Over the past three years, Ben Ruddell, associate professor of NAU’s School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS), has led a team of multi-institution engineers and data scientists in developing FEWSION, a data fusion project that maps the food, energy and water supply chains for every community in the United States. The maps are based on an… Read more
water
Protecting future generations: NAU scientists study Arctic community’s exposure to toxic pollutants
St. Lawrence Island, just south of the Bering Strait in Arctic Alaska, is one of the most isolated places on the planet. Wild, mountainous and remote, the island is inhabited by 1,600 indigenous Yupik Eskimos who subsist by hunting and fishing.
Although the island’s natural environment may appear pristine, residents are exposed to high levels of persistent organic pollutants—toxic chemicals that remain in the environment for many years. Residents are concerned… Read more
There will be an app for that: NAU scientists researching intermittent streams with smartphone technology
As collaborators on one of the first coordinated ecology research projects to study what happens to streams as they dry across the United States, Northern Arizona University researchers Ben Ruddell and Abe Springer will develop an improved smartphone application for mapping wet and dry reaches of streams.
Based on lessons learned from phone apps developed to map the desert springs of… Read more
NAU planetary scientist’s study suggests widespread presence of water on the Moon
NAU assistant professor of planetary science Christopher Edwards co-authored a paper recently published in Nature Geoscience that has generated interest among scientists in the field as well as in mainstream science news, such as Science Dailyand Outer Places.
The researchers analyzed remote-sensing data from two lunar missions and concluded that water appears to be evenly spread across the surface of the moon, not confined to a particular region or type of terrain as… Read more