Thriving Earth Exchange

Thriving Earth Exchange supports community science by helping communities find resources, project managers, and experts to address their pressing concerns. This is an initiative of the American Geophysical Union. Our group was fortunate to connect with this wonderful program last fall and create a project to help us answer some questions about recycled rubber materials used on school and park play spaces. We hope that our project will help parents and decision-makers understand more about their choices.

Follow this link to learn more about our project: Assessing Scientific Data to Create Safer Playgrounds and Community Environments. 

Our Community Science Fellow is Brendan Turley, an assistant scientist at the Cooperative Institute of Marine and Atmospheric Studies at the University of Miami. Brendan is the project wrangler, helping our local group clarify what information we are seeking and how we can reach our goals. Brendan is a parent, currently living in Wisconsin and working remotely because of the pandemic.

We are very fortunate to have found our Community Scientist in our own community. Kristofer Rolfhus,a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UW-La Crosse. Dr. Rolfhus has researched mercury cycling in the Atlantic Ocean; Postdoc, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison 2001, research was on how flooding affects mercury in food webs;

Working with Dr. Rolfus are two UWL students, Katie Peterson and William Murphy.

The local scientists are setting up protocols and doing preliminary work to ensure the results will be useful. We are working to plan ways for parents and children to get involved as citizen scientists in the spring.