Center for Water and the Environment

The economic growth of Minnesota depends on sustained yield and protection of its natural resources. The Center for Water and the Environment is committed to understanding problems and developing tools for solving problems that impede the environmentally sound development of the economy.

Gerald Niemi attends White House Great Lakes briefing

NRRI scientist Gerald Niemi attended a White House Community Leaders Briefing on the Great Lakes Region. The Obama Administration’s FY 2013 budget includes $300 million to continue critical interagency collaboration on the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. The briefing was an opportunity for dialogue between Great Lakes leaders and senior administration officials. Read more...

Center for Water and the environment program areas

• Land Resources
  This program focuses on understand the interactions among the forest ecosystems of the northern lake states, and the shifting mosaics of human land use and natural disturbance that drive the ecological and economic health of the region.
• Water Resources
  Program goals are to understand the ecological structure and function of Minnesota’s surface waters to predict, minimize, and mitigate the effects of human impacts on biological communities, water quality, public health, and other beneficial uses of these resources.
• Land/Water Interactions
  The way we live on the land affects the quality of our water. This program area focuses on understanding the relationship between these two ecosystems. Research projects range from GIS tools to public outreach.
• Environmental Chemistry
  These are exciting times in terms of managing chemical information. With some 80,000 industrial chemicals loose in our environment, understanding their potential toxicity is critical. The Chemical Abstract Services Registry master list had more than 29 million entries in 2001 and of those chemicals, approximately 1,000 annually end up in actual use. Methods of testing current carcinogens include laboratory animals (in vivo) at a cost of approximately $5 million over 5 years; or cell cultures (in vitro) at a cost of $20,000 to $ to $50,000 over a period of weeks; or computer modeling (in silico) at a cost of less than one cent in less than one second.
• Public Outreach/Education
  This program has evolved over the past 12 years in close collaboration with Minnesota Sea Grant, UMD’s education department, and a host of local agency partners. It targets the general public, and formal (grades 6–12 and college) and informal (museums and nature centers) educators. A unifying theme has been to use regional stream and lake water quality data, especially intensive real-time data to illustrate how these water bodies function and how they respond to poor land use practices. The overall goal is to educate the general public and policy makers to improve environmental decision making.