Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment
The University of Tennessee's Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment (ISSE) seeks to promote the development of policies, technologies, and educational programs that cut across multiple disciplines, engage the university’s research faculty and staff, and grow in response to pressing environmental and security issues facing the state, the nation, and the globe.
News & Events:
Convened by the China-US Joint Research Center as a follow-up of its 2009 annual conference, a topical China-US workshop on "Sustainable Management of Soil and Water Resources" was held on Jan. 6-7, 2010 in Shenyang, China. Jack Parker co-chaired the workshop and made a presentation on “Models, Uncertainty and Cost Optimization of Water Management Decisions.” Jie (Joe) Zhuang helped organize the workshop and made a presentation titled “Transport of Colloid-Associated Contaminants in Porous Media.”
At the workshop, a China-US Joint Laboratory of Soil and Water was proposed and seven UT faculty members were invited to be research faculty of the joint laboratory, which will focus on collaborative soil and water research and student exchanges in next three years.
Shesh Koirala made the following presentation at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, December 14-18, 2009, San Francisco, CA:
S. R. Koirala and R. W. Gentry, Using Wavelets to Evaluate Persistence of High Frequency Hydrologic and Hydrochemistry Signals (H51I-0908).
ISSE's Jack Parker gave the following presentations at the DoD Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) meeting in Washington, DC on Dec 2-4: "Practical Cost-Optimization of Characterization and Remediation Decisions at DNAPL Sites with Consideration of Prediction Uncertainty" (Jack Parker, Peter Kitanidis, Michael Cardiff, Ungtae Kim, Xiaoyi Liu, Dave Becker, and Aleisa Bloom); and "Estimating DNAPL Source Depletion Time Model Formulation, Calibration and Uncertainty" (Jack Parker, Ungtae Kim, Mark Widdowson, Peter Kitanidis, Frank Chapelle, Carmen Lebron, Xiaoyi Liu, and Michael Cardiff).
Reports & Publications:
Ungtae Kim and J. J. Kaluarachchi. 2009. Hydrologic Model Calibration Using Discontinuous Data: An Example From the Upper Blue Nile River Basin of Ethiopia. Hydrological Processes 23(26): 3705-3717. DOI: 10.1002/hyp.7465 (link)
Ungtae Kim and J. J. Kaluarachchi. 2009. Climate Change Impacts on Water Resources in the Upper Blue Nile River Basin, Ethiopia. Journal of American Water Resources Association 46(6): 1361-1378. DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-1688.2009.00370.x (link)
G. Tang, M. A. Mayes, J. C. Parker, X. L. Yin, D. B. Watson, and P. M. Jardine. 2009. Improving parameter estimation for column experiments by multi-model evaluation and comparison. Journal of Hydrology 376, 567–578. doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2009.07.063.
M. A. Mayes, G. Tang, P. M. Jardine, L. D. McKay, X. L. Yin, M. N. Pace, J. C. Parker, F. Zhang, T. L. Melhorn, and R. Dansby-Sparks. 2009 (in press). Influence of sedimentary bedding on reactive transport parameters under unsaturated conditions. Soil Science of America Journal.
F. Zhang and J. C. Parker. 2009 (in press). An efficient modeling approach to simulate heat and mass transfer between fracture and matrix regions for oil shale retorting. Transport in Porous Media.
Jie Zhuang, John S. Tyner, and Edmund Perfect. 2009. Colloid transport and remobilization in unsaturated porous media during transient flow. Journal of Hydrology 377, 112-119, doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2009.08.011.
Read the 2009 ISSE Annual Report:
A message from the Director...
"ISSE Shapes Sustainable Research Agenda"
Randy Gentry,
Director
Sustainability, a term still fairly new to the lexicon, defies a tidy definition in part because it can be applied to virtually every aspect of human activity and thus encompasses the complex interaction among economic, social, and environmental factors. Perhaps the best working definition of the term is derived from the 1987 report titled "Our Common Future," also known as the Brundtland Report. The report identifies sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." [continued...]