The Ohio State University

09/26/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 09/26/2024 07:10

Ohio State unveils new arts website, app

The Ohio State University has partnered with Bloomberg Connects to create a guide to the university's public art collection.
Photo: The Ohio State University
26
September
2024
|
09:00 AM
America/New_York

Ohio State unveils new arts website, app

University collaborates with Bloomberg Connects on public art app

Franny Lazarus
Ohio State News

Megan Cavanaugh has been busy. In addition to her work as campus art collection manager at The Ohio State University, she has spent the last month hanging QR codes near most of the university's public art, with just a few remaining.

"I will admit, as I've been putting these signs up, I'm making a little bit of a ruckus," Cavanaugh said about her recent project. "I'm hoping people will notice and wonder what I'm doing, then come over, look at the sign and scan the QR code."

What are the codes for? The university's partnership with the Bloomberg Connects app to create a guide to the public art of Ohio State. Bloomberg's app is currently used by more than 550 institutions - zoos, museums, galleries and landmarks - around the world.

"They want to support the arts," said Cavanaugh. "They want to help institutions get their content out. They want people to take advantage of it as a resource."

In addition to information about art pieces on campus, the app also contains campus maps and information for visitors. And it's not limited to the Columbus campus.

"We have the regional campuses, too," Cavanaugh said. "Lima, Marion and Mansfield all have gallery space and Newark has public art sculptures."

The app is just one project that Lisa Florman has taken on since being named the university's vice provost for the arts in September 2022. Another goal: an arts website.

"That was at the top of my wish list when I started this job," Florman said.

One of Florman's charges is raising the visibility of the arts at Ohio State. The issue is not a lack of art but rather a lack of awareness, she said.

"We're quite good in the arts," she said. "It's been surprising to me, though, that people who've lived in the area for a long time aren't aware of that. So, we want to do whatever we can do to bring awareness to all that good work. If we can tell those stories in one place, I think the overwhelming evidence will make it clear that we have a lot of impressive things going on."

The website has information about special initiatives, public art and a university-wide arts events calendar, which is a first according to Cavanaugh.

"This includes all the College of Arts and Sciences areas - dance, theater, music, visual arts - but it also includes the Knowlton School, the libraries and the Wexner Center for the Arts. It will include non-academic areas like Urban Arts Space. Anything that feels arts-adjacent, we're happy to put it on there."

Another role that the website will fill is as a place to share news that doesn't fit on individual college websites. For example, Cavanaugh said, three Ohio State faculty members recently won Guggenheim Fellowships.

"We have all these people doing amazing things outside of their work on campus," she said. "But it's not really academic news. It's not departmental news. But it's a big deal. Three [Guggenheim Fellowships] is a lot!"

Florman and Cavanaugh agree that the website and the app are meant to encourage interactions with the arts across Ohio State's campuses. Cavanaugh found herself thinking about that as she hung QR codes.

"I think you have to have curiosity, to want to learn more about something," Cavanaugh said. "There's a lot of stimuli in people's worlds; we're fighting through many things for people's attention. But if we can pull one strand of curiosity, that can lead to learning so much."

"Check out the website," Florman urged. "Check out the app. I think people may be surprised by what they find there."

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24
,
| 08:00 AMAmerica/New_York

Coral reefs will continue to experience severe heat stress as rising temperatures cause the oceans to become unbearably hot - but a new study shows that altering their feeding habits could allow local populations to avoid total extinction.

Research into two species of coral native to Hawaii revealed that warmer waters caused by climate change play an important role in coral bleaching - a process that causes coral to lose their color - significantly disrupting coral health and growth. The effect that ocean acidification, a process that causes seawater to become more acidic due to the excess amount of carbon dioxide it has absorbed, has on heat-stressed coral was also investigated.

Over the last decade, there has been a rise in the incidence and severity of mass coral bleaching eventsaround the globe, leading to increased mortality for these vital organisms.

However, this work suggests that some coral may well be resilient to these extreme environmental changes, said Kerri Dobson, lead author of the study who completed the work as a graduate student in earth sciences at the Ohio State University.

"Each coral species responds differently to stress and employs different methods to recover from that stress," said Dobson, who currently teaches marine biology at the University of Southampton in the U.K. "Now we know that those responses depend on several factors."

According to the study, which was recently published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, one of the most telling influences that can decide if coral might recover from a stressful event is its access to food.

Typically, corals feed by receiving nutrition provided by photosynthetic symbiotic algae and catching and eating tiny aquatic organisms called zooplankton. These algae also give coral their vibrant color, but when heat stressed, corals lose their algae, leaving them bleached white and starving.

In this work, researchers collected branch samples from bleached and non-bleached parent colonies following one large-scale heat-stress event in 2014 as well as a second, unexpected, heat-stress event in 2015. Once rehoused in special tanks, half of the corals were subjected to a different amount of food and simulated ocean acidification rates to see how these factors affected their potential recovery.

"This is one of the first studies, to our knowledge, that has been able to capture the impact of natural thermal stress on coral in two consecutive years," Dobson said.

As a result of such unique long-term data, the team found that feeding coral zooplankton after a bleaching event could improve their overall resilience to warming temperatures, essentially minimizing mortality, promoting growth and enhancing coral recovery rates.

Ocean acidification did little to slow the corals' recovery, suggesting that some corals could survive in more acidic waters. Unfortunately, this discovery also makes clear that the most present danger to coral reefs is heat stress, said Dobson.

"Heat stress affected the corals' health much more than the simulated ocean acidification," she said. "These heat-stress events function as selection forces, leaving only the more thermally tolerant coral that might be able to survive the stresses that we're subjecting them to."

Finally, the study's findings emphasize the importance of understanding the conditions and evolutionary strategies that contribute to long-term coral survivorship, said Dobson. Moreover, this research offers a path for scientists and watch groups to better customize management and restoration efforts for coral reefs based on their species and location.

"This paper adds to our body of knowledge about coral resilience," said Andrea Grottoli, senior author of the study and a professor in earth sciences at Ohio State. "It gives us more leverage in following up on evaluating how we can protect corals and manage bleaching events by manipulating the environment to their favor."

While predictions about coral survivorship in the face of human-induced climate change do make room for hope concerning the fate of corals, these assumptions are based on the adherence to current climate mitigation goals, said Grottoli.

For example, it is possible that corals could adapt enough to survive a 2 degree Celsiusincrease in global temperatures. However, Earth's current unmitigated acceleration to 4 degrees of warming by the end of the century could eradicate coral completely, she said.

As the next few decades are critical to determining the reality of these scenarios, Dobson's future work will continue to investigate the impact of thermal stress on the ecology of coral reefs in other regions.

"When you do experiments with living animals in a natural setting, there's always some degree of unpredictability, as we saw with the unexpected second heat-stress event we studied," said Grottoli. "Ultimately, you have to roll with it because the work matters, and sometimes the things you didn't plan to learn are the parts that are the most interesting."

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation. Other co-authors include Jeremy C. Williams and Rowan H. McLachlan from Ohio State and Christopher P. Jury and Robert J. Toonen from the University of Hawai'i.

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