College of Letters & Science
Seth McGee led a community science outreach even on Sunday 9/13/2026, inviting students from across campus to net, catch, tag, and release monarchs. A select few monarchs that qualified were also fitted with a solar powered radio tag, enabling more data collection on monarch migration than the standard paper tags alone. Check out the photo …
By Elise Mahon Daijiang Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology, has been granted a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to build new tools that will help scientists understand, analyze, and forecast urban biodiversity. Cities around the world continue to expand with more than half of the world’s people living …
By Elise Mahon This past July, the Wisconsin State Herbarium and Botanical Club of Wisconsin hosted their 8th annual foray. Over the course of three days, a total of 46 volunteers explored habitats throughout La Crosse County, Wisconsin to document their flora. Each year the foray is held in a different region of Wisconsin, inviting …
Zach Feiner is a fisheries ecologist and new assistant professor in the department of Biology. He not only studies how fish respond to changes in their ecosystem, but also what those changes could mean for anglers. Since Feiner’s days as an undergraduate right here at UW–Madison, the Wisconsin Idea has guided his work. Now that …
UW fungi researchers across many disciplines have created a world-class supergroup to improve our lives. Professors Ken Cameron and Anne Pringle are both featured in this On Wisconsin Magazine story. Read more
Peatlands are powerhouses when it comes to improving water quality, minimizing flood risks, providing habitat and storing carbon. Yet, most people are unaware of these important ecological places. Researchers and students from UW–Madison and UW–Green Bay hope to change that. Read more.
Words: Elise Mahon | Photos: Sarah Friedrich One hundred million years ago, long before human intervention, ancestors of grasses, like wheat, rice and maize generated “bypasses” of chemical pathways that are used to create two critical compounds: lignin and starch. These more efficient pathways could explain why grass plants are so successful in nature and …
By Elise Mahon Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison recognize a new species of baobab tree, Adansonia bozy, unique to Madagascar, according to a study published in the journal Taxon. Previously, members of A. bozy were classified within a different species of Malagasy baobab, Adansonia za. While both species look similar, careful genetic analysis revealed …
A paper by Nathan Kiel (PhD iBio ’24), undergraduate student Eileen Mavencamp (’23), and Professor Monica Turner has been awarded the W.S. Cooper Award for Outstanding Contributions in the Fields of Geobotany and/or Physiographic Ecology. Their paper, “Sparse subalpine forest recovery pathways, plant communities, and carbon stocks 34 years after stand-replacing fire“, emphasizes that post-fire …
PhD candidate Tymofii Sokolskyi and professor David Baum published a new paper that investigates pre-biotic chemical reactions in vesicles to better understand the origins of life. Read more.