Brooklyn College Urban Soils

12/13/2024

Best Student Paper award at EWSN'24 UAE! This is a collaborative project with colleagues at Cornell Tech, looking at the feasibility of using wireless signal for the detection of lead contamination in soil. The actual paper will be publicly accessible soon. 📚💻🎉

10/04/2024

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/compost-collection-begins-across-nyc-this-weekend-here-s-what-to-know/ar-AA1rILH5?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=DCTS&cvid=f046eef1c397454e815b503cd598adfa&ei=5

Really good news for NYC.

Compost collection will expand across New York City's five boroughs​ starting Sunday.

10/04/2024

Soil lovers make a pilgrimage to Greenwood Cemetery, where faculty and students from Pace University, LaGuardia Community College, and Brooklyn College gather to learn about soils from USDA NRCS soil scientists Donald Parezik and Richard Shaw (retired).

10/04/2024

BC Eats Garden welcomes faculty and graduate students from Pratt Institute for a short visit on the way to The Urban Soils Lab.

06/21/2024

This summer our Urban Soils Lab research group is conducting a project evaluating the effect of leaf mulching practice on soil health, especially stormwater infiltration capacity. The lawns on several NYCHA complexes are being examined. The project is funded by Sloan Foundation, through the inaugural Pilot Poicy Studio program (adminstrated by Cornell Tech) aiming to strengthen the collaboration between city agencies and academa. Our agency partner is the Sustainability Office of NYCHA. Besides myself as the PI, the Brooklyn college team include: graduate student Andrew Kuan MO, three students from the NSF Research Experienced for Undergraduates program (Ella Hook, Linh Le, Nya Gasowski), Vasar College freshman Eamon Smithsimon, Brooklyn College undergraduate students Bingying Qiu and Michael Kravets. Not in the photos is BC undergraduate reseaech program participant Vanessa Pluvoise.

More detailed information of this project can be found here:
https://www.pilotpitchfest.org/projects

03/10/2024

Brooklyn College Urban Soils Lab doing outreach at the annual Making Brooklyn Bloom event hosted by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The place was crowded, with lots of people stopping by our table asking for soil testing information, and learn about the soils, correlation boxes and soil monoliths that we displayed. It is amazing to see the interests in soils. There should be more public events like this. Especially in the community neighborhoods. Thanks to Elettra and Perl who were talking to visitors about soil, lead from beginning to the end. Glad to see some of our students stopping by as well.

01/31/2024

Our own Sara Perl.

The award recognizes S. Perl Egendorf's work to combat contamination in urban soils and improve food security and the environment.

12/14/2023

Our own undergraduate student, Emma Marin, presents at the Fall 2023 Tow Research and Mentoring Student Research Conference on campus. Her title was "an investigation into the efficacy of small scale community composes I'm NYC". The results are built upon greenhouse experiments in spring 23 and sample analysis in summer 23. Getting lots of interests from the audience. Dr. Perl Egendorf was the co-advisor for Emma.

11/21/2023

New York City just cut all funding for community composting and outreach.

Urge New York's Mayor Eric Adams and the City Council to halt the elimination of community composting! There cannot be a successful Curbside Composting program in NYC without the outreach, education, and support provided by community composters. Sign here.

11/20/2023

Our PhD student Kohinoor Begum has been awarded First Place in the Oral competition presented by the Soil Science Society of America Urban and Anthropogenic Soils Division. Congratulations!

10/18/2023

Homecoming for Prof. Anna Paltseva, currently a faculty member at the University of Louisiana Lafayette.