Opportunity Title:

Integrated Nitrogen and Phosphorus Footprints in Food Production

Research Area:

Ecosystems

EPA Lab/Center/Office:

National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL)

Location:

Corvallis, OR

Duration:

6 months

Brief Summary:

Efforts to support sustainable food and energy production require an approach that accounts for multiple sources of pollution. Environmental footprint calculators are being developed at a variety of scales to provide this information to decision-makers. The fellow would contribute to a multi-institution research project looking to quantify the phosphorus footprint of food production in the U.S. and Canada.

Opportunity Description:

Humans have fundamentally altered global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. The creation of ‘reactive nitrogen’ and mining of phosphorus fertilizers has fueled human progress and helped to vastly increase food production, but it has had unintended consequences for air and water pollution that have immense costs to society. There is now a movement to better identify the sources and effects of ‘reactive nitrogen’, to create a ‘nitrogen footprint’ at individual, institutional and national levels, and to examine ways to reduce the magnitude of this footprint.  In that regard, over the past several years a number of nitrogen footprint tools have been developed by the N-Print project (www.n-print.org).  Water quality problems, in particular those related to eutrophication, are driven by both N and P, thus looking at the release of both elements to the environment from human actions will allow us to address both of these drivers of the water quality problems in concert. 

The fellow would contribute to a multi-institution research project looking to quantify the phosphorus footprint of food choices, including phosphorus release to the environment. This project would allow for the development of skills in data access from government and university sources related to crop phosphorus use, creation of a database of crop P content and fertilizer application rates across the U.S. and Canada, and application of these skills to quantify P used in food production.  The fellow would be based at the EPA facility in Corvallis, OR, but would be collaborating in a multi-institutional setting with scientists from the University of New Hampshire, Washington State University, McGill University and the University of Virginia.  Through this project, the fellow would learn how to connect N and P use in food production to environmental P losses and apply this understanding to develop approaches for consumer education and policy development.

Project scientists: 

Geneviève Metson, Washington State University- Vancouver Graham MacDonald and Tim Moore, McGill University

Allison Leach and Jenn Andrews, University of New Hampshire

Jana Compton, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

James Galloway and Elizabeth Castner, University of Virginia

Opportunities for Professional Development:

The fellow would be based at EPA’s Western Ecology Division, which is home to a number of research projects in the Safe and Sustainable Water Resources Research Program and the Sustainable and Healthy Communities Research Program. The fellow would gain an understanding of the amount of N & P released to the environment due to food and energy and apply this knowledge to approaches to the education of the consumer and the development of policy instruments.

Point of Contact or Mentor:

Jana Compton (compton.jana@epa.gov)