September 2017

We’ve been doing a lot of education and outreach lately.  Holly led tours at Nachusa’s annual Autumn On The Prairie openhouse, which attracted around 1,000 members of the public.  On the same day, Nick spoke to participants in the Illinois Master Naturalists program about restoration.  Both events gave us an opportunity to describe ReFuGE, our methods, and our goals. 

Sheryl also participated in the Skype A Scientist program, talking about dung beetles to a classroom of 4th graders in Peoria.  She also launched The Roving Naturalist, a YouTube channel that includes interviews with graduate students who explain their research and experiences in grad school. 

August 2017

We had a great time at the ESA Annual Meeting in Portland where we presented preliminary data from ReFuGE.  Holly and Nick led an Organized Oral Session on consumer communities in restored ecosystems that had a great series of speakers and was well-attended.  Holly spoke in this session about small mammal communities, and Nick presented a poster on dung beetle communities. Heather Herakovich, Ryan Blackburn, and Kirstie Savage all presented posters on ReFuGE and Nachusa research and took home 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place in the ESA Restoration section’s student poster competition!  And REU student Jeff Heise also presented a poster. 

As the field season began to wrap up and the schoolyear was about to start, we had a celebration picnic with the whole crew.  All of our students worked incredibly hard this year.  Luckily for us, most of our undergrads will be able to continue working in our labs this semester!

Summer 2017

We have been hard at work at Nachusa, collecting a wide range of community and ecosystem data.  Dung beetle trapping and dung decomposition experiments went well, small mammal trapping went smoothly, and plant surveys were completed in record time thanks to our knowledgeable crew. 

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