Strategic Plan for the Life and Environmental science Bylaw 55 Unit for 2013-2020

Principal Author: Marilyn Fogel, Michael Dawson and LES faculty members

Current FTE Faculty (2013): 11 not including Moran (starts 7/14) & Sexton (starts 1/14)

FTE Faculty (2015): 15

Projected 2020 FTE Faculty: 20

Current Graduate Students: 25 within ES and QSB graduate groups

Projected 2020 FTE Graduate Students: 60 (Both PhD and Masters)

Executive Summary: The Life and Environmental Science unit has high potential to promote the interdisciplinary, stated goals of UC Merced of research and teaching. For the 2020 plan, we propose to form the cornerstone of a new School of the Environment with our faculty that currently participate in and are leaders of the Environmental Systems and Quantitative Systems Biology graduate groups. Inherent in this plan is the co-location of our faculty with interested faculty from environmental engineering, management, and ORUs (e.g., UC Natural Reserve scientists and Environmental Analytical Laboratory (EAL)) in a new school and buildings located adjacent to an Experimental Environmental Research Center. We also consider an alternative, innovative strategy to create a School of the Anthropocene, which would be designed to engage colleagues in studies broadly relating to the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

Our challenge: Human activities are altering climate from local to global scales, causing extinction and redistributing species, and changing our own habitable environments with possibly cascading effects.  Realizing the humanitarian promise of the grand ideas in the environmental sciences, however, remains a challenge. For example, curing cancer is often associated with biomedical sciences, yet natural or anthropogenic chemicals in the environment cause many cancers.  Similarly, some of the greatest acute threats to human health are emerging infectious diseases of animal origin that may be transmitted to humans (i.e., zoonoses). Climate change affects zoonoses through increased range or abundance of animal reservoirs or insect vectors, and prolonged transmission cycles, resulting in increased incidence of diseases such as hantavirus, Lyme disease, and West Nile virus. Food security may be expected to change due to climate effects on agriculture, an issue of paramount interest to the Central Valley. Water resources will change, due to climate effects on precipitation and snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. Our goal, by building on our strong, established foundation in life and environmental sciences, targets the major issues of our time and of the coming decades and centuries.

Who are we? Our relatively small faculty group has these primary characteristics: we study the natural world and how it functions; our work is quantitative and uses state-of-the-art analytical instrumentation; and we are interdisciplinary, both as individual faculty and as a group, with respect to both University collaborators and outside scientists. The current focus of our faculty is on understanding fundamental physical, chemical, and biological processes in the earth system, their interactions, and how California and other ecosystems around the world have responded/are responding to historic and current changes in climate and the environment. We have basically two groups of scientists in our unit: a strong environmental genomics/genetics group (Beman, Blois, Dawson, Forman, Frank, Moran, Sexton) and an active biogeosciences group (Berhe, Fogel, Ghezzehei, Hart, O’Day, Traina). Faculty members of both groups interact on a daily basis, taking advantage of each other’s strengths, laboratories, and perspectives.

Where do we fit in? Our group is highly collaborative and interdisciplinary.  We collaborate within LES, with faculty members in other Bylaw 55 units within the School of Natural Science (SNS), and with faculty in other University units. For example, most of the LES faculty participate in and are leaders of the Quantitative Systems Biology (QSB) graduate group; many are leaders in the cross-school Environmental Systems (ES) graduate group.  Many faculty participate in both QSB and ES graduate groups. In addition to the graduate relationships with ES and QSB, most of our faculty are part of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI), a cross-campus institute designed to further UC Merced’s impact in California and beyond. Because we actively conduct field research, we also have strong ties to surrounding researchers and potential collaborators in academia, government, and the private sector (e.g., Yosemite National Park, local agricultural industry).  Although the size of the LES faculty is relatively small compared to other competitive departments in the UC system, we have leveraged our impact by aligning with larger, interdisciplinary groups on UC Merced’s campus.

Where do we want to go? Despite constraints on the growth of the physical campus between now and 2020, our strategic plan goes beyond maintaining our interdisciplinary, cross-campus mode by both strengthening it and by taking our group and UC Merced to the next level. This includes starting a School of the Environment (SOEnv). A school of this breadth would include faculty from LES, the environmental engineers (SOE), environmental policy, economics, resource management, and public/environmental health faculty, along with SNRI, the two natural reserves (Yosemite and Vernal Pools Grasslands), the EAL, and the proposed National Parks Institute, all of which would benefit from a new cluster of buildings that supports current research and catalyzes new areas. The ES graduate group would be administered through this new School. Most mature research universities have taken this approach: University of Washington recently combined disparate departments, schools, and labs into a ‘College of the Environment’, for example, while UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources is the oldest college in the UC system and has been sustained for nearly 150 years.  Both physical integration and administrative unification through this new School would create a hub for research and solutions to environmental problems in the Central Valley, including air quality, pollution, water and soil sustainability, emerging diseases and contaminants, and managing impacts of climate change.

A landmark, bold move for LES and appropriate for UC Merced could take this plan a step further, that is to establish a School of the Anthropocene that leverages the interdisciplinary goals of UC Merced and innovates within the UC System, nationally, and internationally to meet our three interlocking missions: to teach, do research, and provide public service[1]. For the 2020 plan, this vision includes cornerstones from undergraduate and graduate biological and Earth Sciences—both broadly conceived and egalitarian with disciplines that traditionally may not be implied by these descriptors—and addresses the human endeavor in the coming century. This idea is as much an invitation to, as it is a proposal from, colleagues to enhance existing and imagine new linkages at UC Merced to address major challenges to human prosperity governed reciprocally by the health of and interactions among diverse facets of our planet.  Inherent in this plan is the co-location of faculty, students, and partners across a network of facilities on campus and in surrounding areas, including natural resources, built environment, and human capital. 

What do we need for 2020? A new School of the Environment (Anthropocene) (SOEnv/A) would require its own physical resources, which could be built as the campus develops from 2014 to 2020. Ideally, faculty and students in the new SOEnv/A would be co-located within a new building or cluster of buildings, optimizing joint use of already-shared instruments.  This would allow us to carry out proposals already on the table and leverage extramural funding. For example, a proposal has been presented to campus leadership and planners to build an Integrated Environmental Research facility, which would include greenhouses. Such a facility is integral to carrying out the type of research required to support faculty in the plant and soil sciences, a majority of the current LES group and fields of study which are at the heart of any environmental studies program.  This facility, while expensive, need not be housed in a formal campus building, but could form the start of the proposed campus build out to the east of Lake Rd. LES faculty members would administer the operation of this facility, while attracting faculty from environmental engineering and other potential collaborators, such as regional Yosemite National Park scientists, who lack greenhouse access yet critically need experimental space to study threatened, or endangered, organisms. We also envision a shared environmental genomics facility that would provide efficient and scalable space for our research, as well as for visiting researchers from Yosemite and elsewhere.  Many of us use similar molecular and next-gen DNA sequencing approaches that are simply applied to different study systems, organisms, and genes.  We are unaware of dedicated facilities of this kind elsewhere in the UC system, but such a facility provides an opportunity to co-locate research infrastructure, laboratory work, and personnel to maximize efficiency and ideation.

What are our space needs? We require high-performance analytical laboratory space (i.e., one pass air, fume hoods, access to services, emergency backup power) for housing the stable isotope biogeochemistry laboratory, the soil physics and chemistry laboratories, and the EAL (40%). UC Merced has the opportunity to build on its ancient DNA capabilities, which require specifically designed laboratory space. Environmental genomics faculty requires a combination of wet and dry lab space including clean rooms for sensitive analyses (30%). Space for sample preparation of soils, plants, rocks, and other materials is needed to separate this activity from contaminating our analytical and genomics laboratories (10%). Last, LES faculty will include ecological and climate modelers, and faculty who mix experimental and computational studies, who need dry laboratory space for computing and engagement (20%). Shared office space and collaborative working space for graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and research staff is a critical need. An environmental research facility, including greenhouses, is required to complement these space needs.

How do we get there? In the phase prior to the completion of new campus research laboratories in 2020, the current LES group should be co-located sensibly in either SE1 or SE2. Given that almost 50% of our current faculty are housed in the off-campus Castle research labs, yet our primary scholarship within the ES graduate group is highly interdisciplinary, it makes good sense to immediately co-locate the LES faculty in SE2 with the environmental engineering faculty, rather than infill the spaces vacated by SOE faculty in biological engineering. Co-location would accomplish two goals: maintenance of the coherence of LES faculty and assurance of LES’s continued role at UC Merced as one of the most interdisciplinary units on campus. As the 2020 plan unrolls, LES faculty would be in a leadership position to plan the new School and form the cornerstone of the academic program (see also the ES Graduate Plan for further ideas.)

What are we doing now? This current academic year, we have two faculty searches taking place, which we’ve coordinated with the Environmental Engineering faculty search as a cluster hire in Global Change Science. It is a goal of the ES graduate group and the LES unit to increase our intellectual footprint in this field in the 2020 timeframe. Much of our current research incorporates Global Change and Sustainability Science and has left us well-positioned in this developing field—for example, LES faculty have already received several large grants from the National Science Foundation’s Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability (SEES) portfolio. To continue to carry out this vision, we will need to continue to add faculty who have the ability, interest, and time to work across the broad field of environmental science. Our newest hires will be scientists with primarily computational space requirements, because wet lab space is limited.  As cutting edge field and lab expertise is a cornerstone of environmental and global change science and education, this strategy can only work for a few years, making it difficult to recruit the best candidates. Therefore we must be aggressive in building high-end experimental laboratory space to attract the most desirable candidates to grow our program.

What is our “solution” to moving forward? To address this shortage of high performance laboratory space in the next 2-3 years, the LES faculty along with their colleagues in the ES graduate group could “do more with less” if we were given the opportunity to co-locate our research laboratories, economize and strategize on space, while continuing to attract and hire new laboratory-based faculty.

What will our student body look like in 2020? The LES bylaw unit administers two majors at UC Merced, both of which currently enroll about 40-45 students in each: 1) Earth Systems Science (ESS) and 2) the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) emphasis track within Biological Sciences. The LES faculty also shares the responsibility for providing requisite classes for all BIO majors (approx. 1300 students). The LES faculty also deliver a large fraction of courses that fulfill the general education science requirement for SSHA students. We also have an Earth Systems and Sustainability minor with about 20-25 current students. In the next 2 academic years, the LES faculty is committed to increasing enrollment in our two majors to at least 1% of UC Merced undergraduates: about 60-80 students each in ESS and EEB. We have developed a roadmap for attracting more students, revamping requirements for the major, and promoting our broad program. In order to carry out this plan, we will be recruiting students who are currently Undeclared SNS students and undeclared Biology students. By expanding our undergraduate programs from these pools, we will help relieve the some of the burden on the MCB bylaw unit that administers most of the 1300 Biology majors. The LES faculty believe that increasing our majors, and decreasing theirs, will result in a more competitive, higher quality student body.

How do we stack up with other UC campuses? Each UC campus has major players in the field of environmental sciences; the smaller, newer campuses, like Santa Cruz and Riverside, have full-blown science departments (and buildings) for disciplines like chemistry, physics, math, and biology. At the current rate of campus development (including the 2020 plan), we can only compete with them if we propose something different such as the interdisciplinary School of the Environment/Anthropocene. Our vision is to support our current faculty, provide them with the best resources and laboratories that UC Merced can; co-locate us with faculty from other departments, schools, and institutes already on campus; allow us to hire and grow, in our small unit as well as within the larger interdisciplinary grad groups, and to build momentum that will allow this group to coalesce into a new School as the 2020 plan rolls out.

UC Merced will likely never compete with big UC campuses (e.g. Berkeley has over 45 ecologists on their faculty) in terms of breadth and depth, but it could complement them and support, attract, and retain a faculty highly interdisciplinary in nature and committed to the future.  Our faculty and grad students are substantially contributing to understanding the problems and proposing solutions to the environmental issues facing the state of California. We propose to do more with less and truly distinguish UC Merced by being innovative, timely, and speaking broadly to developers, the general public, politicians, and scholars with an new, interdisciplinary School, recognizing the inseparable link between human impacts on the world and the world’s provisions for humans.