2025-09-23
- CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Illinois once harbored more than 8 million acres of wetlands. By the 1980s, all but 1.2 million wetland acres had been lost, filled in for development or drained to make way for agriculture. Now, thanks to a 2023 Supreme Court decision, roughly 72% of the remaining 981,000 acres of Illinois wetlands are no longer protected by the federal Clean Water Act, putting communities at...
2025-09-18 - CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — One of the great challenges of ecology is to understand the factors that maintain, or undermine, diversity in ecosystems, researchers write in a new report in the journal Science. The researchers detail their development of a new model that — using a tree census and genomic data collected from multiple species in a forest — can predict future fluctuations in the relative...
2025-08-22 - A recent study published in Plant and Soil explores how tomato plants utilize both aboveground and belowground defense strategies when exposed to simultaneous environmental stressors. The research, titled "Interactions between soil source, flooding, and herbivory shape tomato plant volatile emissions and rhizosphere bacterial and fungal communities," was conducted by Assistant...
2025-07-22 - Four incoming graduate students—Sam Pring (Min Lab, Plant Biology), Marcus Brown (Punyasena Lab, Plant Biology), Mary Heather Jingco (Kingston Lab, PEEC), and Kehvyn Cedeño (Martínez Lab, PEEC)—recently completed the university’s competitive, fully funded 8-week Summer Predoctoral Institute (SPI).The program, designed to support students from underrepresented backgrounds as they transition into...
2025-06-13 - Juliana Soto-Patiño, a PhD candidate in the PEEC program at the University of Illinois and researcher at the Illinois Natural History Survey (INHS), received the Best Student Presentation Award at the...
2025-06-07 - A podcast created by two SIB alumni has been spotlighted in a recent YouTube video by science communicator Angela Collier, titled “The Best Science Podcast Isn’t What You Think.”From the 9:10 to 9:53 mark of the video, Collier praises This Podcast Will Kill You, hosted by Dr. Erin Welsh and Dr. Erin Allmann Updyke, calling it a fantastic science podcast for its engaging approach...
2025-03-31 - We are thrilled to announce that five graduate students from the School of Integrative Biology (SIB) have been named semifinalists in this year’s Image of Research competition! Each year, this exhibition showcases the stunning diversity and creativity of graduate student research.We invite you to explore the online exhibition and cast your votes for your three SIB favorite entries. Your votes...
2025-03-20 - CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Campylobacter infections are the most common foodborne illnesses in the U.S., sickening an estimated 1.5 million people each year. A new study examined records of Campylobacter jejuni infections from 10 states, plotting regional, age-related, and drug-...
2024-04-28 - The Ecological Society of America is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2024 Katherine S. McCarter Graduate Student Policy Award (GSPA). Students in the 2024 cohort are engaged in advocacy with an interest in science policy. Awardees will travel to Washington, D.C., for policy, communication and career training followed by meetings with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.“I am thrilled to welcome...
2023-12-18 - Congratulations to Sarah Winnicki, who received the A. Brazier Howell Award from the American Ornithological Society for their presentation on how egg-laying order impacts the growth of American Robin nestlings. Sarah presented work following up on their previous findings that robin eggs varied with laying order (hormone content, size), that nestlings hatched asynchronously...
2023-08-31 - URBANA, Ill. — Artificial roosts for bats come in many forms — bat boxes, condos, bark mimics, clay roosts, and cinder block structures, to name a few — but a new conservation practice and policy article from researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign suggests the structures haven’t been studied rigorously...
2023-06-06 - I am walking in a forest and listening to a concert of birdsong at dawn. I pick one song out of the chorus – a fast chatter full of melodious whistles – the sound of the sooty ant tanager. “Today, we will probably get to know this bird up close,” I think. My colleagues and I set up and open our mist nets. Now we are ready to document and study the avian wonders of this corner of the world. We...