Latest News from the University of Miami

New science collaboration will translate five-year Global Reef Expedition dataset into insight about the current health of the world’s oceans.

MIAMI (October 27, 2016)—The University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation (KSLOF) announced today a joint science partnership to translate KSLOF’s five-year Global Reef Expedition dataset into insight about the current health of the world’s oceans.

UM Rosenstiel School Professor of Marine Geosciences Sam Purkis will serve as the principal investigator for the joint project, and as KSLOF’s Interim Chief Scientist for the five-year project funded by KSLOF.

The primary goals of the Global Reef Expedition, which took place from 2011-2015, was to map and characterize global coral reef ecosystems, identify their current status and major threats, and examine factors that enhance their ability to resist, survive, and recover from maj

or disturbance events like bleaching, cyclone damage, or crown of thorns starfish outbreaks.

During the five-year expedition, the Living Oceans Foundation circumnavigated the globe aboard its 220 ft. research vessel, M/Y Golden Shadow, to survey some of the most remote coral reefs on the planet.

The reef expedition generated an unrivaled dataset spanning more than 25 reef provinces across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. The data collected were broad— likely the most comprehensive example of “big data” yet compiled for coral reefs. They encompass 95,000 square kilometers of state-of-the-art aircraft and satellite imagery processed to seabed and bathymetric maps, surveys of faunal and genetic diversity, water chemistry and sediment samples, geophysical surveys and assessments of ocean climate.

The new partnership will support a five-year graduate student project.

— Rosenstiel / Special to UM News

CORAL GABLES, Fla. (October 21, 2016) — The plant-based menu—peanut soba noodles, cauliflower with goat cheese, and sweet potato casserole—at the World Food Day discussion last week was palate pleasing. And the topic—how we need to change our food habits and agriculture practices as the climate warms—was eye opening for South Florida, ground zero for rising sea levels.

The faculty and students who spoke at the Food for Thought forum, held at the Lowe Art Museum in advance of the University’s World Food Day observance on Monday, October 24, agreed that what we eat and how we get it will have to change with the changing climate.

“Most of the food carbon footprint comes from transportation and the fact that you, as a customer, expect to see grapes every month of the year in Publix, not worrying about the fact that the grapes are coming from Chile,” said Teddy Lhoutellier, UM’s sustainability manager who urged the audience to imagine a different, local food system. “Local means local growing, local cooking, local distribution, and here in Miami-Dade we have that local distribution network. We have some of the best growers right down in Homestead.”

The UM community can see—and sample—that local system at the Fair Food Fair that will take place from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at University Center Lower Lounge on Monday, October, 24. Fair visitors will be able to enjoy a free local dish, a nutritious drink made from the “superfood” Moringa tree, and learn more about healthy and local eating, as well as community gardens such as UM’s burgeoning food forest. (View the schedule for other events.)

The food forest, which began as a class project and is sprouting on the grounds of the University of Miami’s Baptist Collegiate Ministry, won’t keep seas from rising or the climate from changing. But junior Annie Cappetta, president of the CommUnity Garden, hopes other students will learn to love and grow the boniato, bananas, leafy spinach substitutes, asparagus, and other tropical and perennial foods that thrive in South Florida—and can be included in our diets when the climate and our food supply change.

“The days are coming when some of your favorite things are not going to be available at the grocery store—coffee, chocolate, specialty products that can be grown only in certain regions and are going to get very expensive,” Cappetta warned. “So we have to be very adaptable and know what your local community can grow and what we can grow here is astonishing. It’s not just avocados and citrus. There are lots of fruits and perennial vegetables that people need to be aware of and incorporate in their diets so when the change starts happening we can be adaptable and open to new foods.”

The discussion was moderated by Andrew Porter, assistant professor of clinical at the School of Nursing and Health Studies, who concluded the program by urging the audience to be part of a big change by doing—or not doing—one small thing every day.

“Not eating meat one day a week. Changing to a plant-based diet one day a week. Not drinking carbonated water,” Porter said. “There’s lots of little things you can do and plenty of options.’’

That’s the message senior Asmaa Odeh, who organized the Food for Thought panel, most wants to convey. An independent major who discovered her passion for educating people about healthy eating after her mother was diagnosed with colon cancer at a young age, Odeh is developing a program that The Lennar Foundation Medical Center, the new Coral Gables location of the University of Miami Health System, plans to use to promote healthier living and eating in the community.

“Our planet is heating up. Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, and extreme weather events like droughts, cyclones, and floods are becoming more common. This is why the global message for World Food Day 2016 is ‘Climate is changing. Food and agriculture must, too,’” Odeh said. “If we each take a few small steps, governments will change policies, business will change practices, impacting generations with the knowledge, skills, and resources they need to eat good, nutritious food for healthier lives. This event united individuals from different disciplines to make small changes from the ground up.”

All who take an initial step on UM’s National Food Day are encouraged to share their actions on social media via #wfday2016.

In addition to Cappetta and Lhoutellier, the panelists included nutritionist Linda Parker, research assistant professor at the school of Nursing and Health Studies, and Thomas Harris, associate professor in the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. The entirely plant-based meal was prepared by UM alumnus Peter Kwa, the pastry and pantry chef at KYU restaurant in Wynwood.

— UM News

Study advances understanding of massive ocean carbon reservoir and its impact to marine food web.

MIAMI (October 18, 2016)—The oceans hold a vast reservoir—700 billion tons—of carbon, dissolved in seawater as organic matter, often surviving for thousands of years after being produced by ocean life. Yet, little is known about how it is produced, or how it’s being impacted by the many changes happening in the ocean.

Think of dissolved organic carbon, or DOC, in the ocean as tree leaves and other dead organic matter falling to the forest ground—a portion of this natural carbon sustains life while the remainder remains hidden in the soils, being sequestered for many years. As is true in the forests, this vital, residual carbon reservoir is necessary to sustain life in the ocean, and to sequester vast amounts of carbon in its great depths.

To better understand this important pool of ocean carbon, researchers at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science used data collected over the past 15 years on several international scientific cruises to map the distribution of this material in the Atlantic Ocean. From the analysis, they found that this major basin contributes one third of the global ocean net production of dissolved organic carbon.

“Carbon is involved in all aspects of our life,” said Dennis Hansell, UM Rosenstiel School professor of ocean sciences and coauthor of the study. “We need to understand the carbon cycle on Earth especially as we add more from the burning of fossil fuels.”

Dissolved organic carbon is the primary food source at the base of the marine food chain. It is produced by phytoplankton during photosynthesis, and it is mostly consumed by microbial life. The remainder that is not consumed by microbes accumulates in the ocean.

The researchers discovered that the production of dissolved organic carbon at the ocean’s surface could be accurately predicted by measuring the amount of nutrients arriving into the euphotic, or sunlit, zone. The nutrients arrive there mostly by winter mixing and upwelling, and in turn support the growth of ocean plant life. From the arrival of nutrients to the surface ocean, they estimated the resulting plant growth and the production of residue, the DOC, from that growth.  From those estimates, they built a map of DOC at the surface of the entire Atlantic Ocean. 

“In our work, we found that the production of dissolved organic carbon depends on the quantity of nutrients that reach the euphotic zone from deeper layers,” said Cristina Romera-Castillo, a former postdoctoral researcher at the UM Rosenstiel School and lead author of the study. “In future scenarios, how climate change will affect the nutrient arrival to the surface ocean will determine the inventory of dissolved organic carbon in the ocean.”

This inventory in turn affects the cycling of carbon on Earth, which has important roles in climate.

The paper, titled “New nutrients exert fundamental control on dissolved organic carbon accumulation in the surface Atlantic Ocean,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study’s authors include: Cristina Romera-Castillo, who conducted the work while a postdoctoral researcher at the UM Rosenstiel School, UM Rosenstiel School Professor of Ocean Sciences Dennis Hansell, and Robert T. Letscher from the University of California Irvine.

The study was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, Grant#  OCE1436748 and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program, Grant# DE-SC0012550

— Rosenstiel / Special to UM News

UM and Virginia Tech researchers will collaborate and investigate the resiliency of coastal neighborhoods.

CORAL GABLES, Fla. (October 5, 2016) – How resilient are Miami and Miami Beach? Could they survive the brunt of a major natural disaster? Could the built environment and infrastructure in those coastal cities withstand Category 5 hurricane-force winds and rising sea levels?

The answers to these questions and many others could soon be found by a team of researchers from the University of Miami’s College of Engineering and School of Architecture, who, along with scientists from Virginia Tech, have received a $500,000 National Science Foundation grant to assess the infrastructures of those two municipalities and perhaps make them more resilient.

Starting in January and with the help of a social scientist and a computer scientist from Virginia Tech, the UM researchers will study neighborhoods in Miami and Miami Beach to determine how they work from both a physical and social perspective.

“We will look at how neighborhoods work and see what their typical features and structure are and how they contribute towards or against resiliency as well as quality-of-life objectives,” said UM Professor of Architecture Sonia Chao, one of the principal investigators on the Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP) project.

The goal is to create new holistic paradigms of resilient urban and community design for coastal cities through the development of a human-centered computational framework, Chao added.

“We will integrate the social science and the urban design to create meta-models and achieve anticipatory resiliency,” said Landolf Rhode-Barbarigos, assistant professor in the College of Engineering’s Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering, and lead investigator of the project. “Our goal is to address the questions of what could happen if an area is hit by a major disaster and what will the effect of anticipatory measures be.”

An innovative flexible modeling and computational framework for simulation and optimization will be developed to help answer those questions, according to Wangda Zuo, assistant professor in the College of Engineering.

“The project is highly interdisciplinary,” said Chao, director of UM’s Center for Urban and Community Design. “That cross-pollination and its implied layering of data and of vantage points, naturally yields a more robust and comprehensive product, which in turn can better afford community leaders with effective resiliency strategies.”

Throughout the two-year study and after its completion, researchers will hold a series of seminars in collaboration with decision-makers and practitioners from the cities of Miami and Miami Beach. They will also hold an exhibition at the Miami Frost Museum of Science to raise awareness and promote research on coastal resiliency.

– Barbara Gutierrez / UM News

National Science Foundation Awards $1.4 Million Research Grant to UM and Virginia Tech Researchers for Future Smart, Sustainable and Connected Communities

MIAMI (September 16, 2016)–Dr. Wangda Zuo, an assistant professor of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering with the University of Miami’s College of Engineering, together with three professors at the Virginia Tech, has received a three-year, $1.4 million research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a proposal titled, “BIGDATA: Collaborative Research: IA: Big Data Analytics for Optimized Planning of Smart, Sustainable, and Connected Communities.”

Zuo, who runs the CoE’s Sustainable Building Systems Laboratory, will use this grant to collaborate with colleagues at Virginia Tech, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Anna Maria Historic Green Village, a zero-energy community in Florida. The grant is part of efforts to understand how best to transform cities into smart, connected and sustainable communities in the coming decade. The research aims to develop a new planning framework for a “Smart City,” revolutionizing transportation, communication and energy systems to seamlessly integrate sustainable components such as renewable sources, smart sensors and electric vehicles. The integration will ensure that tomorrow’s communities are truly sustainable and connected, exhibiting desirable qualities including zero energy (self-sufficient in their energy production), zero outages (communication links across the community are ultra-reliable and experience low interruption) and zero-congestion (traffic congestion is minimized across the community). A community that can achieve these qualities would be classified as a “zero community.” 

The goal of this project is to develop a new planning framework for smart, connected and sustainable communities that meets these zero-energy, zero-outage, and zero-congestion goals by optimally deciding how, when and where to deploy or upgrade a community’s infrastructure. These decisions will be driven by massive volumes of community data, stemming from multiple sources that may include mobility, energy, traffic, communication demands and other socio-technological information. The idea is to gradually and organically transform a community into a fully sustainable and truly connected environment.

One key element of the research by Zuo and his colleagues is creation of a virtual testbed that can accurately reconstruct, simulate and evaluate a theoretical framework by leveraging real-world big data sets from Virginia Tech and Anna Maria Historic Green Village, as well as other sources, such as the U.S. Department of Energy. The holistic nature of this research is expected to catalyze the global deployment of sustainable and connected communities.

“This is a great collaborative project between top research universities, US DOE, and also a partnership with Anna Maria Historic Green Village that will allow us to collect, manipulate, test and report real-world data – allowing us to eventually reproduce [the results] elsewhere in the near future,” Zuo said. “These types of grants allow us to create, test, analyze and augment real-life models under different criteria in a zero community, which allows us to develop it even further.”

Previously, Zuo received the Emerging Professional Award from the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA)-USA Chapter. He is currently the Affiliate Director Representing USA on the IBPSA Board and the Research Committee Chair of IBPSA-USA.

– COE / Special to UM News