L&S News  Tag: Zoology

Combining the forces of the current integrative biology and botany departments, the University’s Department of Biology within the College of Letters & Science will be a powerhouse in research and education.

Fifteen graduate students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have been honored as recipients of the 2017 Campus-Wide Teaching Assistant (TA) Awards. They will be joined by families, friends, colleagues, and the university administration at the award ceremony on February 20.

Patricia Bean McConnell (B.S.’81, M.S.’84, PhD’88, Zoology) of Black Earth, Wisconsin, is an internationally renowned zoologist and certified applied animal behaviorist who specializes in canine aggression.

Bill Robichaud (B.S.’83, Zoology) has devoted his career to saving the saola, a recently discovered mammal that may go extinct before scientists can even study it.

What is the value of a sunset overlooking a wildflower field in the Appalachian Mountains?Or of ice skating on a frozen lake in central Wisconsin? The natural world might most often be counted and measured through the resources we extract from it, or the intrinsic worth of biodiversity itself. But Ph.D. student Rose Graves has focused her research on uncovering a hidden value — people’s cultural ties to a landscape.

"Fueling Discovery" is a joint effort of the UW-Madison College of Letters & Science and the Wisconsin State Journal. This special section features essays from faculty members across the college about their groundbreaking research.

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide would lack their prime source of protein without freshwater fish. Yet the lakes and river systems that supply them are often overlooked by policymakers, who focus sustainability efforts instead on ocean species. “Most freshwater fish catches don’t enter the global trade economy, so they draw less interest,” says University of Wisconsin–Madison zoologist Peter McIntyre.

The Wisconsin Alumni Association recognizes eight alumni under the age of 40 who are leveraging the benefits of their UW education to better their cities, states, nation and the world. Six of these outstanding citizens are L&S alumni.

A study of more than 5,000 Wisconsin lakes shows that nearly a quarter of them have become murkier in the past two decades. This trend could get worse as a changing climate leads to increased precipitation. However, the study also shows most lakes have stayed the same and some are even seeing an improvement in clarity.