UMass Amherst Research Teams Receive 2024 Armstrong Fund Grants
Eleni Christofa, professor, and Jimi Oke, assistant professor, both of civil and environmental engineering; and Nathan Senner, assistant professor of environmental conservation, have been awarded 2024 Armstrong Fund Grants.
The Armstrong Fund for Science is awarded to researchers willing to challenge conventions in their field.
With their $40,000, two-year grant, Christofa and Oke are aiming to answer the question: Can bicycle use and schematic maps reduce emissions? “Which is kind of a bold question, says Oke. “But research has shown that 60% of all the trips we would take by car are one to three miles, so there’s a huge potential for bicycles, or even e-bikes.”
A schematic map simplifies the relational information between locations by sacrificing geographical accuracy, like stops on a subway map. The researchers want to see if providing relevant information in this simplified way can increase bicycle usage.
“The literature has shown that [connectivity and available infrastructure] are actually influencing someone’s decision to bike or not,” says Christofa. For instance, bicycle trail maps in the Northampton-Amherst-North Hadley area exist, but not on one, centralized platform. Nor do they do a good job illustrating where points of interest, like grocery stores, fall along the various routes. Christofa also envisions that the maps could layer on bus routes (since local busses have bike racks) to facilitate longer trips.
Another factor that determines if people ride or drive is knowing what type of infrastructure is available: is there a protected bike path or a just a painted on lane shared with cars? “Bikes can be ridden on any road and we’re not showing the road network,” explains Oke. “We’re showing the cycle network and the major infrastructure.”
To test the effectiveness of these new maps, the researchers will install bike counters around Northampton, Amherst and North Hadley and count cyclists before and after map implementation
Another element of the study is to design a computer algorithm to create these schematic maps for other regions. “It takes time to design a really good map,” says Oke. “But if this can be scaled up and automated, then we can readily apply this to other areas.”
A second Armstrong fund of $39,979 for two years was awarded to Senner to study the genetic movement of Hudsonian godwits in a remote site near the village of Beluga, Alaska.
These birds have an extraordinarily long migration, breeding in Alaska and Canada before migrating to the southern tip of South America, often in nonstop flights for 10,000-11,000 kilometers. “That means they’re flapping the whole way,” Senner says. “They’re not eating, not drinking, not sleeping, presumably. It’s just this sort of incredible phenomenon of migration. Maybe because of the extremeness of their migration, they are also one of the most rapidly declining species of birds in all of North America.”
In two of the last four years, Senner’s research group has not seen any of these chicks survive because of timing changes in migration and changes in emergence of insects that the chicks rely on for food.
“Climate change has shifted the timing of spring,” he explains. “For a number of decades, the birds were actually following climate change, and so these the godwits were arriving to Alaska earlier and earlier. They seemed to be breeding in synchrony with the insects that their chicks need. But just within the past half-decade, they have completely changed their timing of arrival and they’ve now slowed back down. We’re really perplexed by this.”
With the Armstrong grant, Senner will investigate what is causing this shift. He hypothesizes that other near-by populations of godwits are merging into this Beluga population and subsequently watering down the beneficial adaptation. To test this, he will be assessing genetic changes in this population from the past 15 years.
“We really feel like we’re in a race against time to try to figure out why they’re declining,” he says.