Jan W Hopmans Chair, Department of Land, Air and Water Resources

Newsletter - Spring 2008

Chair’s Greetings

It has been an exciting last few years for our Department. I am delighted to bring you up-to-date on the major developments of the recent past, present and into the future, by way of this first LAWR  E-Newsletter. Changes are happening in our teaching and outreach, while departmental research initiatives continue to be first rate. In 2006, the department initiated a department-wide strategic planning process that culminated into a 35-page document summarizing the department’s vision for the next decade. Despite current budget challenges for UC, the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources is constantly looking for opportunities to provide for a secure academic environment in the future.

The strategic plan lays out the vision of LAWR, which seeks to integrate our exemplary disciplinary themes with multidisciplinary environmental teaching, research and outreach. We established a plan of development along four of such integrated themes – Climate Change, Environmental Quality, Agricultural Sustainability, and Landscape Interfaces & Processes that combined capture the core elements of LAWR, while at the same time representing the strong disciplinary programs in hydrology, soil and biogeochemistry, and atmospheric science. The goal of the strategic plan is to place LAWR in a position by which it will continue to attract top scientists in our research and teaching areas, meet student enrollment goals with high quality courses in a broad range of areas, and increase public awareness by initiating a new and innovative outreach program.

Together with the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy we have developed a new major called Environmental Sciences and Management (ESM) that integrates Biophysical Sciences with Policy and includes 6 tracks including Climate Change & Air Quality, Watershed Science, GIS & Remote Sensing, and Soil & Biogeochemistry. In the past few years, our faculty developed 10 new high-enrolment courses such as Crisis in the Environment, Water & Power, Photography: Bridging Art and Science, and World’s Ecosystems and Geography, to meet the Universities’ teaching expectations.
The Department hired Amy King as our outreach coordinator. This was a new position that was created to broaden our existing outreach activities and to generate new ones. She has developed many new outreach projects, and we plan for her to describe some of her more recent and innovative projects in our next E-newsletter.  With the John Muir Institute of the Environment, LAWR is offering Climate Change 101 - A seminar series for non-specialists on the science, technology and policy aspects of climate change, presented in the Winter quarter and through the Spring at the CalEPA building in Sacramento for agency staff.

This year we hired Dr. Ben Houlton as a new faculty member in the area of biogeochemical cycles of ecosystems. We are currently searching for a new Soil Chemist, ensuring that we can offer a complete Soil Science curriculum in the future. I note that our departmental Soil Science Curriculum was recently rated as the top-ranked program in the nation by the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Dr. William Horwath was recently selected as the James G. Boswell Endowed Chair in Soil Science through a 1.5 million endowment by Boswell Farms Inc. Other existing endowed chairs in LAWR include Louise Jackson as the John B. Orr Endowed Chair in Environmental Plant Sciences and Dr. Thomas Harter who was selected as the Robert M Hagan Endowed Cooperative Extension Chair in Water Resources. The link at http://lawr.ucdavis.edu/a&f_endowments.htm gives much more information. In this first E-newsletter, we feature selected research projects across the four integrated research themes of our Department.

There is much more to tell, however, just not enough space for now. I welcome you all to browse through our departmental webpage by clicking the ‘LAWR home’ tab above, to check out recent activities and other departmental information. I hope that you find this way of E-communication useful and informative. I encourage you to ask others to subscribe, by including their email address and name in our database:  Newsletter Subscription form. Also, you may forward the E-Newsletter to your colleagues and friends, by way of using the ‘Forward’ button at the bottom of the screen. Wish you all a fine summer.

Jan Hopmans