Does Mother Nature take Visa? Commercial and residential developers might be asking this question one day. Actually, calculating how much “work” an ecosystem does isn’t a new concept, according to ecological engineer Dave Tilley, who teaches in the Natural Resource Management Program. During a recent interview published in the environmental newsletter Leaf Litter, Tilley identified forested wetlands as the most valuable type of ecosystem. It takes the most work to create, providing valuable services such as filtering nutrients out of polluted water. The work required by nature even has its own name: emergy, from “embodied energy,” a word not recognized by Webster’s yet but worth a million hits on Google.

"There needs to be an exchange system setup,” says Tilley, a faculty member in Environmental Science and Technology, “that forces consumers of ecosystem services to pay into a fund in proportion to how much ecosystem service they use and its value.” Developers would have to pay emergy-dollars—Tilley prefers to call them eco$—a monetary equivalent for the use of land that would otherwise be performing valuable work for the environment. Tilley is working with EPA and the Conservation Fund to secure funding, he says, “to look at the Chesapeake Bay watershed and come up with values for whole ecosystems—terrestrial forests, wetland, marshes.”

Imagine using a hot water treatment to “cook” aphids, mealybugs, scale, thrips, and spider mites instead of spraying them with pesticides. A University of Maryland Cooperative Extension team has collaborated with a colleague in Hawaii who’s developed a way for treating tropical plants. Team leader Stanton Gill directed experiments in Maryland to find threshold temperatures for temperate-zone plant material. “There’s a small temperature window,” Gill says, “at which insect pests die and plant material is tolerant.” Most plants, he says, can tolerate between 120°F and 125°F for varying amounts of time.

The goal, says Gill, specialist in Integrated Pest Management (IPM) for nurseries and greenhouses, was to devise a portable hot water immersion system for treating plant cuttings while insect pests are propagating. The system needed to be economical and relatively easy for nursery plant growers to build and operate. Aiding Gill, who works at the Central Maryland Research and Education Center, Ellicott City, were ag engineer David Ross, commercial horticulture specialists Chuck Schuster and Ginny Rosenkranz, IPM specialist Paula Shrewsbury, and ag technician Suzanne Klick. More details appear in "Keeping the Heat on Pests" (PDF), which appeared January 1 on the American Nurseryman web site.

A goal of alum Matthew Fleming (’97) is “getting the Chesapeake Bay watershed removed from EPA’s list of impaired waters.” A graduate of the Natural Resource Management Program (NRMT), Fleming works as chair of the state’s Department of Natural Resource’s Chesapeake Bay Program Living Resources Subcommittee.

Fleming believes in “the need to adopt an ecosystem-scale view to managing natural resources,” a philosophy stressed by his NRMT professors. His job, he says, “is to advance the science of habitat protection and restoration.” Through the “Targeted Watershed” project, Fleming is part of an effort to develop best business practices and processes. “Hopefully my approach to projects, programs, and policies,” he says, “is to put them into a framework that focuses on whole, functioning systems, not just the system's parts.”

NRMT is a program of the Environmental Science and Technology department.

What should we have done when we looked outside, aghast, to find our azaleas and forsythia blooming during the holidays? Wrap them in freezer paper? Ship them off to the in-laws in south Florida?

The answer is “not much,” according to Jon Traunfeld, coordinator of the state’s Master Gardener Program. Traunfeld, also a specialist in fruits and vegetables for the Home and Garden Information Center (HGIC), takes a long view of the warm weather we had till recently in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic. “Enjoy it and learn from it” is essentially what he told the Prince George’s County Gazette in mid-January. Because if it’s a result of global warming, we’d better get used to it. Focus instead on growing fruit in your yard. Or send HGIC that pruning or watering question you’ve never gotten around to finding the answer for. HGIC is a program of University of Maryland Cooperative Extension.

Many people in the college deserve congratulations this month. Let me start with Mark Varner, faculty member in animal and avian sciences (ANSC), honored as a mentor to a 2006-2007 Phillip Merrill Presidential Scholar, Carin Cordelli.

I also congratulate Mark--and Bob Hill, plant sciences and landscape architecture; Dale Johnson, agricultural and resource economics; and Ray Miller, international programs--for a grant, awarded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, Higher Education Development Program, to back the three-pronged effort to establish a regional distance-learning center for southern Russia, to expand the Internet-based veterinarian continuing education program, and to launch a certificate program for managing small agricultural businesses. The college’s International Programs and Stavropol State Agrarian University, now Russia’s top agricultural institution of higher education, will share the grant.

A well done to two more ANCS faculty, Roselina Angel and Inma Estevez, for their planning grant award to develop an eXtension community of practice in profitable and sustainable poultry, with a focus on welfare, nutrition, and the environment. eXtension—which is slated to become the webmd for information about natural resources, family health and finances, food and nutrition, lawn and garden, and crops and farm animals—is a national online educational partnership of land-grant universities.

A fourth ANSC faculty member, Brian Bequette, deserves congratulations for his grant proposal to identify key metabolism-related genes in beef cattle. The proposal was rated outstanding by the USDA’s National Research Initiative. Brian’s grant actually represents the sixth active USDA-NRI project in his department.

Congratulations to University of Maryland Cooperative Extension educators and specialists Chuck Schuster, David Ross, Susan Schoenian, and Ginny Rosenkranz for their awards from the National Association of County Agricultural Agents, an Extension organization for professional development.

Other Extension folks who deserve recognition—for their presentations in Delaware during the state’s Agriculture Week, sponsored by University of Delaware, Delaware State, and the state’s department of agriculture—are: Laura Hunsberger, Andrew Ristvey, Mike Newell, Eddie Johnson, John Hall, Ginny Rosenkranz, Nancy Stewart, David Ross, Doug Tregoning, Caragh Fitzgerald, John Lea-Cox, Susan Schoenian, Bob Kratochvil, Shannon Dill, Crystal Terhune, Dave Myers, Jerry Brust, Kate Everts, Galen Dively, and Frank Gouin.

And a well done to Edwin Remsberg, college photographer and member of marketing and media services, for his grant awarded by the Maryland Agriculture Council.