August 17, 2015 | Nick Fetty

This week’s On the Radio segment looks at a partnership between Big Ten schools to improve farmland and watershed management in the Midwest

Transcript: Big Ten universities collaborate on research project

While Big Ten universities are competing with one another on the field, court, and mat, researchers from a handful of these institutions have actually teamed up in an effort to improve farmland and watershed management in the Midwest.

This is the Iowa Environmental Focus.

Last month roughly 30 students, professors, and researchers from six different universities met at the University of Iowa’s Mississippi River Research Station in Muscatine for the second annual meeting of a five-year project for the critical zone observatory, a project by the national science foundation which combines different scientific disciplines to study issues related to land, air, and water.

The Midwestern project – known as Intensly Managed Landscapes or IML – focuses on lands and watersheds in Illinois and Minnesota as well as the clear creek watershed just west of Iowa City. University of Iowa engineering professor Doug Schnoebelen said the interdisciplinary focus of this project is critical to its success.

Schnoebelen: “The strength of the partnership, is if you want to use the sports analogy, is kind of like building a team. Any one person is important but the strength of it is really all of them working together. That’s really been the beauty of it.”

For more information about this project, visit iowa-environmental focus-dot-org.

From the University of Iowa Center For Global And Regional Environmental Research, I’m Nick Fetty.