The study in cell cultures and rabbits found that a hormone that naturally becomes elevated during pregnancy produces specific fatty compounds, creating conditions favoring the virus’s ability to make copies of itself.    

The study helps explain why pregnancy, especially the third trimester, is associated with severe HEV outcomes, including liver failure, fetal complications and maternal death.

“This work demonstrates that the same biological processes that support fetal growth may also be co-opted by the virus,” said first author Kush Yadav, assistant professor of animal sciences at Ohio State.

Yadav also said the findings extend beyond hepatitis E, highlighting how metabolic changes during pregnancy may influence the severity of other viral infections.

The study, a collaboration between Ohio State and the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech, was published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hepatitis E (HEV) is a leading cause of viral hepatitis worldwide and is known to disproportionately affect pregnant women, particularly in late stages of pregnancy. The risk of death in infected pregnant people can be dramatically higher than in the general population, but the biological reasons behind this heightened risk have remained unclear.

HEV is also the leading cause of acute viral liver infection in humans worldwide, mostly in developing regions where sanitation is poor.

In this new study, the research team discovered that placental lactogen, a hormone that increases significantly during pregnancy, plays a central role in fueling viral replication. The hormone increase triggers the production of higher levels of fatty acids and lipids – compounds that store energy, form cell membranes and perform other important functions in the body.

In cases of pregnant people infected with HEV, the presence of those fatty compounds provides the virus with an environment conducive to replicating more efficiently.

Experiments showed that elevated levels of oleic acid, a common fatty acid, directly enhance HEV replication, and increased production of phosphatidylethanolamine, or PE, a membrane-forming lipid, is essential for viral replication.

“This collaborative research reveals an important role of host lipid reprogramming in the pathogenesis of hepatitis E virus. Our findings that certain lipids, such as phosphatidylethanolamine and oleic acid, are elevated in hepatitis E virus-infected pregnant animals and enhance virus replication provide mechanistic insights into how hepatitis E virus causes disease, particularly pregnancy-associated adverse clinical outcomes,” said senior author X.J. Meng, University Distinguished Professor of molecular virology at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine.

Disrupting these lipid production pathways significantly reduced viral replication, results showed.

“Cutting-edge lipidomic analyses allowed us to precisely narrow down the key lipid drivers of HEV replication, identifying specific fatty acids and PE as strong candidates,” said second author Menuka Bhandari, a research senior associate in the Research and Analytical Service Core of Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences.

While additional research is needed, particularly in human populations, the study provides a foundation for developing targeted treatments to reduce pregnancy-related complications from HEV, the researchers say.

“By identifying lipid metabolism as a critical driver of HEV replication, the research opens new avenues for interventions,” Yadav said.

Potential future strategies may include therapies that target lipid production pathways, approaches that regulate hormone-driven metabolic changes, and development of broad antiviral strategies that disrupt virus–lipid interactions.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and Ohio State startup funds and Alumni Grants for Graduate Research and Scholarship.

Additional co-authors include Hassan Mahsoub and Hannah Brown of Virginia Tech; Young Bin Park, Huong Van Lee and Jay Mun Choi of Calico Co. Ltd.; and Gireesh Rajashekara of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

A second study showed that greater support from all members of a household – parents, kids, siblings, unrelated roommates – predicted eventual adoption of solar, but greater disagreement was also linked to a higher likelihood of installing rooftop panels. 

Overall, the research suggests a champion for solar adoption in the house gets the family over the finish line. The champion is most positive about the technology, does the most work to plan the project and prompts ongoing discussion. 

“This introduces an opportunity for policy and interventions because if we’re targeting incentives or communication campaigns to a household or one member of a household, that’s probably not enough. We need to figure out how to support these champions,” said senior author Nicole Sintov, associate professor of behavior, decision making and sustainability at The Ohio State University. 

“They’re already shouldering the burden of trying to convince other people in their household to come along, and maybe it’s generating conflict. What can we equip them with to help them with the process?” 

Understanding these dynamics could help the planet by improving the adoption rate of residential solar by U.S. households, which currently stands at about 8%, Sintov said. 

“There are all of these decarbonization technologies available, including rooftop solar and heat pumps, but if people don’t adopt them, then what good are they?” she said. “So we focus on what motivates households to adopt these technologies and how we can design communications and programming to support that.” 

Sintov completed the work with Naseem Dillman-Hasso, a doctoral candidate in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State, and former Ohio State postdoctoral research associate Kristin Hurst, now an assistant professor at Southern Illinois University. The research is published today (July 9, 2026) in Nature Energy. 

It’s not necessarily surprising that a disruptive, expensive home project requires lots of conversation. There’s plenty to consider, with primary barriers identified in the study including high upfront costs versus long-term payments, fear of structural damage, uncertainty about the effects on home value and resale opportunities, and distrust of solar companies. 

What is surprising is that little thought has been given to the family dynamics underpinning these household discussions, Sintov said. 

“Research to date tends to characterize these decisions as this monolithic household choice, but three-quarters of U.S. households have more than one person living in them. In this study, the lens was a large investment like solar panels – and they’re not one-time decisions made by a single person in a multi-occupant household,” she said. 

The first study involved qualitative interviews with 39 couples. Seven had adopted solar, seven had considered solar but opted out, and 25 were still in the deliberation stage at the time of the interview. 

While couples who were in sync were strongly associated with installing solar panels, that alone wasn’t always enough. Interview results revealed that a time-sensitive catalyst event increased their sense of urgency to adopt. Catalysts ranged from skyrocketing energy bills and fears of frequent power loss to the looming reduction of a federal tax incentive. 

The second study was an online survey of 394 household representatives, 268 who had begun lining up solar but ultimately didn’t see it through, and 126 who had adopted rooftop solar. 

In both adopter and lost customer households, the survey respondents described themselves as the most positive and active participants in the process – in other words, the champion. In adopter households, romantic partners and parents played larger roles in the conversations than in lost customer households. 

The champion role was consistently linked with adoption, suggesting that coordination, active participation and deliberation by all household members can improve chances for installing solar. And even greater disagreement predicted adoption – indicating that any form of communication, even if it’s negative, could be at play when a household makes movement toward the decision to adopt solar. 

“That was surprising,” Sintov said. “We don’t know for sure why, but one hypothesis is that among adopters, there may be more to disagree about once you proceed with the adoption process – there’s a lot going on, it’s stressful, it’s conflictual. Or it could just be that engaging in these conversations and being more engaged led to more disagreements.” 

Sintov is already applying some of the findings to her work with nonprofit organizations, building in-sync coordination skills in couples interested in adopting solar and developing worksheets that define goals and divvy the workload for families making changes after an energy efficiency audit. 

Other options are workshops with household members to see if in-sync dynamics can be cultivated, and structured discussion guides that introduce unanticipated stumbling blocks and coax people toward an in-sync approach to addressing concerns. 

“Targeting marketing messages and engagement and outreach to one member of a household or just a general household is liable to result in failure,” Sintov said. “This is a relational process. At minimum, policy and other interventions can help facilitate the coordination process.” 

And though it wasn’t a research goal, there is a decent chance that these dynamics influence lots of household decisions. 

“I think what we’ve uncovered might be just a core dynamic of how households make decisions – this in-sync versus oppositional dynamic and the fact that sometimes there’s a champion for a cause and the other person has to be dragged along,” she said. “There’s very real potential that this applies to a whole bunch of different household decision making, from installing a heat pump to getting a new couch to adopting a dog.”

The findings hint at the juice’s promise as a functional food that may help curb the unchecked inflammation that characterizes a range of chronic conditions, researchers say. 

The tomato-soy juice contained high levels of the plant-based compounds lycopene and soy isoflavones, both believed to have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties based on previous research. Compared to a control tomato juice lacking these compounds, the tomato-soy juice significantly lowered blood levels of three proteins that are markers of systemic inflammation. 

“The idea is, can we use food-based interventions to modulate inflammation?” said lead author Jessica Cooperstone, associate professor of horticulture and crop science at The Ohio State University. “And can we test this in a rigorous way so that we can really see this is affecting inflammation, versus just saying something is anti-inflammatory?” 

Based on these results and additional data, Cooperstone and colleagues have received National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases funding for a pilot clinical trial testing whether consuming the same tomato-soy juice reduces inflammation in patients with pancreatitis. 

The study was published recently in the journal Molecular Nutrition & Food Research. 

Lycopene is a carotenoid that gives tomatoes and other vegetables their colors, and soy isoflavones are flavonoids that mimic the action of the hormone estrogen. Both are phytochemicals that help plants thrive. 

Years ago, based on studies showing an association between diets high in either tomato products or soy and a lowered risk for prostate cancer, Ohio State researchers developed the tomato-soy juice made with tomatoes containing a high concentration of lycopene – also developed and grown at Ohio State – and enriched with soy isoflavone extract. 

Later research at the university linked higher intake of the tomato-soy juice to reduced prostate-specific antigen levels in some men with prostate cancer, and studies elsewhere have suggested that tomatoes and soy, consumed separately or combined, can affect inflammatory and metabolic pathways related to obesity and other chronic illnesses. 

“There’s been enough compelling evidence that compounds from tomatoes and soy might be modulating inflammation that we decided to test this in people,” Cooperstone said. 

In the new study, 12 healthy adults with obesity consumed two 6-ounce cans of tomato-soy juice every day for four weeks. After a washout period, they consumed the low-carotenoid control tomato juice for four weeks. 

“The hypothesis is that it’s the lycopene from the tomatoes and the isoflavones from the soy that’s inducing the effect, so we didn’t want to have a control that’s just water,” Cooperstone said. 

Researchers took blood samples testing for cytokines – pro-inflammatory proteins produced by the immune system – before and after each four-week trial period. Only the tomato-soy juice resulted in significant reductions in three cytokines: Interleukin (IL)-5, IL-12p70 and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF), as well as showing a downward trend in tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-a) that was not statistically significant. 

The team also analyzed participants’ urine before and after each trial period for changes in metabolites, the molecular products of biochemical reactions that break down nutrients to produce energy and perform other essential functions. 

The findings showed that both the tomato-soy and control tomato juice led to some shared changes in the metabolite profiles, meaning some tomato-driven effects occurred in the absence of lycopene. Soy isoflavone metabolite shifts stood out among the changes induced by the tomato-soy juice. While further investigation is warranted, the changes provide additional evidence that this food-based intervention is affecting human biology. 

“This is probably a function of the fact that there’s more to our intervention agents than just these two compounds,” Cooperstone said. “Ultimately, we want to have a better understanding of how the foods that we eat are relating to our health. And when we really want to be sure, we need to test them in clinical trials. And that’s what we’re doing here.”

She and colleagues have also found evidence in an animal model that the soy-tomato juice can reduce inflammation and the severity of chronic pancreatitis – data supporting the prediction in the current clinical trial that the intervention could improve outcomes for patients with pancreatitis. 

“Care for patients with pancreatitis is palliative, focused on controlling pain and GI symptoms. Our hypothesis is that the tomato-soy juice may serve as an intervention to decrease inflammation and hopefully increase patients’ quality of life,” Cooperstone said. 

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health, the Lisa and Dan Wampler Endowed Fellowship for Foods and Health Research, and the Foods for Health Initiative at Ohio State. 

Co-authors include first author Maria Sholola, Jenna Miller, Emma Bilbrey, David Francis and Thomas Mace of Ohio State, and Janet Navotny of the USDA. Mace is the lead principal investigator on the pancreatitis trial. Cooperstone, Philip Hart and Kristen Roberts of Ohio State are also PIs on the trial.

A new study provides the first scientific evidence that the answer is yes, showing that two species of ticks can live at least one week, and up to about three weeks, on hard-surface and carpeted floors. 

The Ohio State University study focused on lone star and Gulf Coast ticks, both of which are capable of transmitting pathogens that can make people and animals sick. Survival rates of each species were assessed in five types of common home flooring: tile, wood, vinyl, and short-pile and shag-like carpet. 

Overall, Gulf Coast ticks survived for significantly longer periods of time than lone star ticks, but in an unexpected finding, lone star ticks lived longer overall in long-pile carpet. 

“Ticks can pose a risk even in the places you least expect, such as your house,” said first author Afsoon Sabet, a PhD student in entomology at Ohio State. 

The findings underscore the necessity of taking protective measures to prevent tick bites, the researchers say. These include using tick prevention products for people and pets and, once inside, thoroughly checking an animal for ticks with a brush or a lint roller and immediately bagging clothes or putting them in the dryer. 

“The ultimate goal from a public health perspective is to reinforce that ticks brought into the home on pets or people could be a risk, and hopefully having some data around that will compel people to say, ‘OK, doing tick checks is really important,’” said co-senior author Risa Pesapane, associate professor of veterinary preventive medicine at Ohio State.   

“That way you’re not releasing ticks into your home environment where you’re relaxed and comfortable, and most definitely not thinking about tick prevention.” 

The research was published online March 13 in the Journal of Vector Ecology. 

Total reported tick-borne disease cases in the United States increased by 40% from 2019 to 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The ticks in the study, Gulf Coast (Amblyomma maculatum) and lone star (Amblyomma americanum) ticks, are commonly found in the eastern U.S. and feed on a variety of birds and mammals. Gulf Coast ticks can transmit several spotted fever diseases, and lone star ticks can transmit ehrlichiosis. In addition, a compound in lone star tick saliva can induce alpha-gal syndrome, a potentially life-threatening allergy to a molecule in red meat and other mammal products. 

For the study, Sabet tested the survival time of 90 ticks per species placed in three rounds of experiments on each of the five floor types. Ticks were individually covered with a cup so they couldn’t escape, but they could move around. Two rounds of the experiments compared survival to control ticks kept in a growth chamber to confirm experimental tick deaths were related to the flooring conditions. 

In nature, ticks feed once per life cycle. Ticks in the experiments were adults that had not yet fed. 

“Generally, what we’re talking about here is hitchhiking ticks that have come in on clothes or pets that have not yet bitten and are actively looking for a host,” said Pesapane, who also has a faculty appointment in Ohio State’s School of Environment and Natural Resources. “They would’ve been looking for a host to feed from in someone’s home.” 

Sabet monitored the ticks daily, with a few exceptions, completing over 4,600 individual observations. 

The average overall survival time of Gulf Coast ticks was about 18 days, and for lone star ticks, 11 days. The longest survival time for Gulf Coast ticks was an average of 25 days on vinyl and the shortest, 10 days on long-pile carpet. Average survival time of lone star ticks was the longest, almost 15 days, on long-pile carpet and shortest on tile – about seven days. 

The cause of death was presumed to be desiccation, or loss of moisture. Meanwhile, some of the control ticks kept at ideal temperatures and humidity levels in the lab survived for more than a year. 

“The tick life cycle is usually at least two years, typically. And the longevity of that tick is based on its ability to maintain moisture,” Pesapane said. “And certainly, the conditions in a home are desiccating conditions, but this shows that ticks are not going to die immediately. 

“Pinpointing exactly how long a tick might survive in a home is really difficult because people’s homes are going to vary in their environmental conditions. But for the first time, this study puts some guardrails on that estimate, and it shows us that ticks can survive for at least a week.” 

Samuel Ward, assistant professor of entomology at Ohio State, was an additional co-senior author of the study. This work was supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Researchers followed up on a 2014 study finding that Ohio’s first established population of blacklegged ticks, carriers of the bacteria that cause Lyme disease, had been detected in 2010 in Coshocton County.

At that time, the infectious bacteria were detected in 2.4% of collected blacklegged ticks and antibodies indicating prior exposure to the pathogen were detected in 20% of white-footed mice, one of the most common of several small mammal sources of wildlife infections to ticks in their nymph and larval stages. 

In the new study, the research team from The Ohio State University found that the prevalence of infection in captured ticks had increased to as much as 47.6% and in infected small mammals, up to 60.4%. 

“Our suspicion was that 10 years later, when we have robust populations of the right hosts in this ecological community in Ohio, that this pathogen vector system could really establish and take off. And that’s what this study essentially shows – that that is what happened,” said senior author Risa Pesapane, associate professor of veterinary preventive medicine at Ohio State.  

“And now Ohio has the same risk as those endemic regions in the Northeast. I think that is surprising to a lot of people because we think, sure, we have the tick and we have some of the hosts, but we’re not Connecticut. But for some parts of Ohio, we are Connecticut at this point.”

Pesapane noted that the risk for infection varies across Ohio and is highest in forested areas in the eastern and southern regions of the state. That said, the presence of blacklegged ticks has been reported in all 88 counties. 

“I think it’s really important to convey, when it comes to both personal protection and to the medical community’s awareness, that you have the same chance of getting Lyme disease in Coshocton, Ohio, and other Ohio areas with the right habitat, that you do in Lyme, Connecticut.” 

The study was published recently in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

Blacklegged ticks, also known as deer ticks, are widely distributed in the eastern United States and are a known carrier of the Borrelia burgdorferi strains of bacteria that cause most North American Lyme disease cases in people and dogs. The ticks also carry Anaplasma phagocytophilum, the pathogen that causes anaplasmosis. 

Ningzhu Bai, a PhD student in the Environment and Natural Resources Graduate Program at Ohio State, led this study for her master’s thesis. The team collected 654 ticks demonstrating questing behavior and trapped 106 small mammals. Ticks pick up the infectious bacteria from small mammals that are reservoir hosts, which infect the ticks that bite them for a blood meal. 

Deer, by the way, are not involved in the cycle of infection that occurs in ticks’ earliest life stages, but are strongly linked to blacklegged ticks because white-tailed deer are the main hosts of adult ticks that are looking for blood meals and mates. 

The researchers extracted genomic DNA from 368 ticks and from mammal tissue and blood samples to test for Borrelia burgdorferi and Anaplasma phagocytophilum. 

“It was shocking to find that infection prevalence increased from 2.4% for Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato to almost 50% in 10 years,” Bai said. “And it was also really high for Borrelia burgdorferi sensu stricto – over 40% carried that pathogen.” 

The infection prevalence in ticks for the anaplasmosis pathogen was 15.5%. Six of the eight mammal species tested positive for infectious bacteria with prevalence of 60.4%, 19.8% and 11.9% for the same pathogens, respectively. White-footed mice and eastern chipmunks were the most frequently infected hosts. 

“When I talk to people, I like to stress this means one out of every two ticks that you might encounter in Ohio could possibly be infected,” said Pesapane, who also has a faculty appointment in Ohio State’s School of Environment and Natural Resources. 

The study provides the ecological data needed to guide where interventions could have the most impact – evaluating the effectiveness of tick-killing acaricides on small mammal reservoirs is an upcoming research plan for the Coshocton properties visited in this study. 

“Ecological interventions are challenging. That’s why we keep promoting personal protective actions, which work extremely well,” Pesapane said. Steps include wearing tick repellent and long sleeves and pants, and tucking pants into socks while outdoors; performing a thorough tick check once inside, and showering; and using preventives for companion animals. 

In Ohio, these protective tasks are worth it, she said: “If we look from 2010 all the way to 2025, there’s been a 48-fold increase in the number of Lyme disease cases in Ohio, and we are going to be considered a high-incidence state moving forward.” 

In addition to frequently collecting and studying ticks of medical concern across Ohio, Pesapane invites the public to mail ticks to her lab. She is also the faculty director of the Buckeye Tick Test, an Ohio State service that tests submitted ticks for pathogens that cause disease, including Lyme disease, for a fee. 

These submissions, and her own research, have made it clear that tick bites are not only a warm-weather threat. 

“Even on days that have snow, as long as the ambient temperature is above freezing, blacklegged ticks will be seeking hosts and biting rather indiscriminately whomever they encounter,” she said. “So year-round, there’s a tick exposure risk.” 

Andreas Eleftheriou of Ohio State was also a co-author of the study. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Created in the aftermath of the 2014 Toledo water crisis, HABRI is a statewide research program that provides near-term solutions for the full suite of issues surrounding harmful algal blooms.

The initiative consists of 29 science teams across the state that are working to fill critical knowledge gaps identified by frontline state agencies, including the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, Ohio Department of Agriculture, Ohio Department of Health, Ohio Lake Erie Commission and Ohio Department of Natural Resources. 

Ohio’s state agencies, researchers and local partners are collaboratively generating and applying new science to reduce nutrient pollution, improve water quality, and strengthen public health responses to harmful algal blooms thanks to this initiative.

The 2025 report highlights that the state of Ohio continues to benefit from HABRI, showcasing the following results:

• The Ohio EPA, with HABRI support and researchers, is working directly with water treatment plant operators to optimize removal of cyanotoxins.
• Several HABRI projects have helped Ohio EPA understand the nature of how nutrients move from the working landscape to streams and, ultimately, Lake Erie, enabling better planning for and support of nutrient reduction implementation actions.
• Researchers at Bowling Green State University and Ohio State are collaborating with Ohio EPA and local farmers to evaluate the beneficial use of dredge materials to amend agricultural soils. This research is providing information for stakeholders on the impact of dredge sediment on soil properties and economic feasibility of beneficial use for agriculture.
• HABRI research has demonstrated that Drinking Water Treatment Material effectively binds phosphorus. Based on the results of the research, Ohio EPA is working with stakeholders to explore new and innovative reuse opportunities to utilize the materials to improve water quality.
• New information regarding nutrient loss pathways, as well as losses from nutrient application activities and losses from residual soil phosphorus, is helping the Ohio Department of Agriculture adjust program practices and specifications to better address nutrient loss from row crop agriculture. Additionally, recent projects studying farmland water management practices are providing valuable insight into their nutrient capture potential.
• Working directly with the academic research community, through the ODHE HABRI, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources is able to more deeply explore the mechanisms that are driving the water quality impacts of its wetland restoration program. The program now has a sharper understanding of the results of its work and better tools to use as the program strengthens the effect of natural infrastructure restoration in the battle against harmful algal blooms in Ohio’s waterways.
• A HABRI-supported review of human health data repositories by researchers has enhanced the Ohio Department of Health’s understanding of harmful algal bloom (HAB) susceptibility by identifying several potential risk factors, including respiratory illness, smoking and diabetes, that may influence future health recommendations.
• In partnership with the Ohio Department of Health, with support from HABRI, researchers are working to improve the dissemination of health education on HABs to current and future physicians. More evidence-based HAB education will aid physicians in swiftly diagnosing, treating and reporting HAB-related illnesses, improving overall state response to HAB events.

“HABRI research projects continue to inform us about the effectiveness of actions included in Ohio’s Domestic Action Plan and to help the state improve our understanding of nutrient reductions from the H2Ohio work being implemented,” said Joy Mulinex, executive director, Ohio Lake Erie Commission, on behalf of Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and Ohio Department of Agriculture.

HABRI is funded by the Ohio Department of Higher Education (ODHE) with $24 million made available since 2015. Matching funding from participating Ohio universities increases the total investment to more than $37 million, demonstrating the state’s overall commitment to addressing the harmful algal bloom issue. 

Final results from 12 projects funded from 2022-2024 make up this year’s report, in addition to one-year results of 17 projects funded in 2024. 

“Gov. DeWine’s leadership through H2Ohio has positioned Ohio as a national leader in investing to improve water quality,” said ODHE Chancellor Mike Duffey. “Recent research has demonstrated common drinking water technology offers further promise in reducing phosphorus-related algae blooms.” 

HABRI comprises 62 scientists leading 114 research projects from Bowling Green State University, Case Western Reserve University, Central State University, Defiance College, Heidelberg University, Kent State University, Oberlin College, Sinclair Community College, the University of Akron, the University of Cincinnati, Miami University, Wright State University, Youngstown State University and consortium leaders the University of Toledo and Ohio State. 

Information about individual HABRI projects, as well as partner organizations and background on the initiative, is also available on the Ohio Sea Grant website at go.osu.edu/habri. The report can be downloaded directly at https://ohioseagrant.osu.edu/p/l6rmc.

Ohio Sea Grant is supported by The Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES) School of Environment and Natural Resources, Ohio State University Extension and NOAA Sea Grant, a network of 34 Sea Grant programs nationwide dedicated to the protection and sustainable use of marine and Great Lakes resources. Stone Laboratory is Ohio State’s island campus on Lake Erie and is the research, education and outreach facility of Ohio Sea Grant and part of CFAES School of Environment and Natural Resources.

Researchers analyzed times and locations in Chicago when coyotes were on the move at the same time people were working, socializing or otherwise occupied outside the home. 

The analysis showed that overlap of human and coyote activity would be far more probable in areas with a high proportion of open space and less likely to occur in predominantly paved areas. 

“The overlap seems to be associated with environmental characteristics: It’s higher in areas with more open space and lower in areas with impervious surface cover,” said Emily Zepeda, first author of the study and a postdoctoral scholar in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University.  

“Coyotes are not going anywhere. In fact, they’re increasing in numbers,” Zepeda said. “The problem to solve is how to coexist with them and, is there a chance we can even appreciate their presence as the apex predator in many urban areas? They can have an impact on urban residents’ appreciation for nature. 

“I’m really interested in understanding overlap because of the implications for both coyote ecology and human-coyote coexistence.” 

The study was published recently in Scientific Reports. 

Zepeda works in the lab led by Stan Gehrt, a wildlife ecologist at Ohio State and senior author of the new paper. In a previous study seeking to identify urban factors that help or hinder coyotes’ ability to survive, Zepeda and colleagues found that areas of Chicago that were densely populated with people were associated with longer coyote lifespans. 

This new work digs more deeply into the interplay between people and coyotes in Chicago and, possibly, in other North American cities with growing coyote populations. 

The animal data comes from the Urban Coyote Research Project, a long-term study of coyote ecology in the Chicago Metropolitan Area led by Gehrt’s lab. 

For years, the project team has been capturing and fitting coyotes with GPS collars that record the animals’ location every 15 minutes for 24-hour periods every two weeks. In this study, data from 54 coyotes, 44 males and 10 females, that had been tracked for an average of 221 days was used for the analysis. 

Human activity used for statistical modeling was represented by population density data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Illinois Department of Transportation data indicating that the highest traffic volume spanned from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. 

On average, coyotes that were active at the same time as humans were attracted to areas with high human population density, like residential areas, relative to areas with low population density, like industrial zones. 

Additionally, coyotes’ attraction to areas of high human density was heightened in areas where humans might be linked to positive things from a coyote’s point of view: lots of vegetation and plenty of natural food sources, common features of open spaces. Specifically, coyotes’ use of areas of high human population density increased 1.8 times when those areas also contained moderate levels of open space, like parks or golf courses. 

In contrast, coyotes may be less likely to overlap with humans in regions featuring the negatives associated with people, like traffic (cars are the No. 1 cause of coyote deaths in cities) and pollution. 

Zepeda noted that the study did not find that the presence of open spaces caused overlap with people, just that there is higher probability of overlap in natural settings than in regions that mostly consist of pavement. 

“We expect that coyotes are going to spend time in areas and during periods where resources are high and risks are low, and we expect overlap to be high when humans are associated with resources,” she said – especially food and shelter from harsh weather. 

The coyotes’ attraction to areas of high human density observed in the study is surprising given their general avoidance of humans, Zepeda said. Decades of research has shown that coyotes are very good at avoiding people and tend to favor eating small mammals like rabbits, mice and voles over the abundance of household trash they can find in neighborhoods. 

However, coyotes in these behavioral studies also exhibit a lot of individual variation in their behavior. So even though there is a population-level trend for avoiding humans, the subset of animals in this study – those that are active when humans are active and attracted to areas of high human population density – may be responsible for many of the human-coyote interactions that occur in the Chicago area. 

“Coyotes are incredibly hard to study because they exhibit so much individual variation – which contributes to their success at establishing populations in new environments like cities,” Zepeda said. 

In newer work, she is examining people’s attitudes toward coyotes after interacting with the wild animals. Future research will look at individual coyote characteristics that might predict high versus low overlap with humans. 

“I think understanding more about coyotes’ actual impacts on humans would be a key piece of information for understanding how overlap should be managed,” she said. 

This work was supported by Cook County Animal and Rabies Control, the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation, the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.  

Andrew Sih of the University of California, Davis and Christopher Schell of the University of California, Berkeley were also co-authors.

Based on survey results, researchers estimated that groceries, takeout and restaurant leftovers averaging $12 in value per night of short-term lodging remains uneaten. Though the analysis didn’t pinpoint how much remaining food landed in the trash, that was the most common outcome reported, along with taking food home or leaving it behind. 

On average, the value of wasted food per trip amounted to about 5.1% of the nightly rental fee. 

“The 5% figure is probably similar to tax rates on lodging in particular localities,” said lead author Brian Roe, professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at The Ohio State University. “So people are basically paying an additional lodging tax through the money they spend on food that they never eat while they’re in the Airbnb.” 

The findings suggested travelers would be open to information from rental hosts about composting options or places to donate uneaten food. 

“There’s some interest among travelers to try to reduce their footprints, and this would be a way to do that,” Roe said. 

The study was published recently in the journal Waste Management. 

Data came from an online survey of 502 U.S. adults who had traveled in the past year reporting on their most recent trip using an Airbnb, VRBO or other short-term rental. Nearly all of the respondents were traveling for vacation – only 3% had been on a business trip. 

Researchers made projections based on statistical analyses combined with relevant national data to calculate the annual estimate of up to $2.3 billion that short-term renters spend on food that they don’t consume before the vacation ends. 

“That amount is an eye-opener,” Roe said. “And if people just realize uneaten food amounts to a 5% surcharge, either they can make sure they’re ready to transport food home if they’re in a car or can get it into the right hands for donation or composting at their rental location.” 

Additional findings included:

• Travelers paid an average of $231 per night for lodging.
• Each child along for the trip was associated with a greater amount of uneaten food by the end of the stay.
• About 80% of travel groups eat at least one meal per day in a short-term rental, and 6.3% eat in for every meal.
• The $12 in wasted food per night consists of $7 in groceries and $5 in food prepared elsewhere.
• Produce and pantry staples top the list of vacation groceries most commonly unused.
• Almost half of respondents said they waste more food when they travel than they do at home, while almost 21% said their food waste at home exceeded travel food waste.

Spending on groceries alone at short-term rentals added up to an average of $34 per day – a tourism statistic not previously known, Roe said.

“There are lots of estimates of how much tourists impact local economies, but this, to my knowledge, is one of the first documentations of how much people spend per day in groceries while they’re in an Airbnb,” he said.

Results indicated 46% of hosts provided an opportunity for renters to recycle and over 20% provided instructions on what to do with uneaten food. About three-fourths of respondents said they would consider it somewhat or very helpful for hosts to offer information on how to donate unused food or compost leftover food. 

“Given what we saw from consumers, there seemed to be interest in understanding if food could be donated or composted, and if so, how and where,” Roe said. 

“One can imagine this as a simple addition to a host’s information booklet – probably a very doable implementation. And if that knocked that $2 billion number down to $1.5 billion, that’s half a billion dollars less each year of wasted food.” 

Co-authors of the study were Sarah Ganbat and Mallika Malhotra, both Ohio State students.

The research helps explain differences in chili pepper pungency, or spiciness, by identifying three compounds in a range of pepper samples that chemical analysis predicted, and study participants on a tasting panel confirmed, are linked to lower heat intensity. 

The findings have multiple potential applications: customized chili pepper breeding, a pain-relief alternative to capsaicin and, in homes with a range of culinary spice sensitivities, a new condiment to put in the pantry. 

“If you’re at home and you’ve ordered cuisine that has spice to it that’s a little too hot for some tastes, you can just sprinkle on a form of chili pepper that has got these suppressant agents in them that will dial it down,” said senior study author Devin Peterson, professor of food science and technology at The Ohio State University. 

“I think the idea of using a natural material as an anti-spice, especially for somebody with kids, would have value as a household ingredient.”

The research was published online May 14 in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Chili pepper heat intensity has long been attributed to two members of a class of compounds called capsaicinoids: capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin. Scoville Heat Units, a scale used for over a century to determine the pungency of chili peppers, are calculated based on each pepper’s concentration of these two compounds. 

For this study, Peterson and colleagues obtained 10 cultivars of chili peppers, determined their Scoville units based on their capsaicinoid content, and normalized the group so all samples, prepared in dried powder form, had the same number of Scoville units. The researchers then added the standardized powders to tomato juice and asked a trained tasting panel to gauge their pungency. 

“They’re all in the same base and all normalized, so they should have had a similar heat perception, but they didn’t,” said Peterson, also faculty director of Ohio State’s Foods for Health Research Initiative. “That is a pretty clear indication that other things were at play and impacting the perception.” 

With this sensory perception data in hand, the researchers created statistical models and consulted molecular structures in existing libraries of chemicals to arrive at five candidate compounds predicted to be lowering the peppers’ perceived spiciness.

A second trained panel of tasters then compared the pungency of a range of capsaicinoid samples mixed with varying levels of these candidate compounds during tests in which different samples were placed on each side of the tongue simultaneously.

The second round of sensory results combined with high-resolution mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance experiments led the team to narrow down the heat suppression effects to three compounds: capsianoside I, roseoside and gingerglycolipid A. These results describe an overall mechanism that affects chili pepper heat levels, but are not exclusive to any specific chili pepper varieties. 

Peterson’s lab studies the complex relationships between oral cavity receptors and food compounds that influence human perception of flavor. The broad goal: applying findings to improving the taste of healthful foods without adding sugar, salt and fats. 

“What is maybe underappreciated from a science perspective is how important food flavor is to your dietary patterns and your enjoyment in life,” he said. “So part of what we focus on is, how do we make healthy eating less difficult?” 

When it comes to capsaicinoids, however, there is also a pain management implication from this study’s results. 

The TRPV1 receptors in the oral cavity that perceive chili pepper spiciness are triggered by molecules – including capsaicin – that cause sensations of pain and heat. These same receptors are present throughout the body, meaning that capsaicin in supplement and topical form eases pain by initially exposing receptors to the irritation signal and eventually desensitizing them to that stimulus so the pain goes away.

The newly identified heat-suppressing compounds may have the same desensitization effect – without the initial burn, Peterson said. 

This work was supported by the Flavor Research and Education Center, which Peterson founded and directs, in Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences. Joel Borcherding, former graduate student, and Edisson Tello, research professor, both in Ohio State’s Department of Food Science and Technology, co-authored the study.

Researchers at The Ohio State University conducted a national survey to gauge consumer perceptions about adopting solar power. Though previous work has examined views about rooftop solar, this study is the first assessment of public opinion about accessing community solar energy for household use. 

The findings led researchers to recommend that policymakers and industry leaders increase marketing campaign references to the practical reasons for embracing solar power – including saving money and improving property values without taking big risks – to encourage broader residential use. 

“Emphasizing the practical benefits of adopting solar, whether it’s rooftop or community, might be the most effective avenue to achieve increased adoption in the real world,” said first author Naseem Dillman-Hasso, a doctoral candidate in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State. 

The study also revealed that most participants didn’t understand what community solar is and few had looked into it, suggesting more public awareness is needed to expand consumer access to this more equitably distributed renewable energy source, said senior author Nicole Sintov, associate professor of behavior, decision making and sustainability at Ohio State. 

“Community solar is a great option for people who are unable to access rooftop solar,” she said. “We show that there are still some significant barriers to entry, and we’ve got to start with letting people know what it is.” 

The research was published recently in the journal Energy Research & Social Science. 

As of 2022, 8% of U.S homeowners had installed rooftop solar panels at an average cost of between $17,000 and $23,000 after applying a federal tax credit, according to the Pew Research Center. Under community solar programs, energy generated at an off-site solar array is supplied to multiple customers within a defined geographical area who receive credit on their electricity bills for energy produced by their share of the project.

With residential solar use still relatively low, Sintov and Dillman-Hasso sought to understand what could motivate households to consider solar as an energy option. 

They based the study on a consumer behavior theory suggesting that three common factors, or attributes, contribute to adoption of sustainable innovations – practical purposes (instrumental attributes), conveying one’s social consciousness to others (symbolic) and protecting the planet (environmental). 

A sample of 1,433 adults living in the United States was recruited for the online survey. Participants were asked about their willingness to adopt rooftop or community solar and whether they had taken action toward adoption, such as researching the options, talking with friends or family, or contacting an industry expert. 

They also were asked to agree or disagree with a series of statements representing the instrumental, symbolic and environmental attributes related to adopting solar. For example, the statements said purchasing or leasing solar “means that I’m a good community member,” “would save me money” and “would be a good way to reduce my environmental impact.” 

Statistical analysis showed that positive feelings about all three attributes increased the likelihood respondents would be willing to pursue rooftop or community solar as a household power source. But the factors linked to practical benefits (including finances) were “by far the strongest predictor above and beyond anything else,” Dillman-Hasso said. 

The magnitude of the effect of practical factors was a surprise, but it wasn’t the only surprising finding in the study. 

Participants were less willing to consider subscribing to community solar than to take on rooftop solar installation – even though rooftop solar generally isn’t available to people who don’t own their home or can’t afford the installation. 

“You don’t want to adopt something that you don’t know about,” Dillman-Hasso said. “Given the realities of community solar having much lower barriers to adoption – you don’t need financing and you don’t have to physically put panels on your roof – it was interesting to see that the willingness to adopt community solar was lower than rooftop. 

“That potentially points to a lack of knowledge or more apprehension around a newer distribution method of electricity.” 

As a behavioral scientist, Sintov said she doesn’t typically issue a generic call for “raising awareness,” given humans’ complexity – but in the context of community solar, the phrase applies.

“In this case, lack of awareness is a barrier, and I think both policymakers and entities that are trying to sell community solar plans could be working toward raising awareness,” she said. 

This study focused on willingness to adopt rather than actually installing panels or subscribing to community solar power. In separate projects, Sintov and Dillman-Hasso are studying different groups of solar power customers to look for factors that lead to signing up for and sticking with solar.

This work was supported by Interstate Gas Supply – Energy, an independent supplier of energy, including solar.

A federally funded project aims to help pin down the process by using mathematical models to analyze how factors like temperature, light pollution, and bird and mosquito abundance affect West Nile virus transmission. The ultimate goal is to advise health departments of the best time of year to kill the bugs. 

“I’m hopeful that what we will uncover in this grant will help us to better understand what’s driving West Nile virus transmission, and seasonal cycles of transmission, so we can determine when and where to direct control interventions to limit transmission and keep people healthy,” said Megan Meuti, principal investigator (PI) on the grant and associate professor of entomology at The Ohio State University. 

The project, based on Ohio data but structured to develop models adaptable to other U.S. regions, is funded by a $3 million grant from the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease program through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. 

Co-PIs on the grant are Laura Pomeroy, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Ohio State, who is building the mathematical models; Jaqueline Nolting, assistant professor of veterinary preventive medicine at Ohio State, who is analyzing biological samples from captured birds; and Brendan Shirkey, research coordinator for the Winous Point Marsh Conservancy, who is overseeing collection of birds and mosquitoes. Andrew Bowman, professor of veterinary preventive medicine, serves as senior personnel, designing experiments and assisting with data analysis. 

West Nile virus (WNV) is the most common insect-borne virus in the U.S. Most infected people have minimal or mild flu-like symptoms, but about 1% can become seriously ill – especially those over 60 or people with chronic health problems – if the virus enters the brain. 

Previous research gives us a general idea of how and when viral transmission occurs: As days get shorter, female mosquitoes from the Culex genus, known carriers of WNV, prepare for the winter dormancy period called diapause by fattening up on nectar from flowers – though they may take a viral infection they caught from birds with them into their winter downtime. After mosquitoes emerge from diapause in warmer months, more of them may become infected by taking blood meals from infected birds, and then transmit the virus when they feed on people, horses and other mammals. 

Among the questions asked by Meuti’s team: How does viral transmission re-initiate each spring, and how does the virus’s presence persist in the environment during fall and winter? 

The dormancy period appears to be delayed – or even prevented – by artificial light at night and heat in urban areas, according to previous studies in Meuti’s lab in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences. That disruption may mean the mosquitoes in cities are biting humans and animals longer into the fall, and also suggests urban and rural transmission patterns may differ. 

“We know humans tend to get infected in the late summer and early fall, and other studies have shown that birds are infected before then, but we don’t really know where West Nile virus is going in the winter,” Meuti said. 

The grant team started collecting mosquitoes and birds last fall and will continuously collect specimens for three years. Urban collection sites are located in Franklin and Lucas counties, and rural sites are in Union and Ottawa counties. 

Bird trapping focuses on nine species known to be bitten by Culex mosquitoes: American robins, mourning doves, Northern cardinals, house sparrows, common grackles, European starlings, gray catbirds, Swainson’s thrushes and red-winged blackbirds. Researchers tag and release captured birds after collecting blood samples that will show their infection status – never infected, active WNV infection, or antibodies indicating they’ve been infected and recovered. 

During the winter, researchers are collecting mosquitoes spending diapause in culverts to see if they’re already infected with the virus. Analysis of the blood contents in mosquitoes’ bellies will tell researchers what animals they’ve been biting – birds, horses or humans. Researchers will also sequence the RNA of the virus detected in mosquitoes. 

The data and modeling will enable the team to test their hypotheses about how the transmission process plays out in rural and urban settings. In general, researchers predict mosquitoes are more likely to be infected with WNV over the winter in urban areas than in rural areas, suggesting that in rural areas, migratory birds are infecting mosquitoes, or the virus is spilling over from urban settings – or both. 

“If RNA sequences are very similar from fall to spring, that would suggest the virus is staying local and, most likely, the way it’s staying local would be in the overwintering mosquitoes. But if we see differences in sequences from fall to spring, that would be more suggestive that it is a new WNV strain or a slightly different strain coming from migratory birds,” Meuti said. 

“Once we have the models in place, we can predict what West Nile virus transmission might look like in a given year. And in partnership with local health departments and mosquito control districts, our ultimate goal is to understand what’s driving West Nile virus transmission and use this information to better predict when and where we can direct specific interventions.”

The AAAS Fellowship, recognizing scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications, is one of the most prestigious honors a U.S. scientist can receive. Fellows are elected by their academic peers.  

“Ohio State’s newly elected Fellows have devoted their professional lives to protecting health, investigating complex principles of physics, and analyzing social behavior and labor economics,” said Peter Mohler, executive vice president for research, innovation and knowledge. “The American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellowship is an important acknowledgment of the key role scientists play in solving critical problems and improving lives.”   

The 2024 class consists of 471 scientists, engineers and innovators spanning 24 scientific disciplines.   

Ohio State’s newest Fellows represent the colleges of Arts and Sciences; Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences; Medicine; and Veterinary Medicine. This year’s class, joining over 540 Ohio State scholars who have been granted this lifetime recognition since 1874, are:   

John Beacom, professor of physics and astronomy. For distinguished contributions to the fields of nuclear and particle astrophysics, particularly regarding neutrinos. 

Pierluigi (Enrico) Bonello, professor of molecular and chemical ecology of trees in the Department of Plant Pathology. For distinguished contributions to the fields of forest pathology, chemical ecology, tree disease resistance and early detection of tree infections. 

Prosper Boyaka, professor and chair of veterinary biosciences. For distinguished contributions to the field of mucosal immunology, particularly in the field of vaccinology to develop alternative novel strategies to optimize protective immunity to pathogens at mucosal surfaces. 

David Robert Cole, professor of earth sciences and Ohio Research Scholar. For distinguished contributions to the field of subsurface mineralogy and geochemistry from the molecular to the geological formation scale. 

Ian Hamilton, professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology and mathematics. For distinguished contributions to the fields of behavioral ecology and complexity science in both theory and empirical studies. 

Chun Ning Jeanie Lau, professor of physics. For distinguished experimental contributions to the field of 2D van der Waals materials, leading to new insights into the thermal, mechanical and electronic properties, and emergent phases in few-layer graphene. 

Roland Kenji Kawakami, professor of physics. For seminal contributions to spintronics and magnetism in two-dimensional materials, and for the investigation of epitaxial magnetic films and heterostructures using molecular beam epitaxy and surface-sensitive characterizations. 

Abhay Satoskar, professor of pathology and microbiology. For distinguished contributions to the field of parasitology, particularly mechanisms of immunity and immune evasion in leishmaniasis and development of novel therapies and vaccines for this disease. 

Bruce Weinberg, professor of economics. For distinguished contributions to the field of labor economics, particularly for a multidisciplinary approach to studying creativity and innovation, socioeconomic determinants of youth outcomes and technological impact on wage structure. 

Fellows are recognized for their achievements across disciplines, from research, teaching and technology to administration in academia, industry and government, to excellence in communicating and interpreting science to the public. 

The 2024 class of Fellows will be honored at a forum in Washington, D.C., in June.

Researchers monitoring coyotes in Chicago found that habitat – areas with relatively high levels of vegetation cover and low levels of human infrastructure – did not influence coyote survival in positive or negative ways. Instead, areas densely populated with humans were associated with longer coyote lifespans. 

“What we found was really interesting, in that the societal characteristics seem to play a much more important role in predicting coyote survival time than the environmental characteristics,” said Emily Zepeda, first author of the study and a postdoctoral scholar in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University. 

“And then we found this positive effect of human population density on survival time. Both of those things are unexpected because we usually associate human activity with detrimental effects on wildlife.” 

The study was published recently in the journal Urban Ecosystems. 

The data comes from the Urban Coyote Research Project, a long-term study of coyote ecology in the Chicago Metropolitan Area led by Stan Gehrt, a wildlife ecologist at Ohio State and senior author of the new paper. 

Gehrt and colleagues estimate that 4,000 coyotes live in Chicago, one of the largest metropolitan areas in North America. Gehrt’s previous behavioral, genetics and biological studies offer hints at how coyotes have adjusted to life in the city. This new work sought to identify the diverse urban factors that help or hinder their ability to survive. 

Tracking data on the movement of 214 coyotes living in the Chicago area between 2013 and 2021 was used for the study. The duration of each coyote’s tracking period served as a proxy of its survival time. 

Potential factors the researchers predicted would affect urban coyote survival included a mix of societal and environmental characteristics: neighborhood median income, human density and demographics; and road density, parks and golf courses, and “disturbed” regions dominated by infrastructure and vacant land. These factors were analyzed alongside the coyote monitoring data in a statistical model to determine their relationships with survival time. 

The results showed a positive relationship between survival rate and human population density – at low human densities, coyote survival was generally low. The data also revealed an interaction between neighborhood income and density: In areas with low human density, median income was not significantly associated with survival, likely due to the absence of humans. However, at moderate and high levels of human density, coyotes in lower-income areas were 1 1/2 times more likely to survive to age 2 than coyotes in high-income areas.

“We’ve hypothesized that population density may have a positive effect because it’s actually providing resources like human-related structures or food that allow coyotes to weather the harsh conditions of the winter, which is a major mortality factor for Chicago coyotes,” Zepeda said. 

Plentiful resources might become problematic, she said, when the food and shelter, combined with more vegetation and less pollution in high-income areas, draws a crowd of coyotes – which leads to higher disease transmission and fighting over territory. 

“There might be more individuals in those areas, but survival time may be shorter there,” she said. “You might die younger in an area where there are a lot of competitors.” 

The findings build on growing evidence that societal processes that benefit and marginalize human populations trickle down to urban ecosystems – suggesting that the presence, or lack, of humans, and the conditions in which they live, has potential to override natural influences on urban wildlife. 

And yet, it was surprising not to find a connection between natural habitats and longer survival, Zepeda said, because “anecdotally, we see really high densities of coyotes in nature preserves and urban parks. That’s often where you see coyotes in the city if you see them at all.” 

Researchers can only speculate, but Zepeda said it could mean the habitat categories on city maps aren’t specific enough or that hunting and trapping is more common in natural settings. Or it could simply be a sign of how crafty coyotes are. 

“It could speak to how adaptable they are that they might prefer natural habitat, but at least in terms of survival, they can do just as well in more urbanized areas,” she said. 

This work was supported by Cook County Animal and Rabies Control, the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation, the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. 

Andrew Sih of the University of California, Davis and Christopher Schell of the University of California, Berkeley were also co-authors.

The national survey found that discarded frozen items make up about 6% of wasted household food in the United States. Based on frozen food’s relatively small contribution to food waste and other findings in the study, researchers say urging consumers to stock their freezers might be one way to prevent premature disposal of food. 

Results showed that though overall food waste remained high, there was a bright spot: Freezing food was associated with less food landing in the trash. 

“We found that households with home freezing behaviors are more likely to have less food waste than other households,” said Lei Xu, first author of the paper and a postdoctoral scholar specializing in agricultural and food economics at The Ohio State University. 

“Food waste is not just an economic loss – it also causes environmental damage because more than 90% of wasted food goes to the landfill, and this can produce greenhouse gas emissions,” Xu said. “The findings suggest that in the future, if we can encourage households to have home freezing behaviors, this small change in food storage habits can have a large environmental impact.” 

Xu completed the study with graduate student Ran Li and senior author Brian Roe, professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at Ohio State. The research was published recently in the British Food Journal. 

Roe has been studying household food waste for years, but this is the first study to tease out where frozen food fits into the food waste picture. Recent estimates have suggested about 30% of food in the United States is wasted, but other research led by Roe suggests consumer food waste is trending upward. 

“The fact that food waste is still increasing may suggest to policymakers that campaigns could be useful to educate households about balancing purchasing behavior and making the most of the food they buy,” Xu said. 

The current study data comes from frozen food-related questions added to the summer 2022 wave of the U.S. National Household Food Waste Tracking Survey in which 1,067 households participated. Respondents were asked to estimate the percentage of all discarded food in the previous seven days that had been frozen and whether it was bought frozen or was unfrozen and placed in the freezer later. They also reported the typical frequency of buying frozen foods. 

The responses indicated that 85% of U.S. households buy frozen foods and among those, 55% of participants reported they purchased frozen food to reduce waste. Frozen food purchasers were more likely to shop infrequently – two to three times per month – and were more likely to be living in households with annual income of under $50,000. The most common categories of discarded frozen foods were meat (20% of total frozen food waste), vegetables (22%) and potatoes and grains (15% each). 

“Based on what we’re seeing among households, we still have space to increase awareness to save food by using freezing behavior,” Xu said. 

Data showed a link between frequent home freezing and significantly less total food waste. Respondents most likely to freeze fresh items or extra food were aged 45 years and older and living in households of three or more people – a possible sign, the authors said, that consumers with a home freezing routine may be more experienced at managing meals for a group and motivated to avoid food waste. 

What the team considered somewhat surprising – and enlightening – was the finding that about 30% more of wasted frozen food was discarded from the refrigerator than from the freezer. 

“Thinking about why that happens, it might mean they don’t understand food storage techniques and don’t understand how long they should keep certain foods and where they should put it,” Xu said. “This suggests more explicit food storage instructions on food labels could educate consumers about how to correctly store foods to reduce waste.” 

Trends in the data suggest that consumer education about the freezer’s role in saving food could make a difference economically and environmentally, Xu said, and also help address the societal problem of food insecurity experienced by 10% of U.S. households. 

“Half of consumers buy frozen food to reduce waste. What about the other half?” she said. “We want to increase social awareness of how to save food, and explain how people use frozen food and home freezing techniques to save food. And freezing is one of the most accessible techniques because essentially all households have a refrigerator and freezer.” 

This work was supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the National Science Foundation and a gift from the Frozen Food Foundation that facilitated collection of a larger survey sample size. 

By Brent Sohngen 

Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics, The Ohio State University

Forest plantations are dedicated to growing commercial timber. Soil Science/flickr, CC BY

Growing the weed, pennycress – often called stinkweed – as a crop requires less fertilizer and fewer pesticides than other plants that can be used to make renewable jet fuel, according to the study. Pennycress also requires fewer farm operations, such as soil tilling, than other potential biofuel crops, reducing the associated environmental costs. Those costs include carbon dioxide emissions that cause the climate to change, as well as other emissions that pollute the air.

Environmental impacts could be further mitigated through farm management techniques that keep fertilizer on fields, rather than allowing it to run off into nearby watersheds, the study suggests. Such techniques can add to the financial cost of growing crops, but reduce their environmental footprints.

“Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from air travel will mean not just incremental changes, but a fundamental change in how we have been producing fuel and where that fuel comes from,” said Ajay Shah, senior author of the study and associate professor of food, agricultural and biological engineering at The Ohio State University in Wooster. “And what we found is that pennycress might make a very good alternative fuel, especially when you consider the environmental costs of producing it.”

The study was published recently online in the journal Applied Energy.

For this study, the researchers estimated the environmental impacts of growing pennycress, transporting it to a biorefinery and converting it to a usable jet fuel. They also accounted for the environmental costs of burning leftover byproducts of refining the pennycress seed into fuel.

Those environmental costs include fertilizer and pesticide use, water consumption and the energy required to harvest and transport pennycress seeds from a farm to a biorefinery and process them into usable fuel.

The researchers built computer models to determine how much total energy it would take to produce jet fuel from pennycress seeds and compared those estimates with the energy needed for producing biofuels from other crops. The data for the models came from existing studies about biofuel production.

Their models showed that it took about half as much energy to produce jet fuel from pennycress as it did to produce jet fuel from canola or sunflowers, two other potential bio-jet fuel crops. Pennycress oil production used about a third as much energy as soybean oil production, the researchers found, and the energy needed for turning pennycress into jet fuel was about the same as that used to produce fuel from the flowering plant camelina, another biofuel crop.

Renewable jetfuels are not yet financially competitive with fossil fuel-based fuels, Shah said. But calculating the environmental impacts of alternative bio-based fuels should help both farmers and policymakers as they try to limit carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere and, hopefully, to slow or stop climate change.

“Pennycress also makes an appealing alternative jet fuel because of its growing season,” Shah said. “It is a winter cover crop that can be grown between corn season and soybean season, giving the same body of farmland an extra production cycle each year.

“Pennycress can be planted when corn is still standing in the field, before the corn harvest,” he said. “And it can be harvested before the soybean crops are planted. The bottom line is it can be used as a cover crop, it doesn’t divert any agricultural production land, and it has suitable properties for renewable jet fuel production.”

Greenhouse gas emissions from air travel contribute to climate change, accounting for about 2% of all human-induced carbon-dioxide emissions, according to various groups that study the effects of transportation on climate change.

“Reducing those emissions will almost certainly mean finding cleaner alternatives to jet fuels made from fossil fuels,” Shah said. “Studies like this one can help determine the best alternative.

“When it comes to pennycress, production and logistics are the big contributors to both the environmental impacts and the costs, and those are the challenge areas ­– they have to be streamlined and solved to make it more efficient,” he said. “If we could improve those areas, we could make production more energy-efficient and substantially lower the costs and environmental impacts.”

This work was supported by funding from the U.S. Department of Energy.

The study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, found that planting and protecting trees, especially in the tropics, could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 6 gigatons a year from 2025 to 2055. That reduction, the researchers’ economic model showed, would cost as much as $393 billion a year over the same time period.

“There is a significant amount of carbon that can be sequestered through forests, but these costs aren’t zero,” said Brent Sohngen, co-author of the study and a professor of environmental economics at The Ohio State University.

A 6-gigaton reduction by 2055 would amount to about 10 percent of the total reduction needed to keep the climate from warming beyond 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. Policymakers and scientists agree that humans worldwide need to put strategies in place that will keep the climate from warming above that threshold.

Limiting warming by that amount would not mean climate change is solved. At a 2-degree increase, for example, extreme heatwaves will become widespread, droughts would plague many urban environments around the world, and heavy rainfalls – including those from tropical storms or hurricanes – would become more commonplace. Many insects and animals would also die.

Those levels, though, would allow for some adaptation, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that is trying to help the world address climate change. The world is currently on pace to warm by about 4 degrees.

A number of recent studies have suggested that tree planting, management and conservation can solve a significant share of the world’s climate problem, but most studies have ignored the costs. This analysis updated the Global Timber Model, which considers potential climate change policies and the effects they would have on forest land use, management and trade. The model allowed the researchers to calculate the worldwide financial costs of sequestering carbon in the world’s forests.

The researchers found that protecting existing forests is cheaper than planting new ones, and that forest management, including changing how and when trees are harvested, provides low-cost options to store carbon in regions where timber management is an important economic activity.

One important reason why the costs in this study are higher than other estimates is because researchers captured carbon leakage, which occurs if carbon emissions shift to other sectors or geographic areas. For example, if planting trees in one location on agricultural land causes additional deforestation somewhere else, the net change in carbon will be smaller because of this leakage.

The study illustrates the geography and timing of the costs of forestry actions to mitigate climate change. Specifically, the researchers found forests in Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia are likely to contribute the greatest possible carbon sequestration efforts at the lowest costs. Protecting tropical forest land in the short term gives way to planting and managing tropical and temperate forests, often with longer rotations, to maintain high levels of mitigation beyond 2050.

“Protecting, managing and restoring the world’s forests will be necessary for avoiding dangerous impacts of climate change, and have important co-benefits such as biodiversity conservation, ecosystem service enhancement and protection of livelihoods,” said Kemen Austin, lead author of the study and senior policy analyst with RTI International, a nonprofit research institute based in North Carolina. “Until now, there has been limited research investigating the costs of climate change mitigation from forests. Better understanding the costs of mitigation from global forests will help us to prioritize resources and inform the design of more efficient mitigation policies.”

The researchers also found that in the temperate and subarctic regions, the United States would likely be responsible for the greatest share of forest-related carbon mitigation efforts – about 24 percent of the possible mitigation in those climate regions would come from the United States based on forested and deforested land. China and Canada have the potential to contribute significantly, too, the researchers found.

And managing the world’s forests would be only one piece of the broader puzzle. Energy sources that don’t rely on fossil fuels – things like solar and wind power – likely will play the largest role in any climate change mitigation strategy.

“What we see is that you should devote about a third of your effort to this stuff and two-thirds to the other stuff – to reducing coal, to investing in solar, to switching to electric,” Sohngen said. “If you want your total mitigation to be as cheap as possible, that’s what you would do."

Across four continents, Rattan Lal, a Distinguished University Professor in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES), has pioneered ways to reduce deforestation, control soil erosion, and enrich soil, leading to sustained or higher crop yields.

Agricultural practices that Lal has helped mainstream are now at the heart of efforts to improve agricultural systems in the tropics and globally, making agriculture part of the solution to environmental problems.

“My source of inspiration has been the challenges farmers of the world face, especially the resource-poor and small landholders. The majority of these are women farmers,” Lal said.

“Their struggle in trying to make a living from degraded and depleted soils under harsh and uncertain climate conditions is the driving force and source of my motivation to find land-based, natural solutions for them.”

Without damaging the environment, Lal’s agricultural strategies increase the soil’s ability to grow food, meeting an ever-expanding demand. At the same time, those techniques help slow the rate of climate change.

Plants grown on healthy soil can best take in climate change-causing carbon dioxide from the air when those plants perform photosynthesis.

In 1997, Lal co-wrote the first documented report showing how restoring degraded soil could also defend against rising levels of carbon dioxide in the air.

“Our entire Buckeye community congratulates Dr. Lal on receiving this incredible honor,” said Ohio State President Kristina Johnson. “It is fitting recognition for a lifetime spent uplifting humankind on a vast scale. As a scientist, mentor and colleague, he is an inspiring example that one person with vision and dedication truly can change the world.”

Lal was chosen for the Arrell Award because of the overall global impact of his career and how important his work is—and will continue to be—in dealing with climate change, said Evan Fraser, director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.

Lal’s work has become “fundamental to the science community” and is “applicable to small-holder farmers around the world,” he said.

“As one of the world’s foremost soil scientists, Professor Lal’s decades of work have helped advance knowledge and shape practices in how to conserve one of the world’s most important and fragile resources.”

Around the world, Lal has promoted agricultural techniques including eliminating plowing, retaining crop residue left after harvest, planting cover crops, minimizing the use of chemical fertilizers by reducing losses, and setting aside some land and water for nature, rather than for agriculture or other purposes. Each practice comes at low cost, affordable even to farmers in the developing world.

In the early part of a career spanning five decades, Lal served as a soil physicist at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria. There, he helped in efforts to restore the productivity of soils in Africa and throughout the tropics.

“Perhaps no single individual has contributed more to the knowledge base of African agriculture,” wrote Ronnie Coffman, a Distinguished University Professor at Cornell University and one of four scientists who nominated Lal for the Arrell Award.

“He is most certainly a researcher who has advanced the understanding of food production with a significant positive impact on society.”

While growing up on a small farm in northern India, Lal first became interested in healthy soil’s potential.

Experiencing frequent droughts and brutally hot temperatures, Lal came to realize that soil can play a critical role in being a buffer against harsh climate conditions by holding onto water and nutrients. Even in bad years, farmers could survive, but that survival depended on the health of the soil.

While his elder siblings worked on the farm, Lal was the only one in his family who went to school, the only one who learned to read and write. That fueled his intense drive to make the most of his education and research to help farmers and influence how agricultural land is managed.

“Dr. Lal has been extremely successful in influencing sustainable agricultural practices around the world, and the ripple effects of his work come, in part, through those he has mentored—just over a thousand undergraduates and graduates, postdocs, and visiting scholars,” said Cathann A. Kress, Ohio State vice president for agricultural administration and dean of CFAES.

“He has brought about a paradigm shift in sustainable soil management. His approach recognizes the need for increasing food production with the necessity of improving the environment.”

For the Arrell Global Food Innovation Award, Lal will receive $76,000, which he plans to donate for soil science research and education.

In June, Lal was named the 2020 recipient of the World Food Prize. A faculty member at Ohio State for 33 years, Lal in 2019 became the first Ohio State scientist and the first soil scientist to ever receive the Japan Prize.

He was listed by Thomson Reuters as among the top 1% of most-cited scientists in agriculture for 2014–2019 and among the world’s most influential scientific minds in 2015. Lal was recognized for his contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.

Lal first came to Ohio State to work on his doctorate in soil science, which he completed in 1968.

The guiding philosophy for his work has long been that the well-being of humanity starts in the ground.

“Sustainable management of soil and agriculture is critical,” Lal said. “The future of humanity and of the planet depends on the health of the soil.”

Conservation projects in cities also are more likely to be successful if they are tackled at a micro, neighborhood level, rather than approached as a city-wide project, the researchers believe.

The researchers made the case in a commentary article based on seven years of research studying the ecology of vacant land in Cleveland, published online Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications.

“By seeding vacant lots with native Ohio wildflowers, we sought to both beautify these spaces and support biodiversity,” said Mary Gardiner, professor of entomology at The Ohio State University and senior author of the paper. “With this article, we wanted to highlight conservation is not successful when it creates conflict with local residents, and summarize best practices from the literature and our own experiences on the ground.”

This study was part of a larger research project designed to understand the best ways to encourage biodiversity among beneficial insects such as bees, spiders and beetles in urban vacant lots.

When the project began in 2012, the researchers worked closely with city leaders, including members of the Cleveland City Council, the Cleveland Land Bank (an organization that manages the city’s vacant properties), and others to identify neighborhoods — and vacant lots within those neighborhoods — for conservation projects. The team designed eight different conservation styles to be used over eight vacant lots in eight neighborhoods across Cleveland. In each neighborhood, vacant lots were cleaned and planted with different wildflowers that would support beneficial insects.

Then, they went door-to-door within a one-block radius of each of the 64 vacant lots in the study to talk with neighbors and make sure they were on board.

But that approach could have been improved, Gardiner said.

“That is asking people to accept something. It’s not asking them to co-create it with you, which is a better strategy,” she said. Also, she said, communication throughout the project duration is key and the group faced many challenges getting the word out about their conservation goals.

“Many living near our sites were short-term renters — the neighbors you would meet in year one, when you were establishing and planting, were not always the same neighbors present in year two. And so, people would notice our signs or the habitat and not know the back story and wouldn’t feel like they were part of the decision-making process, which unfortunately disenfranchised some from the study.”

Cleveland is a city of around 400,000 people; its population has declined in recent decades. The city covers about 84 square miles and has more than 27,000 vacant lots.

The project covered eight neighborhoods, with different conservation approaches in each area. That design was important for research purposes — it allowed the researchers to evaluate the effectiveness of each conservation approach, and to try to replicate approaches across one city. But the researchers emphasize that this research design is not ideal for conservation initiatives that might follow. A one-size-fits-all approach to conservation, even across one city, is unlikely to meet the needs of both residents and target species.

For example, the researchers mowed the edges of each vacant lot habitat, thinking that the residents might appreciate a border between their homes and a wild habitat that might feature tall flowers. But in some areas, residents thought that the teams had abandoned the lots partway through a mow job. Some residents appreciated the fencing that went around vacant lots; others thought it blocked them from accessing the habitats.

“We would advise conservation scientists in the future to focus on starting small in one particular community,” said Katie Turo, first author of the paper and a doctoral student in Gardiner’s lab. “And to recognize how important it is to invest in the community, develop objectives and continue to work with them to understand what’s working and what’s not working.”

And while the researchers put up signs at each lot that included contact information, the scientists found that residents were most likely to talk with them — to complain, compliment the planting or ask questions — when they were on site.

“That was difficult, because many neighbors were working during the day when we were collecting data and managing the sites,” Turo said. “We found that when we were able to stick around after 5 p.m., we were more likely to get feedback from residents. In the future though, we’d recommend that scientists avoid similar issues by partnering with sociologists who can help proactively gather community feedback.”

The researchers cited a successful conservation project in Chicago, the Burnham Wildlife Corridor, which developed a migratory bird habitat, but which also invited community groups and residents to design their own project goals and habitat plans. That project was also designed in partnership with the Field Museum and Chicago Park District and built on 20 years of research into the local communities.

That local community buy-in matters: Conservation projects, Gardiner said, are more likely to be successful when the local community is excited about them and takes ownership. That means engaging residents throughout project conceptualization, implementation and assessment.

“Do not ask people to tolerate conservation," she said. "Instead, seek win-win scenarios for communities and biodiversity.”