Fall/Winter 2024
High lead levels in Portland neighborhoods
The culprit: old telecommunications cables?
Decades of environmental and public health research have taught us that we need to get the lead out — lead is a potent neurotoxin, with children particularly vulnerable to its wide range of effects. Lead is no longer found in gasoline or paint, but its toxic legacy remains, as it persists in the environment and continues to present a public health threat.
CEOAS environmental geochemist Alyssa Shiel has been interested in lead levels in Portland neighborhoods for some time. While measuring lead in samples of moss taken from around the city, she discovered a strange anomaly: Lead levels in moss are as much as 600 times higher in older Portland neighborhoods than in rural comparison sites.
Measurements were highest at sites where lead-sheathed telecommunications cables were once used. The findings raise concerns about lead exposure in pre-1960 neighborhoods where the cables were common and in some cases are still in place even though they are no longer in use.
Lead from the cables is being leached by rain slowly over time, Shiel believes, accumulating in the soil and vegetation, including moss, below. Contaminated soil can also become airborne, transporting lead to areas not directly under the cables.
“We do see that the lead is migrating,” Shiel said. “The moss samples are showing that lead is not just dormant in soil near the telecom cables but is being mobilized in the air.”
Shiel has developed a website, Lead-Sheathed Telephone Cables in Older Neighborhoods, with a map and pictures of old telecom cables, so residents can determine if their neighborhood has these cables or may have had them in the past.
Water conflict cooperation
Transboundary waters database relaunched
Decades ago, the international diplomacy community assumed that World War III would be fought over Earth’s most precious resource. Especially in places where critical freshwater supplies crossed international boundaries, concern grew that nations would war over water.
CEOAS geography professor Aaron Wolf wanted to interrogate this prediction by examining the available information on transboundary waters and the conflicts they sparked. His current doctoral student, Alexandra Turgul, explains what happened when Wolf dove into the issue.
“He found that actually, countries are more likely to cooperate over their shared water resources than to fight over them.”
This revelation led to the establishment of the Transboundary Freshwater Diplomacy Database, now housed at OSU, the most comprehensive collection in the world of information — documents, maps, treaties and more — on how shared waters are managed.
Turgul, serving at the database manager, oversaw a recent upgrade of the database. The most exciting change, she says, is a new mapping interface, the TFDD Explorer, developed in conjunction with the Valley Library at Oregon State, which helps users find available data by simply clicking on a map.
The database is used extensively by academics and practitioners alike to research historical aspects of water diplomacy but also to search for models for new treaties and approaches. “For example, a practitioner from the World Bank might use it when they are in the process of helping countries craft a new treaty over their shared waters,” Turgul says.
The expanded and updated database was launched in summer 2024 at World Water Week in Stockholm. It can be accessed at Transboundary Freshwater Diplomacy Database.
The updated database is unveiled at Water Week in Stockholm by Susanne Schmeier, IHE-Delft,
and Melissa McCracken, CEOAS alumna currently at Tufts University.
Fighting fire with data
Wildfire database gets critical update
Here in the western U.S. (and, increasingly, elsewhere), wildfire threatens lives, infrastructure, ecosystems and even tourism and our leisure time. An important avenue for dealing with fire risk and preparedness is prediction. Where and how are fires likely to ignite? How will they spread? How big will they get?
The Fire Program Analysis Fire-Occurrence Database, developed in 2013 by the U.S. Forest Service, is one tool managers can use in addressing wildfire risk. It incorporates basic information such as ignition location, discovery date and final wildfire size. This year, CEOAS professor and director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, Erica Fleishman, contributed to a major effort to enhance the database, an update that is expected to help wildfire managers and scientists better predict where and when wildfires may occur by incorporating hundreds of additional factors that impact the ignition and spread of fire.
The database now includes many new environmental and social factors, such as topography and vegetation, social vulnerability and economic justice metrics, and practical attributes such as the distance from the ignition to the nearest road.
In addition to aiding on-the-ground firefighters and managers, the database could also help power companies evaluate short-term risk when deciding whether to implement a power shutoff or land management agencies determine whether to reduce access to public lands or restrict campfires, Fleishman explains.
“There seem to be a lot of policies that are guided to some extent by intuition or emotions rather than by a large body of evidence,” she says. “These data present one way to increase the objective evidence to consider when making those decisions.”
Plumes of smoke are seen from miles away as a rangeland wildfire burns outside of the small
town of Antelope in Wasco County, Oregon. Photo: Emily Jane Davis, Oregon State University
Sliding into business
MicroPaleoWorks provides key lab supply for micropaleontology
Jennifer Fehrenbacher studies marine microfossils called foraminifera, forams for short, the size of a sand grain. Collected from sediment samples, forams preserve aspects of the climate that existed when they were living, helping us piece together Earth’s climate history.
Forams need to be stored in slides that include a small well. While these slides have been integral to the field for over a century, the niche market is served by very few manufacturers. A recent shift to production overseas has made it challenging for U.S. researchers to obtain these crucial products.
Fehrenbacher found herself running out of slides, so she resorted to hand-making slides for her own lab; she also knew that other researchers were experiencing the same desperate shortfall. To fulfill the needs of the field, she decided to start her own business to streamline production.
Fehrenbacher turned to the OSU Advantage Accelerator, which takes members of the OSU community through the complex business startup process. With her newfound business skills, Fehrenbacher successfully founded MicroPaleoWorks, which now offers archive-quality specimen holders designed for storing microfossils and other tiny geological samples.
“Starting MicroPaleoWorks has been a challenging yet incredibly rewarding journey. Our goal is to support researchers by providing the best storage solutions for their invaluable microfossil samples,” Fehrenbacher says. Take a look at the products the company is offering at micropaleoworks.com.
Some of MicroPaleoWorks’ storage slides
