Science Policy Report

Address all comments to the Science Policy Office at:
sciencepolicy@sciencesocieties.org

14 January 2015

In This Issue:

Policy News

International Corner

Research, Education, Extension Funding Opportunities

Science News

Policy News

There’s still time to apply for the 2015 Future Leaders in Science Award. ASA, CSSA and SSSA graduate student members with an interest in advocacy and science policy are encouraged to apply for the 2015 Future Leaders in Science award. Recipients of the award will travel to Washington DC to participate in the 2015 Congressional Visits Day, March 16-17. This is a unique opportunity to meet with your members of Congress to discuss the importance and impact of food, agriculture and natural resources research. Be an advocate for science and apply for the Future Leaders in Science award today! Deadline, January 15. Read the full announcement.

Next week, on January 20 at 9pm EST, President Obama will deliver his sixthState of the Union address to members of Congress and to the American people. The State of the Union address can be seen on television or live online via Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and through the White House mobile apps. We encourage you to watch the State of the Union address and interact on social media by asking the President about his plans for the future of agriculture research or what role he thinks research will have in meeting such pressing challenges as food safety and security, natural resource management or clean energy production. In other administration news, the White House is expected to release its FY 2016 budget on Feb. 2, the first time in five years it will meet the mandated deadline. While the exact dollar amount for specific research funding programs is still unknown, we think the administration’s previous support of science and research will leave the food, agriculture and natural resources research community with a good starting point in the upcoming fiscal year.

Due to the shift in power in the Senate after the mid-term election, many committee assignments and leadership positions are still in flux. The committees that control oversight and funding of science and research issues will assuredly have new key players and provide us with an opportunity to foster new champions for food, agriculture and natural resources research. However, some new leadership position announcements have already raised eyebrows in the scientific community. Texas Senator, Ted Cruz, longtime critic of climate science, was named Chair of the Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness. While Senator Jeff Merkley has clashed with the agricultural biotech industry on several occasions, he was named the Ranking Member of the Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee.

If safety and regulatory obstacles can be overcome, within the next three years, drones and the companies that support them could generate $13.7 billion worth of economic activity. Perhaps the biggest industry ripe for drone use is farming. With the help of GPS mapping, drones can survey an entire farm, find bugs or soil that is too dry or too low in nutrients and then send the exact coordinates back to a tractor that will apply pesticide, water or fertilizer only to areas in need. Read the full article.

In a recent Politico op-ed, Senator Rand Paul and Congressman Lamar Smith refute claims that the Republican Party is “at war with science.” They insist that federal science funding should be driven by the national interest and that scrutinizing science funding isn’t the same as attacking science. Read the full article.

Soil -- it’s what’s under our feet. But it’s also what makes sure there is food and water in our stomachs, air in our lungs, clothes on our backs, and a roof over our heads. Soil keeps us from being hungry, thirsty, breathless, naked, and homeless. In an effort to highlight the important role of soils in food production and biodiversity preservation, the United Nations declared 2015 as the International Year of Soils. This week, USDA launched International Year of Soils with an event at its headquarters featuring remarks from Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, SSSA President, Carolyn Olson and National Resources Conservation Service Chief, Jason Weller. SSSA will be celebrating the International Year of Soils throughout 2015 with activities set around monthly themes that showcase the importance of soil. Read the full article.

International Corner

The 2014 Africa Progress Panel report presents the two faces of Africa: robust economic growth and continuing poverty. But the report suggests Africa could change this duality by asking: how can resources make a positive impact on development? While impressive headline growth figures are reported, incomes do not trickle down to improve livelihoods of the majority of the population. Agriculture has the potential to generate significant revenue for Africa, offering more sustainable and equitable development than oil provides. Read the full article.

Two of India’s major science funding agencies are joining the push to make the results of the research they fund freely available to the public. India’s Ministry of Science & Technology earlier this month announced it will require researchers who receive even just part of their funding from its biotechnology and science and technology departments to deposit copies of their papers in publicly accessible depositories. The two departments are the primary government sources for life science research funding in India. Read the full article.

The European Union has a bug problem. After regulators in late 2013 banned pesticides called neonicotinoids, linked in some studies to the unintended deaths of bees, farmers across the continent applied older chemicals to which many pests had developed a resistance, allowing them to survive. Now, infestations may lead to a 15 percent drop in this year’s European harvest of rapeseed, the region’s primary source of vegetable oil used to make food ingredients and biodiesel, according to researcher Oil World. Read the full article.

The appointment of a reputed climate change denier as the head of Brazil’s science ministry has some scientists worried about the country’s environmental future. Others are withholding judgment, at least until the new minister, Aldo Rebelo, appoints the team of scientists and policymakers who will work with him for the next 4 years. But like many minister appointments in Brazil, President Dilma Rousseff’s selection of Rebelo to lead the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI) was a political decision, not a scientific one. Read the full article.

Research, Education, Extension Funding Opportunities

The Division of Environmental Biology (DEB) supports fundamental research on populations, species, communities, and ecosystems. Scientific emphases range across many evolutionary and ecological patterns and processes at all spatial and temporal scales. Areas of research include biodiversity, phylogenetic systematics, molecular evolution, life history evolution, natural selection, ecology, biogeography, ecosystem structure, function and services, conservation biology, global change, and biogeochemical cycles. Research on organismal origins, functions, relationships, interactions, and evolutionary history may incorporate field, laboratory, or collection-based approaches; observational or manipulative experiments; synthesis activities; as well as theoretical approaches involving analytical, statistical, or computational modeling. Deadline, January 23. Read the full announcement.

The Long Term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB) Program supports the generation of extended time series of data to address important questions in evolutionary biology, ecology, and ecosystem science. Research areas include, but are not limited to, the effects of natural selection or other evolutionary processes on populations, communities, or ecosystems; the effects of interspecific interactions that vary over time and space; population or community dynamics for organisms that have extended life spans and long turnover times; feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary processes; pools of materials such as nutrients in soils that turn over at intermediate to longer time scales; and external forcing functions such as climatic cycles that operate over long return intervals. Preliminary proposal deadline, January 23. Read the full announcement.

The Partnerships for Innovation: Building Innovation Capacity (PFI:BIC) program supports academe-industry partnerships, which are led by an interdisciplinary academic research team with a least one industry partner to build technological, human, and service system innovation capacity. These partnerships focus on the integration of technologies into a specified human-centered smart service system with the potential to achieve transformational change in an existing service system or to spur an entirely new service system. These technologies have been inspired by existing breakthrough discoveries. Deadline, January 28. Read the full announcement.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) funds research on and the development of high-potential, high-impact energy technologies that are too early for private-sector investment. The agency focuses on technologies that can be meaningfully advanced with a modest investment over a defined period of time in order to catalyze the translation from scientific discovery to early-stage technology. The objective of an ARPA-E OPEN FOA is simple, yet comprehensive: to support the development of potentially disruptive new technologies across the full spectrum of energy applications. ARPA-E seeks to support transformational research in all areas of energy R&D, covering transportation and stationary applications. Areas of research responsive to this FOA include (but are not limited to) electricity generation by both renewable and non-renewable means; electricity transmission, storage, and distribution; energy efficiency for buildings, manufacturing and commerce, and personal use; and all aspects of transportation, including the production and distribution of both renewable and non-renewable fuels, electrification, and energy efficiency in transportation. Deadline, February 27. Read the full announcement.

The Department of Defense (DoD), through the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP), supports the demonstration of technologies that address priority DoD environmental requirements.  The goal of ESTCP is to promote the transfer of innovative environmental technologies through demonstrations that collect the data needed for regulatory and DoD end-user acceptance.  Projects conduct formal demonstrations at DoD facilities and sites in operational settings to document and validate improved performance and cost savings. ESTCP is seeking proposals for innovative environmental technology demonstrations as candidates for funding beginning in FY2016. ESTCP will conduct an online seminar “ESTCP Funding Opportunities” on January 16, 2015, from 1:00-2:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Pre-proposal deadline, March 12. Read the full announcement.

Beginning farmer education for adult and young audiences in the United States can be generally traced back to the advent of the 1862 and the 1890 Morrill Land Grant Acts. But for the first time, the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 (Pub .L. No. 110-234, Section 7410), appropriated $75 million for FY 2009 to FY 2012 to develop and offer education, training, outreach and mentoring programs to enhance the sustainability of the next generation of farmers. The Agriculture Act of 2014 provided an additional $20 million per year for 2014 through 2018. The reasons for the renewed interest in beginning farmer and rancher programs are: the rising average age of U.S. farmers, the 8% projected decrease in the number of farmers and ranchers between 2008 and 2018, and the growing recognition that new programs are needed to address the needs of the next generation of beginning farmers and ranchers. Deadline, March 13. Read the full announcement.

A well-prepared, innovative science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workforce is crucial to the Nation's health and economy. Indeed, recent policy actions and reports have drawn attention to the opportunities and challenges inherent in increasing the number of highly qualified STEM graduates, including STEM teachers. Priorities include educating students to be leaders and innovators in emerging and rapidly changing STEM fields as well as educating a scientifically literate populace. Both of these priorities depend on the nature and quality of the undergraduate education experience. In addressing these STEM challenges and priorities, the National Science Foundation invests in evidence-based and evidence-generating approaches to understanding STEM learning; to designing, testing, and studying instruction and curricular change; to wide dissemination and implementation of best practices; and to broadening participation of individuals and institutions in STEM fields. The goals of these investments include: increasing the number and diversity of STEM students, preparing students well to participate in science for tomorrow, and improving students' STEM learning outcomes. Deadline, March 16. Read the full announcement.

Science News

Runoff from agricultural fields contains nutrients that can adversely affect surface water quality, human health, and aquatic life. Nitrates from corn and soybean croplands across the Midwestern United States, for example, can end up in the Gulf of Mexico. There, nitrates can cause algal blooms which deplete oxygen from Gulf waters. Currently, such blooms cause a “dead zone” devoid of marine life across an area as large as Connecticut. But perennial filter strips – areas of native plants or grasses – can help. Filter strips can reduce the amount of nutrients, including nitrates, entering water sources and ultimately ending up in the Gulf. Read the full article.

Agricultural gene banks hope soon to cease serving primarily as warehouses for plant seeds and start capitalizing on the often hidden value of some 7 million seed deposits held in more than 1700 repositories around the world. A nascent initiative, dubbed DivSeek, aims to systematically characterize the genetic, physical, and biochemical makeup of banked seeds in hopes of exploiting traits—such as drought tolerance and pest resistance—that could help produce better crop varieties. The 69-member DivSeek consortium, which includes the world’s leading agricultural research centers, is publicly unveiling the effort in San Diego, California, today in advance of the annual International Plant & Animal Genome conference. Read the full article.

A new NASA satellite that will peer into the topmost layer of Earth's soils to measure the hidden waters that influence our weather and climate is in final preparations for a Jan. 29 dawn launch from California. The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission will take the pulse of a key measure of our water planet: how freshwater cycles over Earth's land surfaces in the form of soil moisture. The mission will produce the most accurate, highest-resolution global maps ever obtained from space of the moisture present in the top 2 inches (5 centimeters) of Earth's soils. It also will detect and map whether the ground is frozen or thawed. This data will be used to enhance scientists' understanding of the processes that link Earth's water, energy and carbon cycles. Read the full article.

The Japanese government agency monitors and records the long-term change of the global average surface temperatures and found that 2014 was far warmer than previous years. The data shows that four out of the five hottest years on record have occurred in the last decade: In second place is 1998, then 2010 and 2013 tied for third, and 2005 in fifth place. The new numbers reveal that the world has been warming at an average rate of 1.26 degrees F per century since records began. Read the full article.

99% of all bacteria cannot be cultured, or grown in a petri dish in a lab. However scientists have learned how to use soils to grow bacteria that cannot be cultured. While pursing this line of study, researchers at Northeastern University in Boston discovered a natural compound from bacteria that may prove to be a potent new antibiotic. This news comes at a time when many current antibiotics are losing their oomph — germs become resistant to them. The new compound is especially intriguing because it appears that it might not lose its germ-killing potential, according to a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Read the full article.

In September, the National Academy of Sciences released its assessment of the USDA AFRI program, called Spurring Innovation in Food and Agriculture: A review of the USDA AFRI Program. The report looked back over the first 5 years of the AFRI and made recommendations about its future including a rebalancing of the research portfolio to favor foundational research, the elimination of the Challenge Area Program and the need for greater organization and transparency within AFRI. Last week the report committee and NIFA Director, Sonny Ramaswamy, held a public webinar on the report. Find the archived version here.

European colonization accelerated rates of soil loss in parts of North America to more than 100 times that of pre-settlement, new research shows. Scientists from the University of Vermont and London have, for the first time, precisely quantified background rates of erosion in ten U.S. river basins to compare with modern ones. Their data show that logging and farming led to as much erosion in decades as would have occurred naturally in thousands of years. Read the full article.

Meeting the expected growth in global demand for animal protein in a way that is economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable will require a greater investment in animal science research, says a new report from the National Research Council. The report identifies research priorities and recommends that governments and the private sector increase their support for this research. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that by 2050 there will be a 73 percent increase in meat and egg consumption and a 58 percent increase in dairy consumption over 2011 levels.  While models indicate that North America and Europe will see little growth in per capita animal protein consumption, per capita consumption in Asia and Africa will more than double, and it will rise significantly in Latin America and the Caribbean. Read the full article.

On Tuesday, January 13, the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council will release the report of a study on A Framework for Assessing the Effects of the Food System. The study explored ways to methodically compare different policies or proposed changes to the food system in terms of their effects on, and trade-offs for health, the environment, society, and the economy. Register to participate in the public briefing here.

Two thirds of Americans support labeling of genetically modified ingredients on food packages, even if they may not read them, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll. Fewer Americans say genetically modified ingredients are important in judging whether a food is healthy. About 4 in 10 said the presence of such ingredients was very or extremely important. Here are five things to know about Americans' support for labeling of genetically modified ingredients. Read the full article.

Sources: NSF; USDA; DOE; DOD; NASA; ScienceInsider; The Guardian; The New York Times; Grist; Agri-Pulse; Huffington Post; Politico; University of Vermont, University Communications; NPR; Bloomberg; National Academies News; The Associated Press

Vision: The Societies Washington, DC Science Policy Office (SPO) will advocate the importance and value of the agronomic, crop and soil sciences in developing national science policy and ensuring the necessary public-sector investment in the continued health of the environment for the well being of humanity. The SPO will assimilate, interpret, and disseminate in a timely manner to Society members information about relevant agricultural, natural resources and environmental legislation, rules and regulations under consideration by Congress and the Administration.

This page of the ASA-CSSA-SSSA web site will highlight current news items relevant to Science Policy. It is not an endorsement of any position.