A national workshop held at UD last year has led to the creation of a new center where faculty scientists will study what is known as the Earth’s “critical zone,” the area that sustains life on the planet.

The zone encompasses the outermost surface of the planet, from the vegetation canopy to groundwater, and is exceptionally vulnerable to human activity, according to Donald L. Sparks, S. Hallock du Pont Chair of Plant and Soil Sciences and director of the new Center for Critical Zone Research.

“Because the critical zone includes air, water and soil and is the focal point of food production, it has a major effect on human life,” Sparks says. “It is imperative that we better understand the interactions that occur there.”

The formation of the center, which will be a multidisciplinary initiative, was announced in October at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute. Plans call for it to bring together scientists and engineers across the University to focus on the interactions of rock, soil, water, air and living organisms that regulate and populate the natural habitat.

The center expects to develop strong partnerships with local, state and federal government agencies, with industry and with the public. A key goal is to integrate science, ethics and public policy, Sparks says.

“The Center for Critical Zone Research is part of a growing network of centers at the University of Delaware that bring together scientists from a variety of disciplines to focus on complex problems of great importance,” President David P. Roselle says. “Such high-quality research is a hallmark of the University as it tackles the challenges of the 21st century.”

Provost Dan Rich says the center “will do important work in a field that is vital to the well-being of this state,” adding that its research findings “will have relevance locally, nationally and internationally.”

The primary mission of the center is to better understand the complex chemical, biological and physical processes that occur in the critical zone and thereby to improve the environmental health of Delaware, Sparks says. The state is located at the center of one of the most heavily populated regions of the United States and is experiencing rapid growth in coastal and rural areas. That, coupled with industrial pollution and intensive animal agricultural production, is placing increased pressure on already fragile terrestrial and coastal marine environments.

Key environmental challenges concern drinking-water quality, the health of estuaries, air quality and biodiversity, all of which could have an impact on the state’s tourism and agriculture, as well as on human health. The state has one of the highest incidences of cancer in the nation, Sparks says, with evidence that some cancers may be linked to environmental factors.

But, he says, such problems aren’t unique to Delaware: “Development is having a great effect on the critical zone, with some of the best land around the world being converted to buildings, roads and concrete. That has implications for air and water quality and biodiversity and, over time, could put pressure on our ability to produce food.”

The center will bring together faculty from a number of departments and programs at the University, including soil science, marine science, chemistry and biochemistry, climatology, materials science and engineering. Additionally, UD has strengths in environmental policy in the College of Human Services, Education and Public Policy and in the College of Marine and Earth Studies.

Research on issues of importance in the critical zone has been identified as a priority by the Delaware Science and Technology Council, which is chaired by Lt. Gov. John Carney, and by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other federal agencies.

A team of UD faculty will lead the center, with management support through the Delaware Biotechnology Institute. It will be an extension of the Delaware Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, which is funded by NSF and focuses on complex environmental systems and ecosystem health.

Sparks says he hopes the center will serve as a portal through which state officials and policy makers can gain insight into important issues surrounding the critical zone.

UD has taken a lead role in the field of critical zone research, in 2005 serving as host for an NSF-sponsored workshop that resulted in a call by scientists for an international initiative to study the critical zone. Sparks co-chaired the workshop organizing committee with Sue Brantley, professor of geosciences at Penn State University.

As key parts of the initiative, the scientists called for the development of an international Critical Zone Exploration Network and a systematic approach to the investigation of processes in the critical zone across a broad array of sciences, including geology, soil science, biology, ecology, chemistry, geochemistry, geomorphology and hydrology.

Brantley says researchers must look to both the past and the future.

“We need to understand how living organisms interact with the solid Earth at the scale of a billionth of a meter, as well as the scale of landscapes, and how these effects have changed over geologic time and how they will change into the future as humans continue to drastically alter the Earth’s surface,” Brantley says.

Despite the critical zone’s importance for life, scientific approaches—and funding paradigms—have neither promoted nor emphasized integrated research agendas to investigate the region’s physical, biological, geological and chemical processes, according to the report resulting from the NSF workshop. The scientists say a national initiative is needed.

“We have to do more in collaborative and interdisciplinary research,” Sparks says. “We also must educate the public about this important issue and reach out to policy makers to provide them the best science available to help them solve important problems that arise.”

Critical zone sites include an extraordinary diversity of soils and ecosystems, ranging from the tropics to the poles, from deserts to wetlands and from rock-bound uplands to delta sediments. Understanding and predicting responses to global and regional change is necessary as scientists seek to mitigate anthropogenic impacts on the Earth, the report says.

“We need to learn how to stimulate scientists trained in different disciplines to communicate with one another effectively,” Brantley says. “Once these scientists communicate and begin to tackle critical zone questions with the newest analytical and modeling techniques, we will see our ability to predict changes in this zone expand rapidly.”

The report concludes that Earth’s terrestrial organisms, including humans, depend on the critical zone for survival and that the rates of change of air, water, solid Earth materials and biota must be understood as humans drive environmental change on the planet.

The steering committee for the center includes Sparks, as well as fellow UD faculty J. Thomas Sims, T.A. Baker Professor of Plant and Soil Sciences; George W. Luther III, Maxwell P. and Mildred H. Harrington Professor of Marine Studies; S. Craig Cary, professor of marine biology and biochemistry; David L. Kirchman, Maxwell P. and Mildred H. Harrington Professor of Marine Studies; Dominic M. Di Toro, Edward Davis Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; John F. Rabolt, Karl W. and Renate Böer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering; Stanley I. Sandler, Henry Belin du Pont Chair of Chemical Engineering; Thomas P. Beebe, professor of chemistry and biochemistry; Murray V. Johnston III, professor of chemistry and biochemistry; and John M. Byrne, Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and director of UD’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy.

—Neil Thomas, AS ’76