21 Oct
Now that the government furlough is in our rear view mirror, you might think about checking out “One Cubic Foot”, an exhibition in Washington D.C. that highlights the biodiversity within just one cubic foot of space in Central Park, NYC.
In a recent article , Jason Aloisio, St.Rose’s Founder, commented on the project. To read it, click on the image below.
11 Aug
Fordham University Ecologists attended the 97th Annual Ecological Society of America Conference in Portland, OR in full force this year. Ten delegates, including 8 graduate students, Dr. Jim Lewis (Biology Chair) and Dr. Stephen Freedman (Provost) were in attendance, and together contributed a total of three talks, and five posters (see below) to what proved to be the most highly attended meeting in years, with over 4200 people.
Jason Aloisio: Growing media affects edible plant production and leachate on a simulated rooftop farm
Jim Lewis: Rising CO2 shifts the balance between carbon and nutrient limitation of growth
Michael Sekor: Selection and adaptation to novel environmental conditions in introduced genotypes of the annual plant Brassica rapa
Beth Ansaldi: Gene flow and pollen limitation on experimental green roofs
Andrea Caruso: Physiological and morphological responses of the invasive grass, Microstegium vimineum, to varying resource availabilities
Alison Cucco:Microbial extracellular enzyme function and nutrient cycling along the New York City urban-to-rural gradient
Seth Ganzhorn: Genetic diversity of Manilkara maxima: An ecologically and economically important tree species from a biodiversity hotspot
Graduate students Kaitlyn Parkins and Steph Tougas were also in attendance working as student volunteers.
Mt. Hood – A volcano located in the Oregon Cascades, taken while hiking Tom, Dick and Harry.
5 Aug
Fordham PhD student Dustin Partridge talks about his research focusing on birds and their usage of green roofs.
20 Jun
In a 2012 paper, Butler released a paper titled ” Native plant enthusiasm reaches new heights: Perceptions, evidence and the future of green roofs”, which revealed that landscape architects and architects most frequently published pro-native plant papers. She also revealed that the rational for using native plants was frequently omitted from these published papers and that many of the papers comparing Sedums to native plants showed native plants to perform very poorly; however, one researcher, Jeremy Lunholm was the exception to the rule.
Lundholm uses the habitat template approach, whereby plants selected for green roofs are from ecosystems that are similar to the green roof environment such as coastal barrens where soils are nutrient poor and subject to frequent drought. Under the direction of Matt Palmer (Columbia University) and in partnership with NYC Parks and Recreation the habitat template approach was used to select two local plant communities, Rocky Summit Grassland (located on the balds of local mountains) and Hempstead Plains (located on long island), which both have nutrient poor soils and frequent drought. A city wide project is now underway assessing which plants from these communities are most well suited to the green roof environment. Below, you can see they are performing well!
Butler, C., E. Butler and C.M. Orians. 2012. Native plant enthusiasm reaches new heights: Perceptions, evidence and the future of green roofs. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening 11: 1-10.
Lundholm, J.T. 2006. Green roofs and facades: a habitat template approach. Urban Habitats 4:87-101
22 May
Urban Growth and the Need for Sustainability
As the world’s population grows, so the need for sustainable approaches to urban living does too. While for much of the twentieth century, people tended to move outwards to the suburbs, today they are increasingly being pushed towards the city. When fuel was cheap and land plentiful, suburban living seemed attractive. Now, it is the city centres that are growing. Of the 39 most populous counties in the US (those with over 1 million people), all but two grew between 2010 and 2011 (those that didn’t were Wayne in Michigan (Detroit), and Cuyahoga in Ohio (Cleveland)). At the same time, population growth in suburban counties on the edge of the big cities slowed or stopped. Worldwide, over 50% of people now live in urban areas. With an ever-growing population, we have little choice: cities are growing and will continue to do so. We need to learn to live more densely, but also to live smarter.
The Rural-Urban Balance
As cities get bigger, so the pressure on the rural land that is left increases. Urban farms can help cities to feed themselves, rather than relying on food imported from the countryside. Fuel scarcity and rising prices also makes importing food into cities less sustainable. It makes much more sense for cities to be able to meet — at least partly — their own needs. While urban agriculture might seem like a very twenty-first century problem, it is nothing new. Just as the concept of the suburb was a creation of its time and a certain set of circumstances, so is the concept of separation between city and agriculture.
Urban Agriculture in History
Cities throughout history have engaged in urban agriculture and been able, at least to an extent, to sustain themselves. Machu Picchu is one of the most well-known examples, and one of the best. Perched on a mountain ridge, surrounded by jungle, the city has never been easy to access. It had no choice but to grow and raise its own food. It was self-reliant, with complex systems in place for food production and irrigation. The terraces on which the city grew its food can still be seen today, cut out of the steep mountainside.
In Europe and North America, it was the norm for city-dwellers to keep their own animals until the industrial revolution. Pigs roamed free through streets of seventeenth-century Paris and London, for example. In nineteenth-century Paris, salad vegetables were grown in the waste horse manure that would otherwise pollute the streets. The city produced so much salad in its huge manure-based market gardens that each Parisian could have eaten 50 kg a year. In Britain, there is a long tradition of city-dwellers growing their own food in urban allotments.
Urban agriculture can take many forms although it is rarely covered in textbooks. It is often highly imaginative, re-using waste and allowing people to support themselves. There is no reason this cannot be replicated today, and it is being, in many places. It is easy to do, doesn’t affect landlords insurance and can help people to help themselves. With more of us moving back into the city, we need to make the city work for us.
St. Rose’s Garden is a fruit and vegetable garden on Fordham Universities Rose Hill Campus
30 Apr
Last week, over 120 work hours were donated by about 30 Fordham University Students to clean a small plot of unused land on Rose Hill Campus (see right) and to establish St.Ross’s Garden. Eight raised beds were constructed and then filled with a total of 20 yards of high quality organic topsoil. These beds will be used to grow a variety of fruits and vegetables including things like kale, collards, cabbage, tomatoes, peppers, and broccoli. St. Rose’s Garden will serve as a outdoor laboratory, classroom, and social space. Students that volunteer their time to help with garden up-keep will get a share of the organically grown crops. We also have plants to donate food to local charities and sell some to students to keep the garden a sustainable enterprise.
St. Rose’s Garden was a collaborative effort between many parties in the Fordham Community. Jason Aloisio, PhD student Biological Sciences, and Elizabeth Anderson, B.S. Honors student Environmental Policy, led the development of St.Roses’s Garden, but it could not have been possible without the support of: Farm to Fordham, Sodexo, Dean Latham, Dean Rapaccioli (see below), Dean Russell, John VanBuren (Environmental Policy), John Carroll, Vinny Burke, Leon Kokoszka, Marc Valera and of course all the volunteers!
No Matter what size the hands are!
If you want to get involved in the garden to help promote the garden, coordinate events, grow vegetables, make art work for the garden or simply want to know when various events are happening. e-mail us: sustainablefordham@gmail.com
25 Feb
Recently, FUSE research assistant Julia Serafin, won 3rd place in the Environmental Science Category at the Westchester Rockland Junior Science and Humanities Symposium. Over 150 competitors were in attendance from schools like Ossining, Scarsdale, Yorktown, New Rochelle, Horace Greely, Somers, John Jay, and Eastchester.
Julia is in her third year of a four year science immersion program at Pelham Memorial High School, led by Steven Beltecas. As part of this program students are required to conduct original research. Julia ended up working on the FUSE rooftop throughout summer 2011, assisting with data collection and laboratory analysis, check out a THIS previous blog post on storm water to see her working in the lab. She presented her poster outlining some of our findings from our agricultural rooftop experiments on storm water retention, nutrient retention, and productivity potential, and fielded questions from judges .
Along with Julia, seven other students from Pelham won in poster sessions and powerpoints. Congrats to you all!!
29 Jan
The California Academy of Sciences, located in Golden Gate Park in San Fransisco, is home to many fantastic exhibits, including an albino alligator, an incredible aquarium, an amazing evolution of life planetarium show, and interactive exhibits like this one (below) where you can see the size of the carbon footprint for different food items.
And all of these amazing exhibits are housed under a massive 1-hectare Green Roof!
The Green roof is a little different that your typical extensive green roof becasue it is not dominated by plants from the Sedum genus, drought tolerant succulent plants, and because there are 7 “hills”, which help house the planetarium, aquarium and rain forest aviary.
Scientists, at the Academy, were interested in using Native plants for this green roof to reproduce the vegetation that was displaced by the footprint of the building. To do this, they used the scientific method to test 30 different plant species. For two years, the scientists monitored the 30 different native plants in ground level green roof mock-ups. Treatments included mimicking the slopes of the proposed hills seen behind me (above). From the 30 species tested 9 species were found to perform well by staying green for the majority of the year. You can see them below:
The green roof is accessible to all Cal Academy patrons to view from an observational deck. While I was there I asked a few people what they thought about the green roof.”I like the hills” said one patron, “It looks a bit like a fallow field” said another.
When I asked a few people if they would want a green roof on their home or apartment the overwhelming response was, yes, with one patron exclaiming “Hell Yeah, saving energy would be awesome, and it would be even cooler if I could plant plants that attracted butterflies and birds”. As it turns out, Fordham University and the Wildlife Conservation Society are teaming up to look at exactly that.
St. Rose's Garden + CSA 