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ALBANY – The State Museum will receive a $400,000 federal energy grant and additional state funds to investigate the potential for storing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in New York geological formations in an effort to decrease the amount of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere.

The project is part of a public-private climate change research program being conducted in conjunction with the New York State Energy Research Development Authority (NYSERDA), which is working with research firms, energy developers, universities, and government agencies.

Geologist Dr. Taury Smith will lead the Museum project to evaluate gas shale formations for CO2 sequestration and enhanced gas recovery potential throughout the state. This will build upon a current NYSERDA contract with the Museum’s geologists to assess New York’s formations for sequestration potential.

Carbon sequestration involves chemically capturing carbon dioxide from power plants or other sources before it is released into the atmosphere. The CO2 is then compressed and piped underground to an appropriate site to be injected and stored or “sequestered” in geological formations deep underground.

The Museum will provide an assessment of geologic sequestration potential in New York in support of the Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership. This is one of seven regional partnerships across the U.S. formed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy. The area of review includes New York State, with a focus on adjacent states in the Appalachian Basin (Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio). Museum researchers will study an area starting from the counties just south of Lake Ontario to the Pennsylvania border and east to Otsego and Delaware counties.

The Museum will work with other Geological Survey teams in the partnership to better define key geologic formations that were mapped in adjacent states.

This grant is one of several major grants the Museum has received in recent months. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded four grants to the New York State Museum, an unusually high number for a single research institution. Although the NSF receives about 40,000 grant applications a year for research, education and training projects, the current funding rate hovers at only about 8-10 percent.

Dr. Roland Kays, the Museum’s curator of mammals, received two NSF grants. One was for $1.1 million to establish Movebank (Movebank.org), a project to collect data about animal movement, in collaboration with Princeton University and the San Diego Computer Center. Movebank will provide a mechanism for biologists who track animals to save and compare data to address such questions as the effects of global climate change and human-caused landscape change. It also will complement new technologies for collecting data in real-time by providing live interaction and alerts. Theoreticians will be able to use the site to test ideas related to ecological patterns, evolutionary processes and disease spread. The site will allow conservation managers to show population changes over time and space. Educators will be able to go to the site to find examples to illustrate biological principles and let students ask and answer their own questions about wild animals.

Kays also was awarded a $558,770 NSF grant to study the role of rodents in seed dispersal. He and Martin Wikelski of Princeton University are working at the Smithsonian Research Station in Panama, using a new motion-sensitive radio transmitter they have invented to follow the fate of a seed until it either sprouts a seedling or is eaten.

The study will focus on how seeds are dispersed and allowed to germinate once they fall away from the mother plant. Kays and Wikelski will test the theory that predators kill rodents after they bury the seed but before they come back to eat it. The factors affecting whether rodents are dispersers or predators are very important for forest management, where rodents are viewed as pests that should be killed.

Dr. Jason Cryan, director of the Museum’s Laboratory for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics, received a $328,616 NSF grant to conduct a large-scale investigation into the evolution of spittlebugs, a group of plant-feeding insects found in most terrestrial ecosystems. Worldwide, they inflict heavy economic damage on such crops as sugar cane, corn, rice and improved pasture grasses, causing up to a 70% reduction in agricultural yields in infested areas. The understanding of spittlebug evolution, generated by this research, will be particularly important to the control of several known crop pests, and could help to prevent future outbreaks of novel spittlebug pests. Also, the cutting-edge evolutionary analyses carried out through this research will serve as a model for similar studies on other plant and animal groups.

The NSF awarded a $121,396 grant to Dr. Julieann Van Nest to conduct archaeological research at a large unusual group of annular mounds at Perch Lake, east of Lake Ontario in northern New York. Construction of earthen mounds, as integral components of humanly-built landscapes, extends back 5,000 years and more in eastern North American prehistory. The 2,000 year-old Perch Lake mounds have long been the focus of interest but their purpose has remained a mystery. Working with members of the New York State Archaeological Association, Museum researchers will explore several proposed hypotheses, including a new hypothesis that the structures were large earthen ovens used to process aquatic plant foods.

State Geologist Dr. William Kelly, director of the New York State Geological Survey (NYSGS), has also announced several grants. These include a $394,000 grant for a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) – NYSGS cooperative program, which is part of the National Geological Mapping Act. This provides for bedrock and surficial geologic mapping at a scale useful for the needs of municipal planners, emergency responders, architects and developers. This also provides funds to digitize geologic maps.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation has awarded $15,000 to NYSGS for the second phase of a study to locate and map all of the abandoned underground mines in New York. NYSGS also has received $5,000 in seed money from the USGS to begin documenting the state’s holdings of drill core, oil and gas well logs, minerals and fossils. This will help to preserve the large amount of geological information, collected from thousands of drilling, mining and other projects, which is in grave danger of being lost.

The New York State Museum is a cultural program of the New York State Department of Education. Founded in 1836, the Museum has the longest continuously operating state natural history research and collection survey in the U.S. Located on Madison Avenue in Albany, the Museum is open daily from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. except on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. Admission is free. Further information can be obtained by calling (518) 474-5877 or visiting the museum website at www.nysm.nysed.gov.

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