Headline News Archive

October 30, 2014 - The Florida Center for Environmental Studies (CES) at FAU begins an exciting new chapter and welcomes a new Director, Dr. Colin Polsky. CES has updated their mission of improving Florida's sustainability through research, education and outreach on ecology, climate change, and society.

In August 2014, Dr. Polsky joined FAU as Professor of Geosciences and successor to Dr. Leonard Berry, who founded CES in 1994 and remains active as Emeritus Professor of Geosciences. Dr. Polsky joins Dr. Berry on the Executive Board of the Florida Climate Institute (FCI).

Dr. Polsky is trained as a geographer, specializing in the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change. His programs of study and postdoctoral work in mathematics, humanities, French, geography, and Science & International Affairs (from U. Texas, Penn State, and Harvard, respectively) have led to a sustained interest in advancing knowledge of U.S. climate vulnerabilities, in both methodological and applied terms.

In addition to multiple NSF grants, peer-reviewed articles and co-authored books, Polsky has served as co-Convening Lead Author for a chapter in the 2013 National Climate Assessment, served on NRC, NSF, and USGCRP committees, and prepared reviews for several IPCC reports.

His experience and strong sense of purpose for CES will lead the Center in further expanding its impact on sustainability in Florida. Contact him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

For more information on climate change research and education at FAU’s Center for Environmental studies, please visit http://www.ces.fau.edu

October 30, 2014 - In 2011, the interagency group known as the Compact Sea Level Rise (SLR) Working Group, organized by the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, came to an agreement on the projections for sea level rise that the Compact would use for sea level change up to the year 2060. In light of this year’s IPCC Report from NOAA, revised SLR Considerations from the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the 2014 National Climate Assessment SLR projections, the Compact SLR Working Group is now meeting again to update the projections through 2100. Led by Dr. Samantha Danchuk, P.E., Assistant Director, Environmental Planning and Community Resilience Division, Broward County, group members include representatives from several South Florida universities and municipalities, and the South Florida Water Management District.

October 21, 2014 - The College of Agriculture and Food Sciences announces that Charles Magee, Ph.D., professor of Biological and Agricultural Systems Engineering (BASE), has received a four-year grant of $800,000 from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to provide scholarships for students majoring in BASE. Starting October 1, 2014 through September 30, 2018, the BASE program will receive $200,000 per year in scholarship funds. Each year, 14-16 high school and college students will receive scholarships ranging from $8,000 to $16,000 dollars. This $800,000 scholarship award is believed to be the largest scholarship award any federal agency has given to a single academic program at FAMU.

Students interested in a BASE scholarship should contact Dr. Charles Magee at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call (850) 412-5594.

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October 2, 2014 - Daniel Solís, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at FAMU’s College of Agriculture and Food receives the 2014 - 2015 FAMU’s Faculty Research Award for his research project: "The Effect of IFQs on the Total Productivity of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico Red Snapper Industry". With grant support from The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this Agribusiness Program professor, set a goal to analyze the impact of regulations and climate variability on the technical efficiency and composition of the Gulf of Mexico Red Snapper commercial fleet. For more details, please visit: http://dsolisw.weebly.com/ 

October 2, 2014 - A partnership between the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact (Compact) and the Florida Climate Institute (FCI) aims to increase the effectiveness of current collaborations among Florida’s institutions of higher learning and the local governments and regional agencies of Southeast Florida. The purpose of the Partnership Agreement, signed Wednesday, October 1 in Miami, is to seek better alignment between public sector information and management needs and ongoing research objectives, to improve coordination among the parties in pursuing competitive research funding opportunities, and to assure that the best and brightest ideas emerging from Florida’s world-class institutions are well positioned for implementation in supporting Southeast Florida’s efforts to adapt to climate change and sea level rise and transition to a more resilient economy and coastal infrastructure.

Created in 2009 by forward-thinking elected officials, the Compact has emerged as one of the preeminent regional metropolitan climate change governance models nationally and globally. The collaboration and coordination across cities and counties and among federal, state, and local agencies has advanced the region rather quickly toward increased shared aspirations for greater climate resilience and reductions in regional emissions. Likewise, the Florida Climate Institute, created in 2010, is a path-breaking collaboration among eight of Florida’s world-class universities that serves as a multidisciplinary network for research and education aimed at helping Florida meet the many challenges of global climate change. Together, the Compact and FCI recognize that responsible action on global climate change will require the talents and insights of nearly every academic discipline from primary climate science to architecture, agriculture, and engineering, and from the arts and humanities to ecology and finance.

October 1, 2014 - Dr. Ni-Bin Chang, Professor and Director of the University of Central Florida’s Stormwater Management Academy, Rahim Harji, Pinellas County’s Watershed Management Unit Manager, and Thomas Ruppert, Florida Sea Grant Coastal Planning Specialist, were awarded a grant from Florida Sea Grant titled “Coupling Risk and Resilience Assessment for Networked Sustainable Drainage Systems in a Coastal City under Climate Change Impact.” The team will assist Pinellas County to implement an effective, efficient, and resilient stormwater system in the Cross Bayou Watershed of Pinellas County that increases infrastructure resilience and robustness by incorporating low impact development (LID) controls and flood proofing technologies to harmonize existing storm sewer systems under climate change and sea-level rise scenarios.

This project is motivated by the fact that there are no standard methods/criteria/matrices to measure the sustainability of coastal stormwater sewer systems in terms of resilience and robustness in association with varying risk levels of episodic disturbances including climate variability and sea-level rise scenarios. This project proposes a new concept, the networked sustainable drainage systems, which are featured by ‘system of systems’ or "network of networks" characteristics (i.e., with cascade effect) that should be less vulnerable to flood impact under climate variability and sea-level rise. The project will provide a suite of quantitative tools and methods to build an innovative platform via coupling the risk and resilience assessment to pave a pathway for producing adaptive stormwater management strategies for Pinellas County Government. This advancement will: 1) inform the County engineering solutions to flood hazards, 2) allow Pinellas County to implement its current policies seeking to promote LID, 3) serve as a model for innovative stormwater management technique in the County, 4) incorporate climate change and sea-level rise impacts into stormwater infrastructure in the County, 5) review policies or plan of the County for a better cost-benefit-risk trade-off for stormwater management in the County, 6) deliver the final products to local and regional partners by a series of outreach activities, and 7) disseminate new knowledge to help the County optimize future planning and design of networked sustainable drainage systems.

September 30, 2014 - Warm temperatures and a wet landscape increase soil’s ability to store carbon, which in turn helps mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new University of Florida study covering 45 years of data.

Soil-stored carbon can slow the build-up of carbon-based gases in the atmosphere, a phenomenon believed to be a cause of global climate change. So it’s vital to preserve soil carbon, said Sabine Grunwald, a UF soil and water science professor who led the research.

September 16, 2014 - A new study by Florida State University researchers demonstrates a different way of projecting a hurricane’s strength and intensity that could give the public a better idea of a storm’s potential for destruction.

Vasu Misra, associate professor of meteorology and co-director of the Florida Climate Institute, and fourth-year doctoral student Michael Kozar introduce in the Monthly Weather Review of the American Meteorological Society a new statistical model that complements hurricane forecasting by showing the size of storms, not just the wind speed.

September 4, 2014 - The FCI is pleased to welcome Florida A&M University in Tallahassee as its 8th member university! Dr. Odemari Mbuya is the branch director and Dr. Daniel Solis is the branch co-director. Both are from FAMU's College of Agriculture and Food Sciences.

September 2, 2014 - This report was led by the FCI's Dr. Reed Noss and funded by the Kresge Foundation and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The study focuses on vulnerability of species and natural communities to interacting threats from sea level rise and projected land-use change (primarily urbanization), with some attention also to temperature and precipitation change. A range of adaptation options was analyzed for ca. 300 species and 30 natural communities of conservation concern.

August 29, 2014 - Thanks to co-authors Alicia Betancourt and Maia McGuire, along with contributors Libby Carnahan, JP Gellermann and Mary Campbell, the Sustainable Floridians^SM program has a new module. The module, Climate Change and Sea Level Rise, was reviewed by Libby Carnahan and Gary Mitchum (USF) and consists of a PowerPoint presentation, a pdf of the PowerPoint presentation including the notes, lesson plan/facilitator outline, evaluation and post-test, action plan, and resources list.

August 29, 2014 - The Florida Climate Institute has developed the Florida CARES center request that will bring together prominent universities across the State in partnership with state and regional agencies and the business community to create an economy more resilient to risks from hurricane damage, periodic droughts and floods, higher sea levels, and future climate trends. It will develop research and deliver education programs in support of Florida’s major economic engines (e.g., tourism, agriculture, trade, transportation and coastal marine resources). Working with partners from industries and agencies, it will help develop the workforce to manage Florida’s resources while growing its economy. Florida CARES will make Florida more competitive through its collaborative research and training programs, and create marketable expertise and technologies to meet the increasing demands of the state’s future.

August 14, 2014 - To continue momentum under the Climate Data Initiative, the Obama Administration is renewing the President’s call to America’s private-sector innovators to leverage open government data and other resources to build tools that will make the U.S. and global food systems more resilient against the impacts of climate change. In response to this call, today’s launch includes a number of commitments by Federal agencies and private-sector collaborators to combat climate change and support food resilience through data-driven innovation.

The Agricultural Model Intercomparison & Improvement Program and the Center for Integrated Modeling of Sustainable Agriculture and Nutrition Security. The Agricultural Model Intercomparison & Improvement Program (AgMIP) and the Center for Integrated Modeling of Sustainable Agriculture and Nutrition Security (CIMSANS), in partnership with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), are announcing a new public-private partnership on open data and open-source code modeling to enhance the climate-resilience of food systems. The new partnership will secure the resources and expertise necessary to evaluate seven novel nutrition and sustainability metrics of global food systems, including all of the world’s important staple and non-staple foods, through the year 2050.

Monsanto. Monsanto is announcing that it will donate a multi-site/multi-year maize breeding trial dataset to open data portals maintained by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the Agricultural Model Intercomparison & Improvement Project (AgMIP). Opening these data will it make it possible for public- and private-sector scientists to improve models being used to understand how climate and water-availability changes will impact crop productivity and therefore food security. Monsanto is also partnering with a number of external scientists in the AgMIP community to improve one of the leading publicly available crop-growth simulation models (AgMaize).

Fact Sheet: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/07/29/fact-sheet-empowering-america-s-agricultural-sector-and-strengthening-fo

August 6, 2014 - New research by a Florida State University geography professor shows that climate change may be playing a key role in the strength and frequency of tornadoes hitting the United States.

Published Wednesday in the journal Climate Dynamics, Professor James Elsner writes that though tornadoes are forming fewer days per year, they are forming at a greater density and strength than ever before. So, for example, instead of one or two forming on a given day in an area, there might be three or four occurring.

July 8, 2014 - Drs. Mark Powell (NOAA/FSU) and Steve Cocke (FSU) are part of a new collaboration between NOAA and the Dept. of Energy to collect data that could lead to improved offshore wind turbine designs. Powell's efforts will involve boundary layer research, and Cocke will work on hurricane risk modelling.