As reported in the first issue of this CRC Quarterly Newsletter , Virginia Tech (also known as Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) is the newest member of the Chesapeake Research Consortium.  Virginia Tech (VT) has a long-standing association with the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) Partnership that goes back to the CBP’s beginnings, when Dr. Clifford Randall, a wastewater treatment expert and now Professor Emeritus in the Civil Engineering Department, served as the inaugural Chair of the CBP’s Scientific Technical and Advisory Committee (STAC).  Virginia Tech (VT) has been continuously active in STAC ever since. In fact, Professor Brian Benham of the Department of Biological Systems Engineering (BSE) is the current STAC chair and Dr. Benham also helps the CBP coordinate many of its Expert Panels for watershed best management practices, a position in which he oversees the efforts of that program’s Project Coordinator, Mr. Jeremy Hanson, who is also part of BSE. There are currently five other VT faculty serving within the 38-member STAC . These include Drs. Zach Easton, Tess Thompson, and Gene Yagow, in BSE; Dr. Kurt Stephenson in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, and Dr. Charles Bott, Director of Water Technology and Research with the Hampton Roads Sanitation District and adjunct faculty in VT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. VT’s current Representative on CRC’s Board of Trustees is Dr. Saied Mostaghimi, associate dean for research and graduate studies in VT’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

It is therefore fitting, perhaps, that the first “seed” contributions to our planned bibliographic collection of “Recent CRC Community Publications”  were solicited from faculty in VT’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS).   A printed list (PDF file) of the initially submitted 2016-2017 VT- CALS publications can be found here.  The list represents a selection of papers published in the last two years that are known to be of “direct relevance to Chesapeake Bay science and management” (as defined by the list’s contributors) and includes papers involving faculty from six different VT departments:  Agriculture and Applied Economics; Biological Sciences; Biological Systems Engineering; Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences; and Dairy Science.  VT faculty authors are highlighted in yellow on the linked PDF.

The list of contributions is for only one college at Virginia Tech and is known to be incomplete even for that college.  Nonetheless, it is indicative of the kind of scholarly contributions that VT CALS faculty have made to CBP management issues over the past two years and exemplifies the kind of bibliographic information that the CRC will be seeking from investigators and departmental staff at all of its member institutions in the coming months and years. Please see the related article in this newsletter for details about the database, its intended uses and audience, and how you can help to populate it with publications from your own department and institution.