito-borne disease is laudable. GM mosquitoes could prove to be an important tool in alleviating global health burdens,” the authors concluded. “However, to ensure their success, we believe that regulatory frameworks for open, comprehensive and participatory decision-making are urgently needed.”

Read the full article in The Conversation >>>

Month: June 2020

iSEE Team Part of USDA Crop Production Study of Water, Land, Nutrient Use

Experts Write Op-Ed on GM Mosquitoes