Posted on November 14, 2016
By David Blanchette, SJR
The University of Illinois Springfield is one of eight institutions to receive an Innovation Fund grant from the Coca-Cola Foundation, and the school plans to use the $25,000 to help students study and compare river ecosystems in Brazil and Illinois.
The grant will help fund a joint project between UIS and the UniversidadeEstadual de Maringa (UEM) in Brazil.
Students and faculty from the two universities will study two of the world’s great rivers, the Paraná and the Illinois. According to UIS, nine students and six faculty will be involved in the summer of 2017, with plans to increase that number in the future. Faculty and staff from UIS and UEM have been collaborating for 10 years on similar projects.
UIS associate professor of chemistry Keenan Dungey, professor of biology Michael Lemke and international programs director Jonathan GoldbergBelle submitted the grant-funded proposal along with their Brazilian colleagues.
“The focus is water and the environment, looking at two great rivers in the world, the Illinois, part of the Mississippi River system, and the Parana, part of the Amazon River system,” Dungey said. “Students are going to learn how to measure the ecology of the rivers, water chemistry and microbes, plankton, and compare the state of the Illinois River to the Parana.”
“The Illinois River has been impacted by human agriculture and industrialization for more than 100 years, whereas the region of the Parana has had a lot less impact and three national parks help to preserve the river,” Dungey said. “The students are going to write papers based on their results, and the papers are going to be directed toward public policy and land management.”
Dungey and a group of students went to Gambia this past summer to look at river water quality issues there and shared their research with the Gambian government to help them monitor the situation and develop public policy, Dungey said.
Those who monitor and preserve the Mississippi River basin’s ecosystems support what UIS and UEM are doing with these grant-funded programs.
“Studying and conserving the ecosystems on the Mississippi, Illinois and Missouri rivers are important initiatives for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers here in the St. Louis district,” said the Army Corps’ Tommy Smith, who is based at the Great Rivers Museum in Alton. “One major reason for preserving river ecosystem stability is that here in the confluence region, we have the major North American migratory flyway for many types of waterfowl including white pelicans, trumpeter swans, a wide variety of ducks and bald eagles.”
“We seek to manage and preserve the three rivers’ finite freshwater resources while balancing the needs of birds, wildlife, fish and people for now and in the future,” he added.
The $25,000 grant is part of the Coca-Cola Foundation-sponsored competition “100,000 Strong in the Americas.” The grants recognize initiatives to create partnerships between higher education institutions and Latin America, with the goal of increasing study abroad in the field of environmental sciences, with an emphasis on water. The eight grants awarded in 2016 will help 115 students to study abroad and prepare them for the 21st-century workforce.
Source: SJR
