Michigan Biological Station’s Summer Lecture Series Is Packed with Can’t-Miss Science

• May 20: “Nature in Pieces: Why Large, Continuous, Connected Forests Hold More Life.” Dr. Thiago Gonçalves-Souza teaches a General Ecology Lecture course at UMBS and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. The quantitative community ecologist unravels the intricate dynamics of biodiversity change. Amid habitat loss and climate change, his talk asks a simple but important question about plant and animal life: When forests are broken into pieces, can biodiversity be maintained across the broader landscape? Using data across six continents, his results challenge the idea of fragmentation.

• May 27: “Using Science to Make a Difference: The Work to Reduce Global Mercury Pollution.” Dr. Linda Greer, a UMBS alumna, earned a Ph.D. in environmental toxicology with a “hard science” dissertation but spent her career at the Natural Resources Defense Council working with lawyers and policy experts to promote improvements in environmental laws and regulations and to pressure corporations to reduce their pollution abroad. In this talk, Linda will describe the use of science in her advocacy, illustrating this line of work with the story of reducing global mercury pollution.

• June 3: “The Tale of a Weevil.” Dr. Bénédicte Boisseron is professor and chair of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan and an affiliate faculty in Romances Languages and Literature, and Comparative Literature. Her interdisciplinary work bridges Global Black Studies and the Environmental Humanities. This talk will examine an environmental crisis in the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. From 1972 to 1993, a highly toxic pesticide was sprayed on weevil-infested banana plantations in the islands, despite known health risks, largely due to pressure from powerful white planter elites and the economic importance of the banana industry. The resulting health impact on the population has come to symbolize how the colonial is often inextricable from the ecological. But what about the weevil? This talk responds to environmental scholar Malcolm Ferdinand’s call to also look at the weevil in this dramatic story.

• June 10: Dr. Alison Davis Rabosky is the director of the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan and an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. The evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist studies animal coloration and mimicry in snakes to better understand the origin and evolution of bright color patterns across species.

• June 17: Hann Lecture in Ornithology. “Trait-based Insights into the Dynamics of Biodiversity.” Dr. Marta Jarzyna is an associate professor in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology at The Ohio State University. The macroecologist and biodiversity scientist will show how trait-based approaches uncover seasonal dynamics in bird communities and reveal patterns obscured by traditional metrics — shifts in functional composition across the year that species counts alone would miss entirely.

• June 24: “Making Steel Knives from Sands Found on Douglas Lake.” Dr. John Verhoeven is a metallurgical engineer, U-M alumnus and Distinguished Emeritus Professor at Iowa State University who lives along Douglas Lake. Since retiring, he has continued to do research with colleagues in northern Michigan. They recently found magnetic black sand on Douglas Lake, reduced it to iron and made kitchen knives. Their experiments measuring the composition of the sand in an electron microscope show that it comes from what geologists call OUI deposits of the Mid-Continental Rift. Verhoeven said the source rock from which the sand eroded — Fe-Ti oxide ultramafic intrusions (OUI) — was brought to the surface from magma in Earth’s core 1.1 billion years ago when tectonic plates separated.

• July 1: Bennett Lecture in Mycology and Plant Biology. “Continent-Scale Aerial Dispersal of Fungi.” Dr. Bala Chaudhary is an associate professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College who studies mycorrhizas (plant-fungal symbioses), macroecology (continent-scale ecology), and movement (microbial dispersal). Dispersal is a fundamental ecological process driving the abundance and distribution of species from local to global scales. Combining macrosystems biology, trait-based ecology, eDNA metabarcoding, and data synthesis approaches, Chaudhary will address fundamental questions in fungal dispersal ecology and share new methods her lab is developing to apply AI and data synthesis to make inferences about the ecology and evolution of fungi.

• July 8: “Making a Migratory Monarch.” Dr. André Green is an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan who studies the unique features of monarch butterfly migration. Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) are renowned for their annual transcontinental migration where they fly thousands of miles each fall to overwinter at specific sites in central Mexico. How did this phenotype evolve? The mechanisms (behavioral, genetic, and molecular) required for migrants to perform this trip, particularly to naïvely identify their overwintering sites with remarkably high fidelity, are unknown. Green will discuss lab efforts that aim to extend our understanding of how this occurs.

• July 15: Bennett Lecture in Mycology and Plant Biology. “Unravelling the Relationships of the Natural World with Biodiversity Genomics.” Dr. Jay Goldberg is an Indigenous (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians) evolutionary biologist who uses cutting-edge genetic tools to study interactions between chemically defended plants and their specialist herbivores in the Sonoran Desert. He is now starting an independent lab as a presidential scholar at Arizona State University to uncover the (co)evolutionary processes that shape plant-insect interactions in the Sonoran Desert, focusing primarily on the sacred Datura plant (Datura wrightii) and its community of highly specialized insect herbivores that can tolerate the myriad chemical defenses produced by this iconic native plant.

• July 22: “Linking Pathogen Inactivation and Byproduct Formation: Nucleic Acid Fate During Drinking Water Disinfection.” Dr. Aleksandra Szczuka is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan whose research is motivated by broad access to affordable water. Drinking water treatment plants — originally designed to treat relatively clean surface waters — are now faced with increasing levels of biological and chemical contaminants. Chlorination is a key process for controlling acute health risks. However, disinfection byproducts (DBPs), which pose chronic health risks, such as bladder cancer, form as an unintended consequence of chlorination. Szczuka will examine nucleic acids as a missing link between pathogen control and byproduct formation. She also will discuss the roles of previously overlooked chlorine species in nucleic acid reactivity and viral inactivation, and the potential for nucleic acid chlorination to form an emerging class of DBPs. Collaborating with practitioners, Szczuka will talk about how utilities in Michigan are working to meet both biological and chemical contaminant treatment objectives in a changing climate.

• July 29: Pettingill Lecture in Natural History. “Beavers: Architects of Climate Resilience.” Dr. Emily Fairfax is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota. She uses a combination of remote sensing, modeling, and field work to understand how beaver ecosystem engineering can create drought and fire-resistant patches in the landscape under a changing climate.  Beaver dams and beaver mimicry are gaining popularity as a low‐cost, nature-based strategy to create and maintain healthy waterways and riparian zones such as the banks of rivers, streams and lakes . As the Great Lakes region experiences wetter winters, hotter and drier summers, flashier storms, and a longer frost-free season, Fairfax’s research has shown that beaver-influenced patches stay green and can serve as a place to escape and survive, preserving habitat even during extreme drought and fire. Beavers slow and store water in their ponds, canals, and the surrounding soil during flood periods. As a result, the well-watered vegetation in beaver-dammed corridors between land and water is less flammable. In her talk, Fairfax analyzes the benefit of humans partnering with beaver’s ecosystem engineering to achieve the same goals at a lower cost. 

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