Upon establishing the Environmental Resilience Institute (ERI) at Indiana University, the leaders and visionaries reported four main goals. The first goal stated that the supported research would create “accurate predictions about coming changes in weather patterns, water, plants and animals, and disease risk.” This goal focused on directly predicting what Hoosiers would have to face,… Read more »
Farmers are facing new challenges in the age of global change. Drought is a major stressor for crops in Indiana and other regions of the U.S. and is forcing farmers to face the question: to irrigate or not to irrigate? Irrigation equipment is incredibly expensive, but is often the best quick solution to water crops… Read more »
Graduate students across disciplines agree: as your years of graduate education increase, your knowledge and skill sets become incredibly specialized. Cue Liam Neeson in Taken, “I can tell you that I do not have money, but what I do have… [is] a very particular set of skills.” So when I asked Dr. Tara Smiley, a… Read more »
Scientists have long been interested in understanding animal migration, but gathering migration data proved difficult in the past. For example, the process of catching and recapturing migratory songbirds using mist nets is a laborious process. In the past, recovering songbirds produced data only about the breeding location and their migration destination, and rarely about the migration itself. Studying… Read more »
Typically when you think about a bunch of academics discussing environmental change, it has an air of doom and gloom. The projections aren’t promising: the global temperature is predicted to rise 0.2 °C each decade, resulting mainly from anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases, and this will continue to result in rising sea levels and unpredictable,… Read more »