Nearly forty years ago, I was working with NASA on one of the early efforts to use LandSat imagery to study natural systems; specifically, we were attempting to assess biomass production of large boreal forest regions. That work met with only partial success, but I did discover something that’s been …
Even very ubiquitous and diverse groups of organisms are sometimes so cryptic we’re barely aware of them. Leaf-mining insects, for example, are abundant where-ever there are leafy plants, but most of us are barely aware of them. The leaf-mining life-style works so well, though, that it has evolved convergently in …
Orderly patterns call for explanation — that might be one way of stating a general motivation for most of science. Several years ago, Prof. Don Waller — an ecological researcher from University of Wisconsin — was struck by the appearance of aquatic ‘fairy rings’ on Howe Lake. Viewed from the …
Streams have to start somewhere, but their beginning can be ambiguous. The smallest headwater streams — ‘first-order’ streams that have no smaller tributaries — are usually ephemeral, flowing only at snowmelt or after heavy rains. One relatively definite beginning point is the highest point where these headwater streams establish an …
Art and science are different things, right? Well, maybe not so much. Yes, the two enterprises usually play out in different social and institutional contexts. In academia, they’re sequestered into distinct departments in different buildings, and all academics know that you never talk with anybody in a different building. But there …
The upcoming HMWF newsletter features two researchers who have been documenting, over the last several years, the huge biodiversity of moths at Huron Mt. I’ve written about this work before, but wanted to recognize a recent achievement by one of these researchers in another arena. Dr. Thomas Werner (Michigan Technological …
Increasingly, ecological questions call for ‘big picture’ perspectives in space and time. It’s not so much that these questions are new — they aren’t — but that new tools and approaches are making them, for the first time, rigorously addressable. Synoptic views from satellites and air-borne sensors, techniques for analyzing …
In science, new findings often raise more questions than they answer. That seems to be the case with recently published research on the lake trout (or lake charr) of Rush Lake, where two distinct forms of the species coexist. The origins of this unusual scenario are ambiguous, and it may, …
[Warning: this is a longer-than-usual post. Biological diversity is something worth dwelling on…] All-taxa Biodiversity Inventories (ATBIs) are efforts to fully document biological diversity — list all the species — for some defined area. The value of such documentation, in a world where all the indications are that we’re …
We have our first ‘guest blogger’. At the Foundation’s annual meeting in early August, Dr. Evelyn Williams received the Manierre Award, awarded annually in recognition of recent, peer-reviewed publication of Foundation-sponsored work at the Huron Mountains. Evelyn is a conservation scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Her award-winning publications spring …
