Net Primary Productivity (NPP) quantifies the amount of plant biomass produced each year, per unit area, in an ecosystem or a landscape. NPP is a central concept in ecology, conservation, and sustainability science. It is used to quantify the amount of crop produced on a cropland, forage on a rangeland, timber produced in a managed…
Bill Currie is developing a new undergraduate course for fall 2018, titled “Sustainability Issues in the Great Lakes Region.” This new course, listed as Environ 305, is offered as part of the recently re-organized Program in the Environment, a joint undergraduate major between the School for Environment and Sustainability and the College of Literature, Science,…
Erin Barton spent summer 2017 on an internship working with The Nature Conservancy, Colorado Chapter, on their Sustainable Grazing Lands Program. She was awarded this internship as part of the Wyss Scholarship, funded by the Wyss Foundation, which provides funding for students focosed on conservation issues in the American West. Describing her intership, Erin wrote,…
Bill Currie will be offering a new, 1-credit graduate seminar course on coastal wetlands for fall 2017. Class will meet every two weeks for 2 hours, 4-6 p.m., starting on Monday September 11. The focus will be mainly on Great Lakes coastal wetlands, their ecology and management, but to some extent we’ll look at coastal…
Bill Currie and students attended the IAGLR (International Association of Great Lakes Researchers) in Detroit in May, 2017. Bill presented in a special session on the management of invasive Phragmites in Great Lakes wetlands, a session that combined talks by management professionals and university researchers from across the region. Bill gave a presentation about using…
Congratulations to Master’s students Christina Carlson, Josh Flickinger, Sarah (Quill) Turner, Alex Clayton, and Yifan (Flora) He, who completed their SEAS Master’s Project “Inspiration Ridge Preserve Baseline Ecological Inventory and Management Plan.” Bill Currie was the faculty advisor and the client for this project was the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies (CACS). CACS is obtaining…
Congratulations to Master’s students Kate Keeley, Elliott Kurtz, Luxian Li, Ed Waisanen, Yu Xin, and Fan Zhang, who completed their SEAS Master’s Project “Supporting conservation and decision-making in the Northwoods: Mapping forest values, services, and threats.” The client for this project was The Nature Conservancy of Michigan, with Doug Pearsall as the client contact. Working…
John Graham, who completed his PhD degree at Michigan in 2016, was lead author on a new paper just published in Landscape Ecology. In this work, John used landscape ecology methods to assess whether perennial bioenergy crops like switchgrass or prairie grasses, if used in a large agricultural watershed in Illinois, could improve landscape-scale habitat…
