Projects for mapping forests before and after harvesting and researching quantum materials used in electronics at the University of Maine are being funded by the federal government, the U.S. Department of Energy announced Friday.
Each of the two projects, both led by UMaine professors, will receive roughly $1 million in increments over multiple years. Funding will be used to pay for equipment and employ researchers and graduate students.
Friday’s announcement is a stark difference from last spring, when President Donald Trump withheld millions of dollars in funding for UMaine. Although there are still uncertainties surrounding federal funding, UMaine President Joan Ferrini-Mundy said the grant reinforces the university’s research and relationship with the federal government.
“We have a very successful funding record with federal agencies right now, and we do hope that our work in these new areas will help us broaden that even further,” Ferrini-Mundy said.
While forestry and quantum materials used in processing chips are two different fields, both professors leading the projects said their research is poised to be used in the future.
Funding will be used for data collection at the Howland Research Forest, which has been used for atmosphere and ecosystem research since the 1990s, said Daniel Hayes, a professor of geospatial analysis and remote sensing. The land has been preserved for years, but the adjacent lot has been privately managed and logged, he said.
Before the adjacent lot, which is owned by American Forest Management, was harvested this summer, Hayes asked to use lidar — light detection and ranging — technology to scan above-grown growth. Through laser imaging, data about the tree growth, ecosystem and gas emissions were collected, he said.
By scanning the area again after the harvest, Hayes and other researchers could see how forest management — and how the wood is used after it’s harvested — changes emissions and future growth.
Hayes has already been conducting this research, but the Department of Energy funding will allow for more data collection with a UMaine plane and drones, and, in a partnership with the Oak Ridge Laboratory in Tennessee, that data will be used for a model of earth that tracks energy and water cycles, Hayes said.
Currently, those models don’t take into account how forest management changes those cycles, he said.
“They kind of consider currently that the trees are all just sitting there doing whatever, and they don’t actually have a realistic representation of the fact that, especially in a place like Maine, these forests are intensively managed and they’re harvested,” Hayes said.
Although the research will be used on a global level, Hayes said it could also be used by Maine- based land and forest management companies to better understand how harvesting and logging change growth and carbon storage.
Away from the woods and in the labs on UMaine’s campus, Tomas Marangoni, a chemistry professor, is leading research attempting to find new ways to build quantum materials used in electronics. The materials are often used in microchips found in phones and computers, he said.
Science is reaching “a bit of a limit” on how small these chips can be, but chemistry could be used to create a new material that could make them smaller, Marangoni said.
“What we do is basically we use our molecule, the molecule that our students are making at UMaine, to make the metal atoms communicate better in terms of electronics and magnetism,” Marangoni said.
While the project is focused on miniaturization and how microchip technology can be improved, Marangoni said it also focuses on expanding future technologies. Discovering how a new material can be used or how atoms interact with electricity could lead to more advancements, he said.
“This is not a project that is interested in making a microchip tomorrow. It’s a project that is interested in seeing what comes after that,” Marangoni said.