Ten University of Georgia students and alumni—including four from the Odum School of Ecology—were among received graduate research fellowships from the National Science Foundation to conduct research while working on their master’s and doctoral degrees.
If University of Georgia ecologist John Pickering has his way, mothing soon will become as popular as birding, a pastime 48 million Americans enjoy annually, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
A story in the Savannah Morning News covered a workshop by Ecology Ph.D. student Dara Satterfield, who is recruiting citizen scientists to help collect data for her research into the prevalence of a parasite that afflicts monarch butterflies.
UGA ecosystem ecologist Nina Wurzburger has received a $1.39 million grant from the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program of the U.S. Department of Defense in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to study how the soil-based process of nitrogen fixation facilitates recovery from physical disturbances in longleaf pine ecosystems.
University of Georgia Honors ecology student Theresa Stratmann will discuss her research with members of the Georgia and South Carolina congressional delegations as part of the Council for Undergraduate Research Posters on the Hill Program.
UGA Honors students Sara Black, an ecology and anthropology double major, and Ian Karra, an economics and finance double major pursuing an ecology minor, were among 50 students nationwide who were awarded 2013 Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation Scholarships.
Acclaimed documentary Chasing Ice will open the 2013 EcoFocus Film Festival on Thursday, March 21 at Ciné in Athens. The film screens at 7:00 p.m., with an opening night party at 6:00 and a panel discussion after the film. EcoFocus 2013 runs from March 20-24. For more information, see www.ecofocusfilmfest.org.
A short film by Odum School doctoral student Virginia Schutte has been accepted into the Beneath the Waves Film Festival, which kicks off in Savannah, Georgia, from March 20-24.
Research by Odum School professor James W. Porter; alumna Kathryn Sutherland, associate professor of biology at Rollins College; and Erin Lipp, associate professor in the UGA College of Public Health was featured on the National Science Foundation’s web site on Feb. 14.
Read the story: Underwater Whodunit: What's Killing Florida's Elkhorn Coral?
Ecology graduate student Melanie Taylor is featured on the cover of the Winter 2012 issue of the University of Georgia Graduate School Magazine. The magazine’s lead story describes climate change research by Taylor and Odum School Assistant Professor Jacqueline Mohan.
Read the article: Water Shortage, Drought and Climate Change Lead to Research Innovations
The twenty-eighth annual Eugene P. Odum Lecture at the University of Georgia will be given by Mary E. Power, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her talk, “Food webs in river networks: algal-mediated linkages of rivers, uplands and oceans,” will take place on Tuesday, March 5 at 4:00 p.m. in the auditorium of the Odum School of Ecology.
Associate Professor Jeb Byers was profiled in the "Focus on Faculty" page of the University of Georgia web site.
Read the full profile: Focus on Faculty: Jeb Byers
An op-ed by members of the Georgia Initiative for Climate and Society, including Odum School faculty members Jacqueline Mohan and James Porter, appeared in the Jan. 30 issue of the Athens Banner Herald.
Ecology graduate student Greg Skupien, along with Aaron Joslin and Holly Campbell of the Warnell School, was awarded a Campus Sustainability Grant from the Office of Sustainability for “Composting of Organic Waste in Academic Building on Campus: Pilot Project for Warnell School of Forestry & Natural Resources.”
A short essay by Odum School of Ecology doctoral student Eric Goolsby was recently published in the online edition of the journal Science. The essay was selected as part of NextGen VOICES, a series that features the ideas of young scientists.
The spread of white-nose syndrome, an emerging fungal disease in bats, may be determined by habitat and climate, ecologists at the University of Georgia have found.
Fish play a far more important role as contributors of nutrients to marine ecosystems than previously thought, according to research by Odum School doctoral student Jacob Allgeier and Florida International University associate professor Craig Layman.
Julie Rushmore, a doctor of veterinary medicine/Ph.D. candidate in ecology, received one of nine ARCS Foundation Awards presented to UGA doctoral students in 2012.
The University of Georgia’s Katie Sheehan, a legal fellow with the River Basin Center, has developed a guidebook, “Valuing Conservation Easement Properties: A Guide for Local Tax Assessors,” to help local tax assessors properly value conservation easement properties.
The number of genetic mutations that follow host shifts in rabies virus impacts the speed of disease emergence in new host species, according to new research by ecologists at the University of Georgia and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Seven eminent scientists with ties to the University of Georgia—six of whom are affiliated with the Odum School of Ecology—have been named to the inaugural list of Fellows of the Ecological Society of America.
Scientists from the University of Georgia Savannah River Ecology Laboratory have helped to reintroduce a species of toad declared extinct in the wild to its native range—the world’s first reintroduction of an extinct-in-the-wild amphibian.
Virginia Schutte, a doctoral student in the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology, is a finalist in a video contest sponsored by the National Science Foundation. To view Schutte’s video, see https://grf2012.skild.com/skild2/grf2012/viewEntryDetail.action?pid=40357.
Ecologists in the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology have found that evolutionary diversity can be an effective method for identifying hotspots of mammal biodiversity.
New research is revealing surprising connections between animal microbiomes—the communities of microbes that live inside animals’ bodies—and animal behavior, according to a paper by University of Georgia ecologist Vanessa O. Ezenwa and her colleagues.
EcoVoice 2012 covers events at the Odum School from Spring 2011 to Summer 2012.
Researchers in the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology will work with colleagues from universities across the U.S. Sun Belt on a study of water sustainability in the face of climate change and population growth. The four-year projects is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
2012 marked the 25th anniversary of the Honors International Field Program, an eight-week summer course that takes students across the country to some of the nation's most spectacular national parks and monuments.
In the U.S., most human cases of tick-borne Lyme disease occur in the Northeast—with a smaller cluster in the Midwest—even though the bacteria that cause it are equally common in ticks in both regions. A new study by researchers at the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology, published in the August issue of the journal Epidemics, combines ecology and immunology to offer an explanation for this puzzling disparity.
A front page story in The Franklin Press on August 29, 2012, featured the work of Odum School Ph.D. student Jeremy Sullivan, who conducts research at the Coweeta Hydrological Laboratory and is supported by NSF's Coweeta Long Term Ecological Research (CWT-LTER) project.
Inside Science, a nonprofit media outlet for science news that is part of the American Institute of Physics, interviewed Assistant Professor Rich Shefferson for an article on senescence published on August 30, 2012.
All eyes are turned to London as the world’s top athletes compete for Olympic glory, but a humbler competition has been taking place in Andy Davis’s lab at the University of Georgia this summer, featuring some unlikely competitors—horned passalus beetles.
The University of Georgia is well-represented at the 97th annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, with 38 faculty, students, and postdoctoral associates presenting their research, including 16 attendees from the Odum School.
Odum School undergraduate Theresa Stratmann and recent graduate Grover Brown, BS '12, were featured in an article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about hellbenders—“the aquatic equivalent of the canary in the coal mine”—on August 4, 2012.
Model asks if importing a plant is worth the risk of environmental damage, economic costs
Weedy plants, many introduced to the U.S. for sale through plant nurseries, are responsible for extensive environmental damage and economic costs. Researchers at the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology and the University of California, Davis have developed a “cost-sensitive” model to determine when importing a given plant is worth the risk.
Ecology Ph.D. student Rebeca de Jesús Crespo was one of four UGA recipients of a 2012 Fulbright Scholarship, which she will use to confinue her assessment of the impact of the Rainforest Alliance's certification program on the health of streams that flow into coffee plantations in Costa Rica.
A new study of rabies in vampire bats in Peru has found that culling bats—a common rabies control strategy—does not reduce rates of rabies exposure in bat colonies and may even be counterproductive. The findings may eventually help public health and agriculture officials in Peru develop more effective methods for preventing rabies infections in humans and livestock.
Odum School of Ecology Ph.D. student Alyssa Gehman's study of an invasive parasite that infects and castrates mud crabs living on the oyster reefs along the Georgia coast was featured on the front page of the Savannah Morning News.
Undergraduate Advisor Misha Boyd has been selected as an Outstanding Advising Certificate of Merit recipient in the Academic Advising—Primary Role category from the National Academic Advising Association.
The rate at which rabies virus evolves in bats may depend heavily upon the ecological traits of its hosts, according to researchers at the University of Georgia, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and KU Leuven in Belgium.
Four of the ten University of Georgia students and alumni who received graduate research fellowships this spring from the National Science Foundation to conduct research during their master’s and doctoral studies are from the Odum School of Ecology.
University of Georgia Honors ecology student Scott Saunders has received an Ernest F. Hollings Scholarship from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of only 115 awarded nationwide in 2012.
Linsey Haram, a Ph.D. student in the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology, has received a three-year National Estuarine Research Reserve System graduate research fellowship, one of only nine awarded in 2012.
Alyssa Gehman, who is pursuing her Ph.D. in ecology at the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology, is participating in the second round of the #SciFund Challenge, an experiment in crowdfunding for scientific research. Her proposal is proposal is online at http://www.rockethub.com/projects/7476-a-climate-for-castrators.
A new report just published by the Southeast Watershed Forum, with research conducted by the University of Georgia River Basin Center, provides a comprehensive review of green building programs throughout the Southeast.
University of Georgia ecologist Jacqueline Mohan has received a $554,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to help develop more accurate predictions about the impacts of climate change on forests. Her project is part of a five-year collaborative effort led by James Clark of Duke University.
The University of Georgia’s Outstanding Advisor/Mentor Awards will be presented this year to Anne Marie Zimeri, a faculty member in the College of Public Health, and Misha Boyd, an academic advisor in the Odum School of Ecology.
A team of University of Georgia students, faculty and staff in collaboration with Athens-Clarke County Storm Water and the Upper Oconee Watershed Network is working to make local streams cleaner.
Ecology students Malavika Rajeev and Theresa Stratmann were among the three University of Georgia Honors students—a record number—awarded 2012 Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation Scholarships.
Ecology major Todd Pierson has received a National Geographic Young Explorers grant to travel to China to study what may prove to be a new species of giant salamander.
Ecology majors Theresa Stratmann and Buck Trible have been awarded 2012 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships, two of the four received by UGA students this year.
Associate Professor Jeb Byers is one of three University of Georgia faculty named recipients of the Richard B. Russell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
A new paper by researchers from the University of Georgia and Princeton University sheds light on the critical part played by a little-studied element, molybdenum, in the nutrient cycles of tropical forests. Understanding the role of molybdenum may help scientists more accurately predict how tropical forests will respond to climate change. The findings were recently published in the journal PLoS ONE.
Christina Faust, a University of Georgia Honors student from Athens, has been awarded a 2008 Harry S. Truman Scholarship, a prestigious national honor recognizing outstanding juniors who are preparing for public service careers.
Carl Jordan, professor emeritus in the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology, has received the 2012 Governor’s Agricultural Environmental Stewardship Award for the Northeast Georgia region.
Thomas W. Schoener, Distinguished Professor in the College of Biological Sciences, Department of Evolution and Ecology, and Center for Population Biology, University of California, Davis, will deliver the 27th Eugene P. Odum Lecture on Tuesday, March 27
The 2012 EcoFocus Film Festival, which runs from March 23-31 at Ciné and various locations across the University of Georgia campus, includes something for everyone with 18 feature-length and 22 short films on a wide range of environmental topics.
Ecology alumna Sara Beresford, director of the EcoFocus Film Festival, was profiled in the March 2012 issue of Georgia Magazine.
Squirrels and raccoons will give up food to avoid ticks
A recent paper by Ph.D. student Alexa Fritzsche sheds light on the interaction between ticks and host animals. The study is based on research conducted while Fritzsche was a research technician at Washington University in St. Louis.
Katie Sheehan, legal fellow at the University of Georgia River Basin Center, was elected to the position of member-at-large of the Environmental Law Section of the State Bar of Georgia for 2012.
The Feb. 24 episode of Georgia Outdoors, the award-winning Georgia Public Broadcasting television series, featured Odum School of Ecology Associate Professor Jeb Byers.
Undergraduate Ecology Honors student Erin E. Froetschel received a Scientific Research Society Certificate of Recognition during the Eleventh Annual Sigma Xi Student Research Conference in Raleigh, NC.
Winter may be a relatively quiet season for many farmers in the Georgia Piedmont, but not for Carl Jordan, senior research scientist emeritus at the Odum School of Ecology and the founder of Spring Valley EcoFarms, who is busy preparing for his summer-long course in organic agriculture.
Scientists have for the first time measured how fast large-scale evolution can occur in mammals, showing it takes 24 million generations for a mouse-sized animal to evolve to the size of an elephant.
A paper about climate change and marine invasive species, coauthored by Jeb Byers, was recently covered in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Ecology undergraduate Malavika Rajeev was one of nine University of Georgia students awarded the William Moore Crane Leadership Scholarship for the 2011-2012 academic year.
Students in the First-Year Odyssey ecology seminar “Great Ape Behavior and Conservation” experience "a study-abroad experience in a classroom.”
The Odum School's Julie Rushmore was one of nine UGA graduate students to receive a 2011-2012 Atlanta ARCS Foundation award. Rushmore, a joint DVM/Ph.D. candidate, studies the behavioral and ecological factors that affect disease transmission in African great apes.
Predicting the risk of extinction is a complicated task, especially for species that migrate between breeding and wintering sites. Researchers at the University of Georgia and Tulane University have developed a mathematical model that may make such predictions more accurate. Their work appears in the early online edition of the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has awarded a grant to UGA researchers studying social and ecological factors that affect disease transmission in wild chimpanzees. This is the second grant the scientists have received from the USFWS Division of International Conservation for their work.
Odum School Assistant Professor Jacqueline Mohan spoke about the effects of climate change on forests in the eastern U.S. as part of the UGA Climate and Society Initiative monthly discussion series. Her Oct. 19 talk was covered by the Athens Banner Herald.
O.E. (Gene) Rhodes, Jr. has been appointed director of the University of Georgia Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, a world-renowned environmental research facility on the Department of Energy’s protected Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C.
Ecology alumnus Jianguo "Jack" Liu, Ph.D. '92, has published a new book, Sources, Sinks and Sustainability, an anthology of essays by more than 50 distinguished scientists influenced by the work of former Institute director H. Ronald Pulliam.
Associate Professor John Drake was profiled in the "Focus on Faculty" page of the University of Georgia web site.
Read the full profile: Focus on Faculty: John M. Drake
Carl F. Jordan, professor emeritus in the Odum School of Ecology, and Spring Valley EcoFarms have received the 2011 Conservationist of the Year award from the Oconee River Soil and Water Conservation District.
James W. Porter has been appointed to the International Scientific Advisory Board on Sea-Dumped Chemical Weapons, which advises the group that implements the U.N. Chemical Weapons Convention.
Study finds considerable regional variation in the impacts of extinction on biodiversity
When a species becomes extinct, its loss has an impact on global biodiversity. But a new study by University of Georgia researchers has found that species extinctions may have even greater impacts at the regional level, depending upon how closely related the lost species are to others nearby.
Scientists at Kansas State University, the University of Georgia, and six other collaborating institutions were recently awarded $3.3 million from the National Science Foundation to conduct a-large scale study of how stream organisms influence water quality across North America.
Researchers have found that a species invasion that starts at the upstream edge of its range may have a major advantage over downstream competitors, at least in environments with a strong prevailing direction of water or wind currents.
Assistant Research Scientist Richard Hall Hall prompted an influx of birders to Oconee Forest Park when he posted his photographs of an adult Mississippi kite feeding cicadas to its offspring on his blog, http://surfbirds.com/blog/rjhall in August. The story was covered in the Sept. 12, 2011 issue of Columns.
Beth Shapiro, who received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in ecology from the University of Georgia in 1999, has been honored by the UGA Alumni Association as one of its “40 Under Forty” for 2011.
Associate Professor Amy Rosemond was profiled in the Sept. 6 issue of UGA's Columns newspaper.
Read the full article here: Child of nature: Prof’s fascination with ecology started young
DiscoverLife.org, an online interactive encyclopedia created by associate professor John Pickering of the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology, will reach its first billion hits this fall. To celebrate this milestone and plan for the future, the Discover Life staff and collaborators will hold a symposium entitled “Discover Life: The Next Billion Hits” Oct. 7 from noon to 5 p.m. in the ecology school.
Research by Odum School of Ecology alumnus Seth Wenger, Ph.D. ’06, about how climate change affects trout in the western U.S. has received widespread coverage in the media, including stories in the New York Times, Nature, Science, and more than 50 other news outlets.
An article in the August 20 issue of New Scientist describes how Odum School researchers are using artificial intelligence to understand and predict ecological problems such as species invasions and disease outbreaks.
Carrie Futch, Ph.D. '10, a post-doctoral researcher with the University of Georgia College of Public Health, has been named a recipient of a post-doctoral fellowship in infectious disease and public health microbiology through the American Society for Microbiology and Centers for Disease Control.
A research team from Rollins College in Florida and the University of Georgia has identified human sewage as the source of the coral-killing pathogen that causes white pox disease of Caribbean elkhorn coral.
Odum School of Ecology undergraduate Alexander Wright received a commendation from the Awards Committee of the Georgia Academy of Science for the most outstanding paper presented in the Biological Sciences Section at the group's 89th annual meeting.
Graduate student James Moree has been awarded the American Society of Mammalogists-American Institute of Biological Sciences Public Policy Internship for fall 2011.
Increased seawater temperatures are known to be a leading cause of the decline of coral reefs all over the world. Now, researchers at the University of Georgia have found that extreme low temperatures affect certain corals in much the same way that high temperatures do, with potentially catastrophic consequences for coral ecosystems.
A long-term study investigating how altering nutrient inputs to streams affected forest-dwelling organisms has yielded surprising results: In a paper published in the Online First edition of the journal Oecologia, researchers at the University of Georgia have shown that although nutrient enrichment led to increased production of aquatic insects, streamside predators that depend upon them as a food source did not benefit. In fact, they received significantly less nutrition from aquatic sources than did their counterparts at a similar untreated stream nearby.
The fourth annual EcoFocus Film Festival will take place from March 23-31 in Athens, Ga., and is accepting film submissions until September 15, 2011.
Researchers at the University of Georgia have developed a mathematical model showing a link between land cover pattern and the spatial spread of West Nile virus in New York City.
Ph.D. student Virginia Schutte received an East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes fellowship from the National Science Foundation in 2010, which allowed her to conduct research in Taiwan. She described her experience in a “Behind the Scenes” article for the online science and technology news site LiveScience.com.
Odum School of Ecology Assistant Research Scientist Andy Davis has been interviewed by several news outlets about a paper he recently published in the journal Insect Conservation and Diversity.
For more than 20 years, the University of Georgia Interdisciplinary Field Program has allowed undergraduate students to learn geology, ecology and anthropology in a coast-to-coast outdoor classroom. This year, the students are sharing their progress by using SPOT, an online GPS tracking tool, which charts their route in real time.
Researchers at the University of Georgia Savannah River Ecology Laboratory have recently followed up on a study originally conducted in the 1970s and found that one of the most ecologically diverse streams in the world has not been negatively impacted by three decades of Department of Energy continued operations.
Honors student Brian Watts of Douglasville, Georgia, who graduated with a bachelor of science degree from the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology in May, has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Grant. Watts will spend the 2011-2012 academic year in South Korea.
Professor Paul Hendrix was honored with the Lifetime Professional Achievement Award from the Soil Ecology Society at the group’s biannual meeting, held in British Columbia in May.
Researchers from the Odum School of Ecology have found that certain neotropical stream ecosystems rely almost entirely on a single fish species known as the banded tetra for the critical nutrient phosphorus. In a paper recently published in the journal Ecology, the researchers, led by Gaston E. “Chip” Small, Ph.D. '10, explain why this particular species plays such a crucial role—and why these stream systems are vulnerable as a result.