Jonathan Losos’s course, “The Science of Cats” was featured in the Uncommon Courses series, an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. that highlights unconventional approaches to teaching.
Forest Park Living Lab is understanding racoon ecology in urban land through GPS tracking and how this work informs One Health programs.
The Earth is facing two interconnected crises — loss of biodiversity and climate change. Each separately is an enormous threat to life on this planet. However, together they are fueling each other, creating a worsening downward spiral.
This month, the Republic of Congo agreed to protect a 36-square-mile area called Djéké Triangle by making it part of the adjacent Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park. Biodiversity research led by St. Louis scientists helped inform the decision to include the Djéké Triangle in the existing national park.
Learn about the Forest Park Living Lab project that started with LEC Seed grant monies. Experts in wildlife ecology, animal movement and veterinary medicine joined forces in a landmark collaboration to enhance how we understand Forest Park.
A new book by WashU biology professor, Joan E. Strassmann, borrows from the slow food movement to propose a more thoughtful, less competitive form of bird-watching.
Microbes of Diverse Ecosystems (mDivE-STL) Symposium held on Oct 3 by the Living Earth Collaborative focuses on the important but unseen role of microbes in diverse ecosystems.
Elizabeth Carlen is a postdoctoral fellow with the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis. She is studying how city life is changing the local populations of eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis).
Aryeh Miller, a graduate student in the Evolution, Ecology, and Population Biology program at Washington University is also the lead author on a study, recently published in Oxford’s science journal, Systematic Biology, about how lizard species with sticky toe pads have an evolutionary advantage over their padless counterparts. LEC post-doc James Stroud co-authored the paper with Miller.
Jane Melville, senior curator of terrestrial vertebrates at Museums Victoria and associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University, led the collaborative research effort to emphasize the importance of prioritizing taxonomic research in conservation as part of a Fulbright Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis.
Andean forests have high potential to store carbon under climate change. The study — which draws upon two decades of data from 119 forest-monitoring plots in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina — was produced by an international team of scientists including researchers supported by the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis. The lead author was Alvaro Duque from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Medellín.
Black-and-white ruffed lemurs and diademed sifakas are the focus of Living Earth Collaborative effort in Madagascar to find out how to best support these two endangered species.
“Climate change is altering when plants are blooming, and it’s disrupting the historic relationships between plants and their pollinators,” said Matthew Austin, an ecologist and biodiversity postdoctoral fellow with the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis. “But we know remarkably little about what effect that has on how plants interact with one another and the evolutionary consequences of altered plant-plant interactions.”
Today, the Climatron celebrates its 60th birthday. In 1960, the Missouri Botanical Garden opened the Climatron, a domed conservatory packed with orchids, palms, and other tropical plants. Today, more than 2,800 plants, including 1,400 different tropical species, grow inside the Climatron
The Congo Basin is home to the world’s second-largest rainforest and a unique array of biodiversity. But the ecosystem’s remote location cannot protect it from the threat of poaching. Special correspondent Monica Villamizar and videographer Phil Caller traveled to the Central African Republic before the pandemic to report on indigenous tribal hunters working to protect endangered wildlife.
The Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center at the University of Missouri–St. Louis presented the Garden and the Zoo with the World Ecology Award in particular recognition of their longtime work in Madagascar.
Helina S. Woldekiros, an assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences has a bone to pick with modernization: chickens are losing diversity.
A study published July 8 in the journal Nature Plants presents a novel model for how small-seeded plants came to the table — and it relies on help from large, grazing animals, including bison. The new work is a collaboration between Natalie Mueller, assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and Robert Spengler, director of the Paleoethnobotany Laboratories at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
Marine scientists predict climate change might severely hinder efforts to protect populations of the endangered and iconic Nassau grouper by the end of this century.
The world’s tropical forests lost roughly 39 million acres of trees last year, an area roughly the size of Bangladesh, according to a report Wednesday by Global Forest Watch that used new satellite data from the University of Maryland. Global Forest Watch is part of the World Resources Institute, an environmental group.
A World Resources Institute project aims to collect DNA samples from tree leaves and use it to help track illegal logging.
What we think we know about how to restore tropical forests is getting a second look. A new paper produced by scientists in Missouri Botanical Garden’s Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development (CCSD), the University of Hawaii’s Lyon Arboretum, and the University of Maryland Baltimore County points out an important bias in recent studies.
A situation analysis by the IUCN Oil Palm Task Force. The situation
analysis primarily focuses on oil palm in the context of biodiversity conservation based on literature published before 31 January 2018, and aims to provide a constructive pathway to addressing sustainability challenges in the palm oil industry.
The air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat all rely on biodiversity, but right now it is in crisis – because of us. What does this mean for our future and can we stop it?