Please identify a research group “home." You can choose a proposal submitted by a SWAC group or submit you own idea (250-350 words). Below are descriptions of SWAC research groups interested in hosting a Community Research Fellow.
Nicolas Jelinski Group: Our group is interested in soil properties and soil management as it relates to urban agriculture and human health in urban areas. We are generally interested in forming a collaborative relationship with a non-academic partner to explore questions of community interest around soil management or contamination in Minneapolis-St Paul. Our current projects related to urban soils involve:
(1) investigating the spatial distribution of soil contaminants across residential properties,
(2) examining metrics of soil health across various urban land uses, and
(3) measuring the impact of various urban agriculture management strategies on soil health.
We hope to build or enhance strong, lasting interpersonal relationships with a potential Fellow that are founded on mutual trust. Over a period of 12 months we would interact with the Fellow both on and off campus in a variety of settings - the goal of which is to co-develop research ideas or questions of high interest to the Fellow. We are open to interdisciplinary work.
Lindsay Pease Group: Water is one of Minnesota’s most prized natural resources but protecting it is a challenge. Often this is because local water issues begin hundreds of miles from where people experience them. Our group is generally interested in forming a collaborative relationship with the Fellow to explore water quality and quantity issues of interest to local communities. The Pease lab’s current projects involve working
with farms on strategies to reduce potential downstream water quality impairments such as harmful algal blooms. Through this program, we hope to work with the Fellow to co-develop research ideas or questions of
high interest to community partners and to act as a liaison between upstream and downstream watershed partners. The Pease lab is based in Northwest Minnesota, but we are open to building community partnerships anywhere throughout Greater Minnesota and the Twin Cities. We are also open to interdisciplinary work.
Kyungsoo Yoo Group: We are particularly interested in working with artists or storytellers who like to internalize the science of soils and land-people interactions into artistic forms or in stories for the general public. We look forward to building a collaborative relationship that will result in a formulation of workable ideas within the 12-month time frame. Our research is highly interdisciplinary, and our mission as researchers is to better understand the processes shaping soils as we find them in the field. We have three major research themes.
(1) Global W"o"rming: Although not commonly known, much of high latitude ecosystems have evolved without native earthworms since the last glacier. Such status quo has changed dramatically across the world recently. Humans are vectors of earthworms. We seek to better understand the impacts of those exotic earthworms on the ecosystem.
(2) Bottom-up understanding of land-people interactions in world cultures: The diversity of human-managed landscapes is fascinating. Such diversity owes its complexity not only to environmental conditions but also to cultural, socio-economical, and historical circumstances. We are studying how these people-land dynamics have shaped the landscapes, soils, and ecosystem processes.
(3) Landscape evolution and soil biogeochemistry: The shapes of land are in constant change. For example, on coastal hillslopes in California, pocket gophers, while tunneling soils for foraging and sheltering, generate sediment transport, thus soil erosion. After all, soils move (or are moved), and that matters for the chemistry of soils. We study the coupled nature of landscape evolution and soil biogeochemistry.
Katsutoshi Mizuta (Yuxin Miao Group): Farmers are always under pressure to produce more yield with fewer inputs.
Dr. Katsutoshi Mizuta, currently working as a postdoc with Dr. Yuxin
Miao, plans to establish an on-farm precision agriculture trial network across Minnesota to create agriculture practices that are financially, environmentally, and sustainably beneficial to farmers and other stakeholders.
Dr. Mizuta is interested in working with a Community Research Fellow to
connect with farmers, crop consultants, researchers, extension
specialists, students, industry representatives, and other related
agricultural professionals. The Miao group team will collaborate with the Fellow organize an annual meeting where on-farm trial results, challenges, experiences, and new technologies will be shared. The Fellow will be supported to learn about how site-specific management recommendations are made based on on-farm data collection and analysis for the community members and practitioners. The Miao group would also like to organize training workshops together with the Fellow to
help those who want to adopt the latest precision agricultural
technologies. A platform for informal communication to share related
information (e.g., questions, ideas, results) could be jointly
developed. The Miao group is open to developing and performing other research ideas and interdisciplinary collaborations with a Fellow.
