Facilities
The Centre has limited but well used facilities including:
- Student workrooms, seminar rooms, academic, postdoctoral and postgraduate offices, and laboratories.
- Facilities include an analytical laboratory equipped to process a wide range of ecological and environmental materials, a specialist wastewater laboratory and a new geochemical laboratory.
- The Centre also owns air and water samplers and a range of field monitoring equipment. Technical facilities that are used in research and teaching include a small library, computer facilities, vehicles and scuba equipment.
- All researchers in the Centre have access to the College libraries and to the technical resources of other science disciplines.
Department labs
The Centre for the Environment operates three laboratories designed for (1) inorganic and bulk organic analysis of environmental substrates, (2) research on biogeochemical cycling in the coastal zone and (3) research on wastewater treatment.
The labs contain equipment including ICP-EM spectrophotometer, CN elemental analyser, TOC-TN analyser, ion chromatograph, 3-channel flow injection analyser, scanning fluorescence spectrophotometer, microwave digester, respirometer, laboratory scale treatment plants in addition to general and other specialist equipment.
Potential users of the laboratory facilities in the Centre should contact Mark Kavanagh (Email) well in advance of any planned analysis.
Research projects using the Centre facilities over the past 12 months include:
- Effect of temperature on NRA in marine sediments
- Detecting wastewaters using EEMS
- Effects of water level fluctuations on lake littoral zones
- Impact of HM pressures on littoral macro-invertebrates
- Toxicity of acid mine drainage to duckweed
- The effect of nitrates on NRA in different species of marine macroalgae
- Co-treatment of acid mine drainage with domestic wastewater using activated sludge
- Effects of hydromorphology on the functioning of littoral macro-invertebrates
- Control of foaming in activated sludge using metabolic control
- Bioavailability of phosphorus inputs to Lough Leane
- Effects of anoxia on protozoan communities in activated sludge operations
- Benthic photosynthesis in inter-tidal mudflats in Dublin Bay
- Acid deposition in the Dublin region