Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant’s Kristin TePas recently began her new position at the U.S. EPA Great Lakes National Program Office (GLNPO) in Chicago. As of Feb. 1, she is IISG’s Great Lakes community decision-making specialist. In this position, Kristin will assist coastal communities and other clients in making informed decisions, strengthening policies, or implementing programs that improve the health of the Great Lakes ecosystem. She will be working with GLNPO scientists to use their monitoring and research data to make products and publications for community leaders.

Kristin previously worked as the program’s aquatic invasives extension associate for almost 10 years, conducting outreach focused on preventing the introduction and spread of invasive species.

“I’m very excited about this new opportunity,” Kristin said. “I’m looking forward to working with the Great Lakes communities and broadening my focus beyond aquatic invasive species.”

One project she is currently working on is acting as a liaison between EPA and Purdue University, which is developing indicators for land use change and agricultural lands. The project is being done in the hopes that EPA will adopt the indicators.

Kristin holds an M.E.M. in coastal environmental management from Duke University and a B.A. in psychology from the University of Notre Dame.

From Science Daily:

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists have come up with a way to detect pathogenic Escherichia coli and Salmonella bacteria in waterways at lower levels than any previous method. Similar methods have been developed to detect pathogenic E. coli in meat products, but the approach by the scientists with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) represents a first for waterways. Read more.

From NBC Chicago:

From the day the first French explorers arrived in what would become Chicago, human beings have tried to mold Lake Michigan into a more user-friendly body of water.

Grant and Millennium Parks sit in what used to be open water, filled in a hundred years ago by city fathers anxious to give Chicago a magnificent front yard. And up and down the lakefront, repeated modifications have been made in an effort to corral the lake’s fury. Read more and watch the video.

Mike Allen’s interest in biology and nature flourished at a young age as a Boy Scout spending his time camping and exploring the woods of New York state. However, at the time he probably couldn’t have envisioned that his youthful fascination with the environment would lead him to play a role in the United States government’s response to one of the worst environmental crises in decades – the Gulf of Mexico oil spill of 2010.

Allen was in the third month of his Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant fellowship with the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) when there was an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April 20, 2010 that killed 11 workers and resulted in oil being pumped in the Gulf for almost three months.

“We won’t know the full effects and the real answers for years,” said Allen, who received his Ph.D. in ecology, evolution, and conservation biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009. “It is very disheartening because the Gulf is already a stressed ecosystem, and (the spill) is one more major kick in the gut. It is going to be interesting to see what happens over the next five to 10 years.”

The National Sea Grant College Program established the Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship in 1979. Graduate students accepted into the program travel to the Washington, D.C. area to work on marine policy in legislative and executive offices.

Soon Allen’s office, the Office of Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes, located in Silver Spring, Md., was tasked to put together a group that would coordinate major components of the science and research response to the oil spill disaster.

“NOAA is the lead science agency for oil spills, so all aspects of the enterprise came into play,” Allen said, adding that they worked on researching seafood safety, dispersants, oil properties in the water, and more.

Allen worked with the federal agency’s leadership to track activities in the Gulf; develop and submit science proposals with the laboratories; and secure reimbursement and new funding for completed, ongoing and proposed activities.

While Allen was never sent to the actual site of the spill, he said the experience gave him a new perspective on how the government responds to a crisis of this magnitude.

“We were just one agency among many that had a mandate from Congress to respond to a spill like this,” he said. “Setting up the coordination mechanism across government agencies to make this happen was just incredible to see.”

During his fellowship, Allen also worked as the primary liaison between NOAA’s administrative headquarters and the three “wet labs” – the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, and the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.

Allen’s yearlong fellowship ran through the end of January 2011, when the program allowed him to transition to a contract position with 2020 Company, LLC, which has placed him in NOAA as a policy analyst.

“(The fellowship) has been an absolutely fabulous experience for me,” he said. “Being here in D.C. and seeing how the agency works and interacts with other agency offices has been very eye-opening for how the government functions and how people get things done.”

He also said the fellowship gave him the opportunity to travel to various offices and laboratories as well as develop valuable contacts.

“I encourage other people in Illinois and Indiana to consider applying for this fellowship because it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience policy in Washington, D.C.,” Allen said. “It will open your eyes to the way government works.”

Applications for the 2012 Knauss fellowships are due by Feb. 18. For more information, go to our Fellowship page.

IISG’s new environmental social scientist is Caitie McCoy. Caitie will focus on communities interested or involved with the Great Lakes Legacy Act, which provides resources to clean up U.S. EPA Areas of Concern. She will be working on outreach related to contaminant remediation and restoration (including economic and societal benefits), user needs assessments, communications plans, and case studies.

According to Caitie, she will work closely with local residents so that remediation projects are in line with community interests. She will bring together scientists, landowners, and other participants, including underserved audiences in the community, to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

She is located in the U.S. EPA Great Lakes National Program Office in Chicago.

Caitie recently finished her M.S. in the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources at Colorado State University. Her graduate work combined communication, collaborative conservation, and education to build the adaptive capacity and resilience of local communities. She has participated in a number of research projects focused on the connection of people and nature. She has some teaching experience and has worked for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

From the Environmental News Network:

Predicting future climates on planet Earth is an extremely hard task due to the myriad of factors involved. To make the necessary calculations requires computers with capacities far beyond the average home computer. However, climate models are become ever more reliable thanks not only to greater computing power, but also to more extensive observation efforts of the current climate, and an improved understanding of the climate system. Read more.

From the Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel:

The cutting-edge “environmental” DNA sampling method that sparked a multistate lawsuit to force lock closures on the Chicago canal system has for the past year been dismissed by lock closure opponents as a junk tool. A big reason: The science behind it had never been peer-reviewed and published in a scientific journal.

That argument no longer holds water.

On Wednesday, the pioneers behind isolating DNA from water samples to confirm the presence of Asian carp in the Chicago canal system published their article in the peer-reviewed journal Conservation Letters. It asserts the survey tool is not only valid, but also that the risk of an Asian carp invasion of Lake Michigan is imminent. Read more.

From the Environmental News Network:

Global dimming is a less well-known but real phenomenon resulting from atmospheric pollution. The burning of fossil fuels by industry and internal combustion engines, in addition to releasing the carbon dioxide that collects and traps the sun’s heat within our atmosphere, causes the emission of so-called particulate pollution—composed primarily of sulphur dioxide, soot and ash. When these particulates enter the atmosphere they absorb solar energy and reflect sunlight otherwise bound for the Earth’s surface back into space. Read more.

From the New York Times:

Scientists long believed that the collapse of the gigantic ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica would take thousands of years, with sea level possibly rising as little as seven inches in this century, about the same amount as in the 20th century.

But researchers have recently been startled to see big changes unfold in both Greenland and Antarctica.

As a result of recent calculations that take the changes into account, many scientists now say that sea level is likely to rise perhaps three feet by 2100 — an increase that, should it come to pass, would pose a threat to coastal regions the world over. Read more.