On October 13, an AASHE Campus Sustainability Research Award was presented to current UC Davis PhD student Elizabeth (Izzy) Castner, along with a team of researchers from the University of Virginia, University of New Hampshire, Brown University, Colorado State University, Dickinson College, Marine Biological Laboratory, Eastern Mennonite University, and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The award recognized work presented in a paper titled "The Nitrogen Footprint Tool Network: A Multi-Institution Program to Research and Reduce Nitrogen Pollution", which was the lead paper in an April 2017 special issue on nitrogen footprints published by Sustainability: The Journal of Record. 

The special issue presents the work of eight institutions that were the first to use a campus nitrogen footprint tool for measuring the amount of reactive nitrogen released to the environment as a result of a university's resource consumption. The nitrogen footprint highlights the importance of pollutant losses in food production chains and energy production, linking campus activities like meat consumption and energy use to negative environmental impacts that include smog, acidification, eutrophication, depletion of the ozone layer, and global climate change. 

Read the special issue here, or read the press release by AASHE (the Association for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education).