Professor Gene E. Likens, famous for his discovery of the impact of acid rain in North America, is to give a public lecture at the University of New England about the water-related challenges facing the world.

“Solving the world’s water needs represents one of human society’s most urgent problems, given the critical role of water in the world’s economies, politics and general biotic wellbeing,” he says.

Professor Likens (pictured here) is on a two-week visit to UNE, where his host is Professor Martin Thoms, an internationally recognised expert on riverine ecosystems. The public lecture, titled “Water: The challenging interface between scientific understanding and policy”, will be in UNE’s Arts Theatre (Arts Lecture Theatre 1) at 6 pm on Thursday 25 August.

Professor Likens played a vital role in identifying the relationship between sulphur dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and acid rain. In recognition of his contribution to science, he received the US National Medal of Science in 2002 and, in 2003, the Blue Planet Prize (with F.H.Bormann) awarded by the Asahi Glass Foundation. He has won several other major awards, including the Australia Prize for Science and Technology (now the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science) in 1994. He was responsible for establishing two major research centres – the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study and the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies – in the United States.

“Major issues of human-accelerated environmental change currently affecting our planet include global climate change, stratospheric ozone reduction, land-use change, loss of biodiversity, invasion of exotic species, pollution of the biosphere, and infectious disease,” Professor Likens said.

He pointed out that all these factors were having an impact on the world’s inland waters. “There is a clear and urgent need to resolve the conflicts of use and abuse of aquatic ecosystems within the context of our planet’s finite freshwater resource,” he said. “Serious water shortages and water-quality problems have occurred in many areas around the world. And there are new water problems on the horizon – including contamination by antibiotics, steroids, hormones, other pharmaceuticals, and nanoparticles.”

In addition to being elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, Professor Likens has been elected to membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is also an Honorary Member of the British Ecological Society.

Everyone is welcome to attend the free lecture on Thursday 25 August by this eminent scientist, educator, and science adviser.

UNE has been awarded funding from the NSW Government’s Environmental Trust for two exciting research projects that will help to better understand, prevent and measure environmental impacts.

A grant of $19,500 has been awarded to Professor Martin Thoms, of Geography and Planning in the School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences, to investigate ecological thresholds and river health in NSW.  This research will take the novel approach of examining fish specimens collected in the past. By measuring their carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios, he hopes to establish a series of food webs that will enable comparison of food webs that existed in the past to those in rivers today.

‘Once established, we can investigate the influence of a range of environmental disturbances, like drought, on our river systems,’ Professor Thoms said.  His approach is based on cutting edge, collaborative research which is currently examining rivers in the United States and which will create a ‘timeline’ of river health.

A grant of $19,160 has also been awarded to research the role National Parks currently play in carbon storage and also where carbon storage in National Parks can be enhanced to contribute to mitigation. The project will be undertaken in collaboration with the Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water (DECCW) by Associate Professor Brian Wilson and Dr Lalit Kumar of the School of Environmental and Rural Sciences.

Using existing spatial data, this project aims to estimate current carbon stocks (soil and vegetation), to delineate areas where land is suitable for management to enhance carbon storage, and to provide a “first approximation” of carbon storage potential across NSW National Parks. This will also provide a conceptual and practical framework for a more extensive and refined carbon inventory.

Associate Professor Wilson said that, to date, much of the attention relating to carbon sequestration has been focused on the agricultural and forestry sectors but National Parks are an extensive, publicly owned asset that has the potential to sequester large quantities of carbon in soils and vegetation. They might therefore offer a number of effective strategies for carbon storage, consistent with biodiversity conservation, that have been somewhat overlooked to date and for which information is largely lacking.

In announcing the approval of the seeding grants, the NSW Minister for the Environment, Robyn Parker, said they were ‘for innovative research to test creative ideas that might lead to significant breakthroughs in managing our natural environment’ and could be used to test a theory or concept that may be used for a larger research project in the future. She added that the research would also ‘tell us where to concentrate rehabilitation efforts to ensure environmental health.’