August 20, 2002
AMES, Iowa — An internationally renowned soil scientist will visit Iowa State University to talk about the water needs of production agriculture. The 2002 Pierre Lecture in Soil Science will be given by William Jury on Sept. 11 in 2050 Agronomy Hall at 4:10 p.m.
Jury's speech is titled "The Emerging Global Water Crisis." He says that both industrialization and the needs of urban populations compete increasingly with agriculture for water. And that by the year 2025, three billion people will live in water-stressed areas, and dozens of countries will lack the water needed for food self-sufficiency.
Jury is a distinguished professor of soil physics and director of the graduate research unit in environmental sciences and engineering at the University of California at Riverside. His research interests are chemical movement and reactions in field soils and assessing losses of organic compounds from soil and water. Jury was originally scheduled to present the Pierre lecture last September but couldn't travel to Ames because of the terrorist attacks.
This year, Jury also will present a technical lecture in soil science, "Unstable flow of water in soil — a lot more common than you think," at 9 a.m. on Thursday, Sept. 12, in 3140 Agronomy Hall.
The Pierre Lecture Series honors the memory of William H. Pierre, who served as chair of the ISU agronomy department from 1938 until 1964. Jury's lecture will be the 15th in the Pierre Lecture Series. It is co-sponsored by the ISU Graduate College, the Iowa State Water Resources Research Institute and the Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences.
Editor's note: Jury will be in Ames Sept. 10-12 and available for interviews. Contact Mike Thompson, agronomy, (515-294-2415 or mlthomps@iastate.edu) to schedule an appointment. More information about William Jury is available at http://envisci.ucr.edu/faculty/wajury/.