NCED sponsored a booth at the AGU Fall Meeting, which took place December 5-9 in San Francisco. This year we had 58 posters,41 presentations, and NCED-affiliated individuals were responsible for convening 19 sessions, an overall increase from last year! Barbara Burkholder and Stephanie Day ran the NCED exhibit booth at AGU, drawing in over 1,000 visitors with an interactive video display, 3D posters, and table top delta box experiment. Paul Cutler, the NSF Geomorphology and Land Use program director, volunteered to sit at the booth Wednesday afternoon, talking with researchers on NSF grants and initiatives. Several visitors were interested in learning more about NCED's research as a NSF Science and Technology Center as well as its education initiatives, with many teachers requesting construction instructions for the delta box.

Read about NCED at AGU here. 

2012 Upper Midwest Stream Restoration Symposium Updates!

The Partnership for River Restoration and Science in the Upper Midwest (PRRSUM) is an NCED and St. Anthony Falls Laboratory joint-initiative that looks to bring together stream restoration practitioners from around the region to exchange knowledge and facilitate collaboration. Researchers, consultants, professors, managers, and regulators meet together at an annual symposium that features single-track sessions with presentations revolving around topics such as stream restoration design guidance, restoration and aquatic management, urban stream restoration, and restoration integrated design and evaluation.

Coordinated by NCED staff Barbara Burkholder and OSL manager Jess Kozarek, the 3rd annual 2012 Upper Midwest Stream Restoration Symposium (UMSRS) will be held at the Holiday Inn Metrodome in Minneapolis, Minnesota from March 4-7, 2012. Invited speakers include University of Minnesota environmental economist Stephen Polasky, Minnesota DNR ecologist Mike Davis, Michigan Trout Unlimited President Bryan Burroughs, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency supervisor Nelson French, and American Rivers conservationist Sara Strassman. Our Wednesday half day forum subject focuses on looking at the development of standards and certifications in stream restoration, with current panel members including Marty Melchoir from Inter-Fluve, Inc. and NCED's own Chris Paola.

This is also the first year that the symposium is hosting short courses prior to the conference, offering half and full day courses. Peter Wilcock and Dan Baker from Johns Hopkins University will teach a half day course on StreamProject, a restoration design guidance; Bob Gubernick from the Forest Service will lead a half day aquatic organism passage workshop, and Jennifer Tate from the USACE will lead a full day introductory course on Adaptive Hydraulic Modeling (AdH). The full technical program is available on  www.prrsum.org with links to register for the conference. We hope some of you may attend!

NCED co-organized a symposium titled "Sustainable Landscapes: Advancing the Theoretical, Observational and Modeling Foundations," held at the Technical University of Crete in Chania, Greece on January 9-12, 2012. Symposium participants included several NCED PIs as well as experts from international teams such as the Technical University of Crete, University of Exeter, University of Manchester, and the University of Sheffield. Presentations discussed new NCED research advances around NCED's watershed, river, and delta research objectives; introduced research and programs from the international teams; and overall helped catalyze collaboration among investigators, institutions, shared experimental facilities, and field sites.

Led by Professor Nikolaos Nikolaidis from the Technical University of Crete, symposium participants also spent a day in the field learning about the Koiliaris River Basin in Crete, one of the EU Critical Zone Observatories (CZO). The basin has a history of soil degradation brought about by unsustainable agricultural practices, including deforestation of the land for livestock and cropping. Under current climate change estimates, the Koiliaris River Basin is under the imminent threat of desertification over the next century. Through a trip to their hydrochemical gauging station on the Koiliaris River and other site visits, Nikolaidis and his research group demonstrated their commitment to understanding, promoting, and implementing sustainable land management measures that will reduce soil erosion and increase current crop yields.

Overall, the symposium capitalized on the complementary strengths of existing US and EU facilities and multidisciplinary teams while building the foundations for new extended and long-term international collaborations. A website containing presentations from all participants will soon be available on the NCED website.

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