That may soon change as the institute is expected to be a major player in state-wide climate-change research spurred by a $15 million grant from the National Science Foundation's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCR).

Gayle Dana is an associate research professor in hydrology at the institute, but most of her time is taken up with her duties as project administrator for the systemwide EPSCR grant.

Michael Young, an associate research professor and interim director of the hydrologic sciences division, is one of the institute's most forward-thinking researchers. He will also help administer any EPSCR grants allotted to the hydrologic sciences division of DRI.

Pro-environment: Michael Young, interim director of the Desert Research Institute´s hydrologic sciences division, and Gayle Dana, associate research professor, at the institute. SAM MORRIS / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Young: The Desert Research Institute is part of the Nevada System of Higher Education. Its charter was signed 49 years ago, and our main role is to provide scientific research for Nevada - that is what our original charter was. In fact, it was to really oversee what the Atomic Energy Commission was doing at the Nevada Test Site - that's how far back it goes.

We are all faculty, we have faculty appointments within the system. We don't have tenure, which sets us apart a little bit from the universities. But we're a completely separate entity within the Nevada System of Higher Education. There's a lot of confusion across the state and elsewhere that we're really a part of UNLV or UNR, but we're completely separate. We have our own president, our own vice president, and they ultimately report to the chancellor's office. What really makes us different from the universities is that we don't have tenure, and we're not a degree-granting institution. We don't have people graduating from DRI.

We have faculty appointments at the universities - Dana has a faculty appointment at UNR; I have one at UNLV. We advise students, we hire them to work on our projects in the same way university faculty do. We teach courses. And so we're able to exist in sort of the pure academic world as well as the research world.

But because we're soft money, our job is really to write proposals and to administer grants, and so we have kind of a target of trying to be self-funded so that about 70 percent of our salary can be funded by external grants. Our budget last year, as an institute, was about $50 million - about 85 percent of that comes from external grants. There's a lot of leveraging. For every dollar we get from the state, we bring back $4 in external research grants. So it's a good investment as the state invests in us.

And we almost exist from grant to grant. We're a very active research community. We publish a lot of papers, we serve on committees and things like that.

Dana: Our primary mission now is environmental research. It's pretty broad; it's environmental research in the broadest sense. We have researchers - for example, I've been researching in the desert of Antarctica. Most people don't think of it as a desert, but there are areas with less than 10 centimeters of precipitation a year. It's one of the coldest and driest places on Earth. And we have people researching in the deserts here.

We have people pretty much all over the place in all sorts of things - we have an atmospheric sciences division, we have a hydrologic sciences division, and an earth and ecosystems sciences division. But within each of those the research spans the gamut of everything you could think of in those areas. There are even types of research you wouldn't think people would be conducting here like risk assessment.

Young: We have a postdoc who is now doing a lot on outreach and how you educate the layperson in the sciences in a way that they can make policy decisions. There's a particular way to do that and ways not to do that.

So we're trying to do more research that can directly contribute to policy decisions being made at the state and national level.

We have about 500 people total in the institute. It's probably one of the largest institutes of its kind in the country. It almost has no peers. There are very few research institutions that are completely self-sustained within an education system that aren't under the umbrella of a particular university. So we're unique in that way.

And we do everything from the atmospheric sciences, earth and ecosystems sciences looking at geology and archaeology and cultural resource assessment, all hydro sciences and four crosscutting scientific centers that are focusing on environmental restoration work, arid land management, on watershed and lake environmental sustainability systems and computer visualization that spans all divisions.

We have a tremendous number of students and about 140 faculty that are Ph.D. level faculty. There's a lot of support staff who have master's degrees and a lot of hourly workers.

Young: I can give two examples that are based just in our division. One is the Community Environmental Monitoring Program (CEMP) which is part of a long-term (Energy Department) contract to help monitor air conditions and meteorological conditions around the Test Site.

For example, when they were doing above-ground tests, there was a lot of concern by people living downwind of the Test Site that there was ionizing radiation falling down on them. So we maintain a series of weather stations all across the state. In fact there is a weather station that is right on the west side of the (Atomic Testing) Museum building (next door to the institute's Las Vegas headquarters on Flamingo Road) that you can look at. And there are about 100,000 hits a month on that CEMP Web page. It's a very popular program. A lot of the really small communities in rural Nevada, all the way to Utah, are checking the data - they're looking at the information and they're using it to make decisions on their end.

The other thing we do is we're doing a lot of work right now in Spring Valley and Snake Valley. And part of our global change grant is going to fit in that area.

This is the area where the Southern Nevada Water Authority is vying for water rights to pipe water from the central valleys down to Las Vegas. And ultimately, it's looking for about 180,000 acre feet, more or less. The state engineer has to grant those water rights, but in order to do that he needs data and information. And the question is what is a safe amount of water that can be withdrawn from the valleys before they dry up, and it changes the ecosystems and what role does climate change play in these decisions. If he grants 100,000 acre feet of water to be pumped down south and suddenly we are looking at these drying conditions and there's less and less recharge going into the aquifers, what is going to be the impact of that?

Dana: This grant is from the National Science Foundation, but it's a different type of grant than NSF usually gives out. It's called a research infrastructure improvement grant. So unlike other NSF grants where the people apply to do research and a science project with a hypothesis, the main emphasis is for building infrastructure in a certain targeted area to build capacity in a way that's meaningful for the state.

We chose, through a long process, climate change as that target area. So a lot of the funds that are coming in are for building capacity - whether it be physical capacity - infrastructure - or people - faculty, fabulous students, people to do the work. We're trying to build capacity to do climate-change research so that Nevada can become very competitive in that research area.

What we'd like to do at the end of the day is have a virtual climate-change center. It would be a focal point for data coming in, work being done and data going out, and informing decision makers, informing scientists and also to compete nationally with other researchers doing climate-change research.

One of the reasons for EPSCR is to help states that typically have not gotten very much National Science Foundation funding to come up to the level of other states that have been more successful in getting those grants. Typically it's states that have lower population levels. We just don't have the people power to compete with states like California or Texas or some of the East Coast states. So there's 26 states that are EPSCR states that are competing for these types of infrastructure improvement grants.

One thing that people tend to look at EPSCR for is to help us bring in more funding - that's true. But (the National Science Foundation) has a broader thinking about it. Its goal is to make us more competitive, not just to be nice, but it really needs to draw on every state in the United States to be competitive so it can increase the U.S.'s competitiveness worldwide. The workforce in the U.S. has been aging - people are retiring, so they really want to tap into all the resources in the U.S.

A big part of that in Nevada has to be outreach to the K-12 system. Nevada has a big Hispanic population that hasn't been brought up to speed, and (the foundation is) really interested in having us bring in these underrepresented groups and build the workforce and make the U.S. more competitive.

This climate-change grant is very comprehensive. It has six different components: climate modeling is a large component, water resources, ecological change, cyber infrastructure, policy and education outreach.

And those last two are really important. This is our conduit to the decision makers and the community. Bringing this climate change capability into the schools to the students - it's been shown this is where students really get interested in being scientists. This is where you can really tap their interest.

Young: The state has a rather small research infrastructure and when we submit grants to (the foundation), maybe we submit 30 grants per competition and there's usually two competitions per year. Then there's a 5 percent to 10 percent chance that they're going to get funded. So out of 30, maybe we'll get a couple within the state per cycle. California, maybe, submits 1,000, and it totally overwhelms small states like us.

This gives the small states a fighting chance. States that get less than .75 percent (that's 0.75 percent, less than 1 percent) of NSF funding are eligible to become EPSCR states. So you have 26 states that get less than 20 percent of total NSF funding, nationally. That's a big disparity. And the EPSCR project provides the infrastructure and improves that ratio.

And, of course, it's not all brick and mortar, it's not a building, it's not widgets - it's intellectual infrastructure. Within the grant we'll have 21 graduate fellowships that are competitive, and we'll be advertising nationally. So we're trying to bring people from outside of Nevada into Nevada as well as to bring up the K-12 and undergraduate students to populate UNR and UNLV to raise their standards as well - to try to make them (top) research institutions as well.

And so we have dollars for new faculty support to recruit faculty from outside the state and to build up this cadre of faculty and staff and students who do work in this area. And what my role is in part of this grant is to try to create a monitoring system that will be used by climate modelers statewide, by installing monitoring stations at different elevations throughout the state, from the valleys all the way up, as we change from one ecotone (a transition area between two adjacent ecological communities/ecosystems) to the other - from the warm deserts to the aspens and pinion pine, and how those ecosystems change from year to year, how they differ from each other. We really have a poor understanding of what that is because the state doesn't have the monitoring systems in place for us to study it. We're trying to build that.

And not only in the south in the Mojave Desert, but in the Spring Valley-Snake Valley area, as well, where there's this huge conflict - it's this big intersection of rural versus urban lifestyles. There's the large city and the small towns, and there's water up there and a ranching lifestyle and the city dwellers down here, and there's all this conflict that's occurring. And as the climate changes, or even if it's just variable with very wet years and dry years, that's going to have a huge impact on the water that could be available as the city grows and as the state grows.

We're trying to get those baseline conditions now so as we're monitoring those conditions into the future we're seeing these trends and if the trends continue, this is going to be the outcome.

It's very broad. We're really looking at not only water resources, but the water resources play a very important role when it comes to ecosystems. What's the plant community, what's the wildlife community, what happens if we drain all the water out of these valleys and the ecosystem begins to crash? What's going to happen? It's very hard for us to predict what that's going to be without any data. One of the realities of science is that we can't predict very well these things that we can't see. Engineers are lucky in that they can see the bridge, they can look at it, they can touch it and measure it. We don't know what's going to happen as the climate changes because more often than not we can't see what it is we're trying to predict. So this gives us that opportunity to get a more visual understanding of what's happening.

Young: DRI's president has written a memorandum, which is available on our Web page, that describes what impact the 14 percent cut could have on DRI's operations. Having said that, we're fortunate in a way that so much of our operations and our dollars that come in are funded by external sources. So we're not affected as much as the other universities are that are more highly dependent on the state money. President Steve Wells and the upper administration have looked at a variety of scenarios if we get these big cuts. But the administration is very lean when it comes to funding. Because so much of the funding comes in from the faculty, at least theoretically the faculty have some say and they are very vocal in how administrative dollars are spent because we're bringing in the bulk of it.

A year ago there were a series of committees that were looking at reallocation, rebudgeting of all the different operations from facilities all the way down to the library, central administration and all the support functions that go into helping the research community. So what President Wells is trying to do is affect the way we operate as a research group as little as possible with these budget cuts.

So we're not going to be hurt as badly as UNLV and UNR. It's going to be devastating to those operations because they have more state dollars coming in to support student education.

Young: We're scientists, so it's hard for us to say. Grants, endowments, graduate student fellowships: Those types of gifts are very, very important for us. The kind of work we do is focused on environmental research, and there are people who feel very strongly and like they have a vested interest in, say, seeing the desert environment maintained and kept pristine and that we're managing it properly. In that sense, if there are programs the institute is working on that are really important to them on a personal or corporate level, then that's usually where the tie-in comes between the work we do and the endowments.

Dana: Some people come in and look at DRI and focus on funding something they really care about. And a lot of the contributions people have made in the past have been when they are passionate about one particular area of research. But there have been endowments for other things like women researchers where someone wanted to promote women in science and tied it to an up-and-coming woman researcher at DRI.

Also, in K-12 there's a lot of opportunities for improving education at that level, to really get kids interested in science at an age when it can really make a difference. I can't tell you how often I get calls from some of the faculty who want to do something at that level and want some funding to do it, and we don't have any extra funding and can't do it.

Dana: I think we're really well thought of. Everywhere I go, people know our institute.

Young: I think we're better known outside the state than inside the state. When we go, for example, to the American Geophysical Union - a big international conference - we typically have dozens and dozens of presentations at all levels. At the faculty level we have people on the committees and creating sessions and we're very involved from a service standpoint.

I would say the atmospheric sciences division in particular is one of the largest and best thought of in the country next to the National Center for Atmospheric Research. It's hugely well thought of outside Nevada because it's one of the only atmospheric sciences programs offered anywhere in the country that offers what we do - DRI runs it and the degree is offered at UNR.

Dana: Something I want to emphasize about the grant is that this is a statewide program with equal partners in DRI, UNLV and UNR with significant contributions from Nevada State College, and we're involving to the extent possible the community colleges. That grant is all three institutions plus the others as well.

Young: In fact the grant was awarded to the institution and the system is administering it to the universities, which makes it a really unique undertaking.

Young: It's hard to say.

Maybe it's that people don't really understand how entrepreneurial the faculty are. We are living in a soft-money world and if we are unable to bring in grants and contracts then we basically don't have a job - that's what it boils down to. Although there are a lot of safety nets built into the institute internally to keep us going and make our job easier, our survival depends on how well we can cast our ideas in a way that people can understand.

So we live a little on the edge at the same time we still make room to advise students and mentor students and young faculty on projects and meet with the media like this.

I suspect the business community doesn't really understand that there's a business behind science and that we have to deal with budgets and deliverables and staffing and overhead and fringe rates in a way that is really not that different from a typical business. I imagine the business community would be really surprised by that.

Dana: My life is so much about these EPSCR programs it's sometimes hard for me to zero in on certain projects. What's exciting to me is to see these programs putting out products and being successful. It's more of a general feeling of "Wow! They really did something."

With the last EPSCR grant that's ending, Michael was the lead on a huge lysimeter facility in Boulder City. It analyzes soil processes. Four years ago, when he put together the proposal, it was just a big idea - Michael has big ideas. He made this premier lysimeter facility, and it's just coming up to speed now and the proof is going to be in the future pudding whether they're successful in getting grants and attracting people to come use this world-class facility.

Young: We're looking at the data now. Just a month ago we connected the last sensor. There's about 150 sensors between the three facilities, so it can generate just a huge amount of data.

Right now we're getting the data integrated in a database where we can start looking at it. We're seeing diurnal changes in weight and trying to understand what's causing it - it could be lunar tides or the pull of the moon could be having an effect. We have been seeing evaporation and condensation of water flow. Some of it's a bit esoteric. Right now we're looking at static conditions. We're not getting any rain, conditions are very dry in the soil. We're just trying to see how well the system is working.

It's kind of like the Mars rover. They probably spent years running that thing around in the desert checking those sensors again and again and again to make sure it's working. You can't back up the Mars rover and just send it back. It's over at that point.

It's the same way for us, we have the sensors in the soil, we can't back it up we can't take it out and fix it - it's over. So we spent a lot of time just looking at the sensors, making sure everything was working, getting it integrated and then tying down all the loose ends and that's what we're finishing now.

In a few weeks we're planning to start irrigation. And that's really where we're going to start to change quite a bit.

We've got interest from people who want to do research on it, people from Arizona, people from Europe. So we're really excited to get this thing working.

It's hard to keep a facility like this running without state funding. That, I think is going to be the real challenge. Most of the universities that have external facilities, like UNLV has a water-conservation center in North Las Vegas, they have state money to run the facility. We don't, so we have to get external grants just for day-to-day operations, which is difficult to do. It's a unique facility, and there's nothing like it in the world. So we're excited to get the information out there and get people excited and get the grants coming in to support it.