Service Project Profiles

Mission

Service I professionally serve in various capacities with many organizations. In addition to the direct roles listed below, I serve as: outreach member to ESF initiatives in K-12 activities, faculty mentoring, and professional development; advisor to many students, our junior faculty, and environmentally-oriented community groups; reviewer of approximately ten scholarly articles in a wide-range of national and international journals each year; reviewer of approximately 15 proposals to local, state, federal and international agencies each year, and committee member on several departmental, a few college and cross-institutional initiatives. I am interested in both lending my expertise in water resources and ecological engineering to assist committees, communities, and institutions and in lending my time to learn from and assist others in addressing environmental stewardship needs.

Roles & Organizations

Weather Monitoring and Reporting

In June of 2002 a small group at ESF launched an ESF Live Weather on the Internet, which compliments the data gathered by multiple remote stations and other meteorological links

Volunteering

  • From December 2005 to August 2006 my family and I were sponsored by a CIES Fulbright award to live in Cyprus so I could provide research (with two agencies) and teaching (with two universities) support. My wife also volunteered with in the Elementary Science Education Department of the University of Cyprus. Our efforts were successful, noted by presenting at conferences, publishing findings, graduating students, largely due to our gracious and helpful hosts; like most volunteer experiences, we certainly gained in spirit and experience just as much if not more than we technically provided.
  • From June of 1990 to September of 1992, I lived and worked in Honduras as a Peace Corps aspirant and volunteer. I am much indebted to the generous people of Honduras for providing me with a welcoming, enlightening, and enriching experience. While in Trujillo, Honduras I performed a tremendous diversity of duties. A primary project was to work with the Honduras Forestry Agency, a Canadian development organization, the UNESCO group, the Trujillo municipality, and many local leaders and educators, to research and establish two protected natural areas within a coastal Caribbean watershed. A concurrent step was to foster a local group to manage these areas, essentially an effort toward sustaining our work and placing myself out of a job.

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    Service News and Celebrations

    This 2009 we are actively working on a community water supply project for a rural mountain village in northern Honduras, called Buena Vista. This project is sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation to create a system which sustains ecological function and provides adequate supplies of potable water, using biogeochemical cycling of the watershed as a natural filter system. The ESF student Engineers without Borders group is leading this work. In late 2008 Don Ferlow, Don Siegel, and I delivered a wetland design workshop to approximately 50 professional engineers and landscape architects, and used our River Table to demonstrate watershed monitoring of watertable depth and riparian hydrology. Our hydraulics lab and exercises in stormwater management have been used with several other dynamic outreach activities led by the ESF Outreach team and our Department, such as providing an interactive exhibit at the Great New York State Fair. Community support of our research and teaching is expressed through requests for service and outreach.

    Return throughout 2009 to learn more about our service impact!