A new $160,000 grant from the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission will fund three years of a student research program at Shepherd University in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle.
A new grant from the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission (HEPC) is furthering student research in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle.
The Shepherd Opportunity to Attract Research Students (SOARS) program pairs students with university faculty for summer research projects, providing them a stipend for their work.
A new HEPC grant of more than $160,000 will allow the program to continue for the next three years.
Participants in the program select a scientific research project they want to work on alongside a professor, receiving mentorship over the course of the summer.
At summer’s end, students have the opportunity to present their research. Later, they complete a capstone project from their findings.
This marks the fifth cycle of the SOARS program, which welcomes 30 students in each round of the grant.
“Students who are paid on the SOARS grant in the summer have extra hours and bits and pieces that they can do,” said Robert Warburton, dean of Shepherd’s College of Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Nursing, in a Monday press release.
“That means they get extra experience, and the faculty advisor gets assistants working in the lab, which is also important because the faculty must be able to do research because of their professional development requirements,” he said. “It’s a win on both sides.”
It’s an old story in Appalachia: failing water systems leaving people afraid to drink from their taps. Now, Virginia Tech researchers are putting numbers behind the stories with a study of water inequality in McDowell County, West Virginia.
This conversation originally aired in the Sept. 3, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.
It’s an old story in Appalachia: failing water systems leaving people afraid to drink from their taps.
Now, Virginia Tech researchers are putting numbers behind the stories with a study of water inequality in McDowell County, West Virginia. Leigh-Anne Krometis is a professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech, and she was part of the team that conducted the study.
Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams reached out to learn more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Adams: We’re talking because of a study that you and your team did in McDowell County, West Virginia. Tell us about what the study was and what y’all were looking for.
Krometis: I have been studying roadside springs for a long time. If you drive around Appalachia, I’m sure you’ve noticed people with their jugs collecting water at roadside springs. Several years ago, I started researching the water quality of those springs and why people value them, and then that led me really to look at people’s home water quality. Because when you see people collecting water, you wonder, “Well, do they have water in their homes?” My original hypothesis was, “Oh, well, these people don’t have water in their homes. And that’s why they’re choosing to go to the springs.”
In reality, the majority of the people that we have gone to their homes and interviewed and taken home water samples, they have water in their homes, they can turn on the tap and water comes out. But it’s not water they trust, or it’s not water that meets federal guidelines.
Adams: I can’t think of the number of times I’ve been at someone’s house and asked for a cup of water, and they’d tell me to drink bottled water instead.
Krometis: A colleague of mine said, “You’re gonna find out that everyone’s using bottled water anyway.” And that is really the second phase of this study, is we’re looking at the health and economic implications of having to rely on bottled water, because you have water in your home, but you can’t use it. We all know that there are food deserts. McDowell County is the only place I think in America where a Walmart failed. You have to drive 30-45 minutes just to go somewhere to buy your bottled water. It’s an added cost. Bottled water is 2,000 times the cost of what you get out of the tap. And so what does all that mean, to us, especially for people who don’t have huge household incomes?
Adams: How did you all research this question in McDowell County?
Krometis: We worked with some community groups and community contacts. We’d go to someone’s home and say, “Would you like free water quality testing?” One of the things that’s really important to me is the democratization of water science. If I collect a water sample from your home and analyze it, I give the data back to you first. That data isn’t mine, it’s yours. It’s your exposure in your home. We collect water samples, and then do a short interview about typical water-use reliance on bottled water.
Adams: What did you find in this initial round of results?
Krometis: The most obvious thing is that, especially for homes that are reliant on private water systems, people in Appalachia get pretty creative. I mean, all over the country, we see private wells and private springs, but folks here also have cisterns. They have other ways of running water into their homes. The most common contaminant we see is coliform [bacteria] and E. coli, which are bacteria that if you had them in a centralized system, it will cause a boil order, because it means that there’s actually fecal contamination. There’s a health risk. In homes that are reliant on public water, we didn’t see that because chlorine is kind of a miracle worker. We did see high levels of salt and some things that can make water taste funny in some homes.
But the more interesting thing that I found … as a water scientist, is there’s this kind of new idea called multiple water use, which is that we imagine that people in their home you turn on a tap, and that’s the water use for everything. But actually, people are making a lot more subtle choices. You might use bottled water to drink, or to use for cooking, you might go collect spring water for coffee, or for making tea. And then you use the tap water for cleaning. Or maybe you have two different wells or a rainwater cistern on your home. But this is a lot of mental work. That’s a lot. It’s not just turning on your tap for everything. You have to think about which water you’re using for what purpose. And that’s an idea that science is only just now realizing. I mean, it’s a reality people in Appalachia have known for hundreds of years. But it’s something we’re just realizing makes exposure really difficult to measure.
Adams: I’d like to go back to this question of spring water, because I know for myself, and a lot of people, they just think that water from natural springs tastes better. You’ve actually done some research. Is spring water better to drink than bottled water or tap water?
Krometis: No. The problem with “spring water” is that it’s generally not truly spring water. We have this idea that it’s groundwater, and so it’s protected from all the gross things humans are doing on the surface. But because of the underlying rocks and geology of Appalachia, it’s often not even truly groundwater. It’s surface water that has sunk under the ground and reemerged. There are lots of places where we sample that people think are springs, [but] they’re actually outfalls from historic mine sites.
Now, ironically, some of those flooded mines have pretty decent water quality, because they’re so deep, but 80 percent of the springs that I’ve sampled have E. coli in them. If you were out hiking on the Appalachian Trail or going camping, you would want to boil that water before you used it. But it looks great, right? It’s in a beautiful setting and it doesn’t taste like chlorine, but it really does not meet health guidelines.
Adams: What are some of the implications for this study and what you found?
Krometis: We’ve had some national level analyses talking about the “plumbing poverty” or water inequity, and Appalachia frequently comes up bright red, as somewhere that is challenged by this. We don’t really talk about what that means in terms of the human impacts. What is the lived experience of being in a place with plumbing poverty? That means extra time waiting at a spring, it means extra health impacts, because you’re exposed to water that doesn’t meet guidelines.
It’s just the indignity of having to spend your time juggling different ideas of what water you can serve to company versus yourself for using it to make baby formula. What I hope is that this motivates long-term investment, and also creative investment. The way that we typically create water infrastructure in America with these long water lines; it might not work for Appalachia. And people here are creative: How do we take that creativity and make sustainable healthy water systems that meet needs?
On this West Virginia Morning, we learn how a project at WVU studying the environmental effects of acid rain in the Fernow Experimental Forest in Tucker County is inviting local students to participate, and we explore ideas for including loved ones with dementia into holiday celebrations.
On this West Virginia Morning, West Virginia University (WVU) scientists since 1989 have been studying the environmental effects of acid rain in the Fernow Experimental Forest in Tucker County. COVID-19 pandemic restrictions forced the long-term experiment to change in recent years, and researchers are now inviting local students to take part in the project’s next phase. Chris Schulz sat down with WVU biology professor Edward Brzostek to discuss the changes.
Also, in this show, the holidays can be a stressful time, but dementia can make that even more difficult. For his series, “Getting Into Their Reality: Caring For Aging Parents,” News Director Eric Douglas spoke with Teresa Morris, program director for the West Virginia chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, to get some ideas for families who are working to include someone with dementia into their celebrations.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University.
Caroline MacGregor produced this episode.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
A WVU researcher is studying a plant that can help restore surface mine lands by creating missing topsoil and capturing carbon out of the air and storing it underground. The above ground plants can also be used as biomass which can be turned into biofuels or even particle board.
A WVU researcher is studying a plant that can help restore surface mine lands by creating missing topsoil and capturing carbon out of the air and storing it underground. The above ground plants can also be used as biomass which can be turned into biofuels or even particle board.
News Director Eric Douglas spoke with Jennifer Kane, a postdoctoral student in plant and soil sciences from the WVU Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design. She is studying the plant Miscanthus (Miscanthus × giganteus). She grew up in Raleigh County and has first-hand knowledge of the abandoned mine lands she is looking to improve.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Douglas: We’ve seen stories of people getting grants, we’ve seen efforts to plant on former reclaimed coal mine lands or even abandoned mine lands, to restore them with mixed success. And it’s just not worked because the soil is not topsoil anymore. It’s just not got the nutrients in it, so nothing’s growing real well. This kind of intrigues me as something that is actually growing and can actually serve a purpose on coal mine lands.
Researcher Jennifer Kane.
Kane: My family specifically, we’re kind of a transplant, my parent’s generation moved here. So I don’t have a long line of multiple generations but certainly I went to high school in Coal City and went to school with many people whose family spent five generations in the mines. We would ride four wheelers on old mines that were pre-SMACRA. They weren’t reclaimed at all, some hazardous conditions and obviously, things weren’t going well. And what I would say about Miscanthus is we’ve been testing it on varying mine disturbance across a spectrum. Anywhere from it’s really bad.
Kane: Surface Mining Reclamation and Control Act of 1977.
Douglas: Post 1977, the mining industry had to put money into a fund to help reclaim mine lands. It’s not near enough, but that’s a different story.
Kane: Yeah, some level of accountability with some basic reclamation requirements.
Douglas: Before 1977, they often just walked away.
Kane: We have one site like that, that was a pre-77 surface mine. It was just left as bare rock unreclaimed. The interesting thing, we do see lower yields of Miscanthus on those lands, but it’s still certainly alive and well. The two purposes of Miscanthus in our minds are maybe one day, we could use it for energy or materials, but it also literally builds soil under it. That’s a really great thing about it is that even on these really disturbed sites where the yields are pretty low, and it may not be viable for really high industrial use, it’s making the soil better under it.
Douglas: This has a pretty significant root system underground as well. This is one of those that reaches down four or five feet, right?
Kane: Here they are four or five feet , yes, but some places out in the Midwest that we kind of watch their research and are jealous of because they have these beautiful deep soils, they’ll find roots 9 to 10 feet. Here, I would say four or five feet is a good estimate but that’s something we’re looking into. We’re looking into how much root biomass there is, how deep it goes.
Douglas: That stabilizes the soil and then as it grows and decomposes, adding nutrients into the soil.
Kane: It certainly helps with things like hydrology, and you don’t see these lands kind of washing away, indirect effects on other indirect consequences of mining, like the devastating floods we see all over the state.
Planting rhizomes for a research project at the Agronomy Farm Friday, May 31, 2019. The plants are now 15 feet tall.
Douglas: Describe for me what grows above land. This is such an interesting plant that it’s doing all these great things for the soil. But you’re also talking about harvesting it and using it for biofuels.
Kane: There’s a lot of interesting uses. We in the U.S. are not on the forefront, I wouldn’t say, of bioenergy technology, but some places in Europe are using Miscanthus. You can use it for more traditional bioenergy, cellulosic ethanol production, where you are fermenting it and it ends up as ethanol, but that may not necessarily be the best use of it. I mean, people have pellet stoves and things like that. It can be pelletized and burned similar to how wood is used for heat and energy. Also, there’s an interesting company, again in Europe somewhere I believe, and they’re actually making building material like particle board out of Miscanthus. It’s not a good forage grass, unfortunately, but it is really strong and tough. If you walk through a field of it, you’re all scratched up and in pain. It’s a strong plant. It has a really high photosynthetic efficiency, so for how well it can produce in terms of biomass, it uses relatively little water and nutrients.
Douglas: Is this like, three, four feet tall?
Kane: Fifteen or 16 feet.
Douglas: You said the pre-77 plot is probably less than that.
Kane: It’s an interesting thing that happens on those plots. We’re seeing some tradeoffs in height versus less stems that are taller versus more stems. So it’s thinner, if that makes sense. And we see through the roots, you dig down four inches, and it’s refuse. It’s coal. It’s busted up rock, and there’s chunks of coal down there. We pull all kinds of stuff out of there. The roots adapt, and the plant adapts to survive, resulting in less total biomass.
But again, we’re seeing an increase in soil organic matter. You can even feel it if you just look at the soil five years ago, when we planted them, versus now you can see we’re actually getting a topsoil layer now.
Douglas: What’s the long term goal of your research?
Kane: Essentially, the bacteria and fungi in the soil are living, they’re decomposing all of this dead plant matter and root matter that comes into the soil. And that decomposition results in some CO2 production as they use enzymes to break down the plant material. But they also take a lot of those carbon and nutrients into their own biomass. So think of bacterial cells, they need that stuff to grow, and live themselves. Once they take it into their biomass, it can stay in the soil through a couple different mechanisms. It can be actually stabilized for long periods of time, and we see that that’s favorable in terms of how much CO2 ends up in the atmosphere and continues to warm our planet.
Douglas: This plant is a net collector of CO2?
Kane: I wouldn’t go so far as to say our plots are a total net positive, but we are seeing increases in soil carbon. In order to know that, we would have to do a landscape level carbon stock analysis, which we may do someday. But some people have done it and they’ve accounted for all the CO2 from all the cultivation — all of the machines they bring in, all of the production once they harvest it – and they found that it’s still more carbon in the soil than was released.
Douglas: If you’re harvesting these plants and then using them in something, doesn’t that release some level of CO2 as well?
Kane: Absolutely. Depending on what you do with it, I mean, obviously burning it will produce CO2, and I’m not sure if it’s a net positive in that regard. But it’s certainly better than something like fossil fuels where there’s no offset. And it’s renewable on a very short timescale.
Douglas: How long does it take to get 15 foot tall plants?
Kane: By year one and year two there is a little bit less yield, but in year 3, 4, 5, we were getting into the 10 feet 12 feet. I would say between years three and five is the standard for when you can expect the most biomass.
Douglas: Is there anything we haven’t discussed?
Kane: We’ve done several studies since 2019 on the whole system. My study specifically has to do with the roots and how roots interact with microbes at that very small scale because we have evidence that the Miscanthus roots may produce more roots or less roots or their tissue chemistry might change, and that can also impact the soil carbon cycle.
Douglas: How many plots are you working?
Kane: In Morgantown, we have 64 plots. They’re not as big as you might think, they’re like five meters by five meters. Another key piece of this project is we’re testing how different common agricultural practices like fertilization impacts these dynamics. If the plant is relying on the microbiome to get nutrients from the soil, and the atmosphere in some cases, and if we add in fertilizer, does that disrupt that relationship? We’re testing those things and trying to understand what type of factors disrupt that plant-microbial relationship. We also have some studies going on with drought, and how when humans come in and change things, or when climate change changes things, what is that going to mean for the whole system?
Douglas: It’d be interesting to see what it does over the long term on reclaimed land.
Kane: A collaborator of mine, Jeff Skousen, who’s the reclamation specialist here at WVU, has some plots that are 10 to 15 years old on places like the Hobet mine site. These are bigger reclamation sites, so there’s work there, but certainly not enough.
A group at the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech is researching extended family members who become dementia caregivers throughout central Appalachia. They want to understand how these caregivers moved into that role.
Caregiving for family members with dementia can be difficult and stressful. For many of those caregivers, it progresses from helping out a little bit to sometimes becoming a full-time job.
Now, a group at the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech is researching extended family members who become dementia caregivers throughout central Appalachia. They want to understand how these caregivers moved into that role.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Douglas: You’re researching caregivers, family, familial caregivers for people with dementia?
McCann: That’s right. This study is focused specifically on extended family caregivers. I will just tell you quickly about how we came to be studying extended family. So the primary investigators for this study were doing a study based in Appalachian Virginia on service use and dementia caregiving. They noticed that about 10 to 15 percent of the sample was extended family caregivers. When we say that, we mean siblings who are helping out, grandchildren, nieces and nephews and just other extended family caregivers, because typically it’s an adult child or a spouse who is in that primary caregiving role.
Douglas: For what it’s worth, I’m in that role. My mother has middle stage dementia, and I’ve been dealing with that for the last several years. But you’re not talking about me caring for my mother, you’re talking about the rest of the family, the aunts and the siblings.
McCann: They’re often classified as “others” in research. How did these other family members get to be in this caregiving role? In that study, they were in a primary caregiving role as the first contact. So, now we’re doing this larger study. We started out in Virginia and now we’re interviewing people in North Carolina and Maryland, West Virginia, and the broader region, all the surrounding states of Virginia. We wanted to understand more about how these extended family caregivers came to be in that role, their family histories, what challenges they might face, in terms of service use, because we are very interested in understanding barriers to service use the families may face.
Douglas: What have you found so far?
McCann: We know there are larger demographic changes in the country and in the region. In family science, we used to talk about families as being shaped like a pyramid. There were maybe one or two older adults at the top, middle generation, a few more and then a lot of younger generation. You had this large circle of younger people to care for an older person. And now we see in family demography that there are fewer of those younger generations to care for an older adult. And so they talk about moving from a pyramid structure to a beanpole structure. There might be one niece, for example, who’s caring for not only her mother, but her aunts as well. We also see divorce and re-partnering across the lifespan, greater numbers of that. So maybe now stepchildren can be involved in the care of a person who’s having memory loss or dementia.
Douglas: I wonder too, if the kids have moved away, and now the kids are four states away, so it falls to somebody else to take care of grandma?
McCann: Absolutely, absolutely. And we see that maybe there’s a sibling who’s doing the day to day checking in, that kind of thing, and making sure that the person can still stay in their home. And maybe the adult child is the power of attorney, but they’re out of state and they’re maybe making some decisions, but they’re sharing the work of caregiving, so to speak.
Douglas: What’s the scale of this? Are we talking 30 percent of seniors in this category, 50 percent? Do you have any grasp?
McCann: That’s one of the things that we’re finding, even measuring the numbers of those extended family caregivers who are involved can be tricky, because it depends on how you define caregiving. Some people, it’s very clear, there’s one person involved; that’s typically an adult child or spouse, and they’re doing 90 percent of the stuff. But in other situations, you might have a whole family involved, it might be several adult children, maybe a spouse, grandchildren, especially I think of in rural areas, or an Appalachian region, where you may have family land, and where there are multiple families living on the same property. There’s all kinds of people helping this person stay in their home, maintain their lifestyle, as they had it before they started having cognitive decline. In that situation, there may be multiple people who are doing caregiving in that family so it gets a little bit harder to measure.
Douglas: I hadn’t thought about that kind of rural community where everybody lives up the same holler, so they check on mom.
McCann: That’s one of the challenges that we’re finding in terms of finding participants is that sometimes the grandchildren, for example, don’t think of themselves as caregivers. They might be going to Granny’s house every day. As a researcher, we would consider care work, going over there and helping her read the recipes to do family dinners, and maintaining those kind of family traditions. And that person can be going over there every day, doing all this really important work, but they don’t think of themselves as a caregiver. They’re just helping Granny.
Douglas: I wonder if those people think of caregiving as the more – nursing, physical, hands-on, feeding type behaviors versus just hanging out and being with them and making sure they take their meds and that kind of stuff.
McCann: That is such an important issue. I think people underestimate how important that is, and that’s why it can be hard when people do kind of reach a breaking point, and they realize they need help, it can be really hard to find somebody, because I think it’s hard to describe what exactly it is that they’re looking for.
We just published an article on caregiver vigilance, and when we asked caregivers how many hours a day do you feel like you need to be on duty for your relative who’s having memory problems? So often people say, 24/7, even if they’re only doing like three to four hours of actual stuff, that feeling of being constantly vigilant, providing that high quality level of care and attention to someone who’s experiencing cognitive decline is very, very important. That’s kind of the crux of the issue in terms of finding appropriate services and that kind of thing.
Douglas: Tell me about the research you’re doing. What do you need from somebody to participate?
McCann: We’re asking that people be an extended family caregiver. So that would, again, be siblings, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, or any step and that they see the person three times a week and are involved in their care. So after they meet the inclusion criteria, then we do one longer interview that usually takes about an hour and a half on the telephone.
In that interview, we would ask them a little bit about their family history, we have some open-ended questions. And then we just kind of ask some standard caregiver questions about how stressed they feel, that kind of thing. And then we do eight daily diaries after that. So for eight evenings in a row, we call in, and those take about 10 to 15 minutes, and we just asked about the help they provided that day. It’s nine days total. We do compensate people for their time. So if they do all nine days, we send a $110 gift card to them, and also resources for whatever state.
In West Virginia, there’s the FAIR program that provides respite services for family caregivers of people with dementia. If somebody has a particular issue with getting their relative in the shower, which is a common thing, we might send tip sheets from the Alzheimer’s Association about that particular issue.
Douglas: What’s your end goal for this research?
McCann: The goal is twofold. First of all, it is to understand how these demographic changes that I mentioned earlier, such as divorce and re-partnering, families becoming smaller in the younger generations and movement, even in the Appalachian region, people may still move just within the region, but they’re still farther away. So we want to understand how these larger demographic changes are impacting families in caregiving situations.
The second one is focused on this service use. How we can help families overcome barriers to service use. Is it financial? Is it the person who has dementia doesn’t want services? That’s very tricky to handle. Just helping understand what barriers these families might be experiencing so we can provide better support to families. Because we know that families need more support.
To participate in this study at Virginia Tech, call 540-231-9250, send an email to carex@vt.edu, or visit their website and fill out the online form.
On this West Virginia Morning, in the spring of 2016, a massive brood of cicadas emerged in northern West Virginia after 17 years underground. The event prompted one West Virginia University professor to study the composition of their wings. Assistant News Director Caroline MacGregor has the story.
On this West Virginia Morning, in the spring of 2016, a massive brood of cicadas emerged in northern West Virginia after 17 years underground. The event prompted one West Virginia University professor to study the composition of their wings. Assistant News Director Caroline MacGregor has the story.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Concord University and Shepherd University.
Caroline MacGregor is our assistant news director and produced this episode.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
