Smith College
AC-8: Campus as a Living Laboratory

Environmental monitoring at the Ada and Archibald MacLeish Field Station currently comprises measurement of meteorological variables and vegetation. Continuous measurements from atop an eighty-foot tower include atmospheric pressure, temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation, and wind speed and direction. These data are complemented by precipitation recorded by a heated tipping-bucket rain gauge at ground level. Additionally, three 20 x 50 m (0.1 ha) permanent vegetation plots were established in hemlock-dominated forests in 2009, and micrometeorological stations were added to these plots during the summer of 2010. Shorter-term monitoring efforts have included snow sampling, geochemical surveys of streamwater, and assessing the differences in throughfall chemistry and volume between deciduous and hemlock forest stands. Data can be accessed by faculty for use in student/faculty research and teaching via our website (listed below)

Bechtel Environmental Classroom Supported by a grant from the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, Smith College completed the construction of a 2,300 sq.ft. building at the Ada and Archibald MacLeish Field Station in 2012. The Bechtel Environmental Classroom is designed to be one of the ""greenest"" buildings in the United States, and was certifed as a Living Building in 2014 (see link below) . A 9.4-kW solar array generates more electricity than the building uses on an annual basis, and Smith students and the building's designers vetted all of its building materials to ensure that they were the most sustainably-sourced materials available. The building has successfully completed the Living Building Challenge, a rigorous green-building standard overseen by the International Living Futures Institute. The Bechtel Environmental Classroom developed from a student design for an outdoor classroom and pavilion at the MacLeish Field Station. The Bechtel Foundation's generous grant expanded the vision from a pavilion to a fully functioning building that could serve as a shelter and educational space for students and other visitors to the field station. The building comprises a seminar and lecture space, a ""dry"" lab room, a small office, a kitchenette, and two composting toilets. Students continue to monitor the building for its Living Building status, and are actively engaged in the continued development of the building details and educational offerings as part of a number of different internships and classes.

Smith College Dining Services is committed to supporting local food and sustainabliity efforts. In 2014, as part of her work for the Sustainable Food Concentration, a student worked with Dining Services to revamp their website to include information to further engage the campus in understanding the issues associated with sustainable food, and where their food is sourced. She has been supporting Dining Services by researching how to expand their offerings of local and sustainable food, and has also developed informational brochures and other educational outreach material. A two-year grant (awarded spring 2014) from the Henry P. Kendall Foundation promises to bolster sustainability efforts at Smith. The $168,751 grant will support the ongoing efforts of Smith College Dining Services to develop sustainable, local and healthy food practices. Efforts supported by the grant include: • Hiring additional staff and student workers to establish sourcing protocols aimed at encouraging the use of locally grown produce and locally raised meat and fish. • Evaluating Smith’s student-run community garden, which currently lacks a long-term planting and business plan, in an effort to guarantee future sustainable success. • Conducting an evaluation of current menus to determine beef usage that will inform Smith’s practices regarding purchasing local and/or grass-fed beef. • Identifying local products that can be processed, chopped and/or frozen, via the Western Massachusetts Food Processing Center, and then stored for future use. Dining services’ current sustainability practices include: purchasing cage-free eggs, fair-trade coffee, local yogurt and granola, and using a bicycle-delivery system for catering Smith events. About 22 percent of Dining Services’ food purchases are from local, sustainable sources, and humane or environmentally friendly sources, according to Dining Services Director Kathy Zieja. “We would like to increase that number,” she says. “Currently, we purchase as much local fruit and vegetables as is seasonally possible from about 10 to 15 farmers and producers in our Massachusetts valley and in southern Vermont. The Kendall Foundation grant will allow us to explore further opportunities.”

Mill River Greenway Initiative The Mill River Greenway Initiative is a working group of local citizens who aim to protect the Mill River watershed, preserve its cultural artifacts, enhance its biological health and encourage recreational activity. Their goal is to design and create a greenway along the river. Reid Bertone-Johnson is working with a group of six students in the STRIDE (Student Research in Departments) and AEMES (Achieving Excellence in Mathematics, Engineering and Sciences) programs on the Mill River Greenway project. The group has met with a newly formed committee of citizens in Williamsburg who are considering a multi-use connector path between the villages of Haydenville and Williamsburg. Smith's Mill River Group will work in geographic information systems and with GPS (global positioning system) cameras to gather data and build maps for the committee's use. Reid will also work with the Smith group on interpretation materials for areas of the Mill River near and on Smith's campus.

"Engineers for a Sustainable World student organization (ESW) completed a multi-year project to design and fabricate a pedal powered cargo vehicle for Catering Services: http://www.smith.edu/news/catering-cuts-carbon-footprint-with-cargo-cycle/"

Students in ENV 312 Environmental Science and Policy Capstone completed a semester long research project on redusing food waste at Smith College. The resulting report will inform campus waste management decisions and action.

English sudents measured river discharge in the Mill River, compared their results to the on-campus monitoring station, and used historical USGS data from a monitoring station a kilometer upstream of Paradise Pond to calculate flood recurrence intervals for the river. They then wrote reports that will inform campus pond management decisions and action.

A STRIDE (Student Research in Departments program) student created a catalogue of the biodiversity of living organisms at Smith's Ada and Archibald MacLeish Field Station. She will present a poster of her findings at the All-College Collaborations. Her work will continue to be built upon over time and will inform conservation, management and planning decisions and action. Her work will allow the Field Station Manager to better coordinate ongoing and future research in a sustainable manner.

Engineers for a Sustainable World student organization (ESW) designed and fabricated a dance stage called Tinydance that could be folded and towed by a standard bicycle. The stage has been used to engage the larger community in thinking about sustainability issues: 'Arts for the Earth' Event hosted by Engineers for a Sustainable World , Thursday, April 10, Noon, Ford 240 Hosted by Engineers for a Sustainable World, this event is the second in the interdisciplinary series, Arts for the Earth! A collaboration by the tinydance project, Celebrations Dance Company, Engineers for a Sustainable World, and the Smiffenpoofs, Arts for the Earth examines the relationship between the arts, engineering, and sustainability. This event features the unveiling of the newly constructed tinydance stage, a combined music and dance performance, a great lunch, and a presentation/discussion surrounding sustainability.

American Chestnut Blight resistant chestnut hybrids will soon be available in large enough numbers to begin restoring the American chestnut into natural forests. With this prospect in mind, the Center for the Environment is sponsoring and supporting a series of experiments at the MacLeish Field Station with the goal of testing methods of restoring American chestnut hybrids into various natural forest communities of southern New England. These experiments include an investigation of chestnut seed germination ecology in a natural setting, the growth response of seedlings to forest gaps of varying size, the competitive interactions of chestnut with other native hardwoods, and an examination of the chestnut's response along a soil moisture gradient. The chestnut project will be designed to provide several levels or access points for student involvement. For example, the very interested student could use the chestnut project to develop her own one to two semester-long research project under the umbrella of the broader experiment, enabling her to work at the MacLeish Field Station and potentially develop connections with the American Chestnut Foundation at the state and national levels. For students with less time to commit to an independent project, but with strong interests in conservation, this project has the potential to provide a larger number of students with the chance to work on American chestnut conservation for a day.

http://www.smith.edu/ceeds/macleish_monitoring.php, http://living-future.org/case-study/bechtelenvironmentalclassroom, http://www.smith.edu/diningservices/local.php, http://www.smith.edu/ceeds/macleish_research.php