Center for the Environment

Signature Areas

Welcome to Purdue’s Center for the Environment! The C4E, as we refer to it, is a major home of interdisciplinary, problem-driven research and teaching at Purdue focused on some of the world’s largest environmental problems. C4E faculty are currently working on problems ranging from eliminating hazardous electronic waste, to reducing nutrient runoff in farm systems, to understanding the fate and transport of new chemicals in our soil and water, to understanding and addressing threats to soundscapes—acoustic resources that are an important part of many ecosystems.

Map of proposed energy infrastructure along US-Mexico border

Message from the Director

Featured research


Instead of a wall, what if we built an energy corridor?

Get Involved

U.S. forests’ changes are double-edged sword for environment

April 18, 2019

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Climate change, nitrogen deposition and fire suppression are leading to shifts in the types of...

Read More about "U.S. forests’ changes are double-edged sword for environment"

Brownbag talk: Field Ecology, Conservation and Photography in the Brazilian Amazon

April 22, 2019

The Department of Anthropology at Purdue University is pleased to welcome Dr. Jorge Solorzano-Filho. The Amazon rainforest represents over half of all tropical forest left and the most biodiverse one. It supports hundreds of Indigenous Peoples that still live according to their customary lifeways, among them the Kayapó peoples. Today the Kayapó Indigenous Territories form the single largest protected forest fragment in all Southeastern Amazon, making it a conservation example of how empowering a traditional community supported the successful protection of the ecosystem. Contributing to this achievement was the creation of the Pinkaiti Biological Reserve and Research Station by the A'Ukre village in the early 1990s. This station attracted biologists and ecologists that studied the reserve ecosystems' fauna and flora, but that also invited the Kayapo to engage with global environmental politics and the environmental crisis.

Read More