Human+Nature Blog

July 15, 2016

Janet Hsiao is a master's degree student studying how landscape characteristics may affect the quality and condition of coastal habitats and the organisms they support. She is advised by Dana Infante.

Over the past few weeks, I have grown from a perpetually disheveled data scientist and learned to dress slightly better than a sack of potatoes –an added benefit of my summer of experiential learning in the DC area.

July 5, 2016

Anna Herzberger is an MSU Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability doctoral student doing research in the Heilongjiang Province in northeastern China. She hails from the farmlands of Virginia, Ill.

So if you remember from previous blogs, my research project is attempting to find differences is in the soil-microbial community between corn, rice (grasses) and soy (a legume). Global soybean trade, specifically soybeans from Brazil and the USA, are being imported by China; these imports are cheaper than domestically produced soybeans, thus driving out China’s domestic soybean production. Areas that were originally planted with soy are being converted to rice and corn, as they are more profitable crops. In order to identify these changes, our research team is traveling around Heilongjiang, the far northeastern province, surveying farmers and sampling their soil.

Joe Nohner is a CSIS PhD student who's studying largemouth bass, specifically how habitat helps baby largemouth survive and grow, and the socioeconomic factors that influence landowners’ habitat management choices. He's also a passionate fisherman who aims to understand the layers and layers of complexity to solve ecosystem problems. This is an excerpt from Joe's blog, Fishing for Habitat.

Nov. 2, 2015

“I have no idea what this thing is, some sort of a spiny-headed worm or something,” called out Michelle, a technician in the lab. Transfixed by the insidious creature, she zoomed in with the microscope to take a

Sept. 8, 2015

Thomas Connor is a first-year PhD student studying with Jack Liu. He's spending his summer doing field work in and around Wolong, China. 

I returned from my first trip to China. Happily I was able to recover enough to get back into the field, but alas only once. We hiked to the border of Wolong Nature Reserve and the reserve to the north, Caopo. This area had excellent panda habitat and we found four different fecal samples. From a conservation perspective this was nice to see, as it is clear that pandas can move freely between these two reserves. In the future I hope to use genetic data from fecal sampling to evaluate connectivity between Wolong and neighboring reserves and unprotected across a larger area.