How does your prairie grow?

Prairie Quadrat program attendees identify prairie plants on June 30.

Summer is show time for Fermilab flora: out of the grassy green prairie pop the bright yellow blooms of compass plants, the tiny white buds of wild quinine and the pale purple blooms of coneflowers. From a single square meter of earth, plants of 10 or more species might spring up in brilliant color.

You can glimpse the display from your office or car window, but you can also get shoulder-deep in the plant life as a participant in the Fermilab Prairie Quadrat Program. Attendees will have the chance to do useful science while admiring the native art.

Throughout July and August, Fermilab employees and members of the public will have four opportunities to participate in morning-long surveys of the Fermilab plant population. In small groups, volunteers will focus on a square meter of vegetation, called a quadrat. With help from docents and field guides, they will identify each plant in their quadrat and record their findings on a paper grid. After about two hours in the field, the team will head back to the Lederman Science Center to enter the data in an online archive.

"The Prairie Quadrat Program gives the public a chance to see what it's like to be a field scientist," explained Sue Sheehan, an education program leader at the Science Center. During its 17-year history, the program has hosted hundreds of volunteers, ranging from elementary students to Ph.D. physicists.

The program has also given experts a valuable look into the health of Fermilab's natural areas. Quadrat studies have helped document the restoration of farmland to a diverse prairie ecosystem.

"It comes back to saving a habitat," Sheehan said. "Saving a prairie is just as important as saving a rainforest. We're trying to restore this site to what Illinois used to be."

Would you like to join the effort? Sign up here to participate in studies scheduled for July 16, July 25, August 4 and August 13, from 9 a.m. to noon each day.

-- Rachel Carr

Special seminar by KEK DG Atsuto Suzuki today

Professor Atsuto Suzuki, director general for KEK, the national laboratory for high-energy physics in Japan, will give a presentation at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, July 15, at Northwestern University's Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Professor Suzuki will present a detailed overview of the present and future projects at KEK. He will talk about the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Center (J-PARC), which is currently coming into operation and will provide the world's highest-intensity beams of hadrons and neutrinos; the B-factory, including its detector, Belle, which is setting records in electron-proton annihilation intensities; and plans for a Super-B factory.

The presentation will begin at 2 p.m. Coffee will be served at 1:45 p.m. Northwestern University's Department of Physics and Astronomy is located at 2145 Sheridan Road, Room F-235, in Evanston, Il.

New director of the DOE Office of Science addresses advisory committee

From AIP FYI, July 14, 2009

William Brinkman, the new Director of the Department of Energy's Office of Science had been in his new position for about two weeks when he appeared before the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee on July 9. Brinkman spoke to the committee for about 40 minutes, describing DOE's science programs, the FY 2010 request, and his perspectives on several key issues. His presentation focused on the Office of Science's three overarching themes: science for national needs, science for discovery, and national scientific user facilities. Among the topics he discussed were:

USER FACILITIES:

When commenting on DOE's user facilities, Brinkman said Fermilab's Tevatron will be kept in operation until the Large Hadron Collider "really starts doing things." In discussing ITER, he told the committee that it was both a fusion experiment and an experiment in international partnerships. Brinkman described his pride in the large numbers of users for the department's scientific facilities - especially the light sources. He wants to increase the number of users of the department's nanoscale facilities.

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