GreenBoard readers,

As part of our effort to share all of the great work our students, staff and faculty do, we’ve started an occasional series of short videos highlighting environmental work on and around MSU’s campus. We hope the videos will spread awareness of important issues by showing their reach into our own backyards, and that our researchers’ enthusiasm for science and nature will prove contagious.

We’ll post each new video here so that subscribers to our RSS feed will have the latest sent to them, but the entire series will be housed on a new page, available here.

In our first video, we head to MSU’s Tree Research Center, where forestry and ESPP doctoral student Sara Tanis talks about the emerald ash borer, and discusses her research into ways to halt the tree-killing beetle. She even shows us trees in downtown East Lansing that are dying from ash borer infestation.  For more information about the beetle from MSU, click here.

An upcoming conference will draw attention to the effects of climate change and invasive species on Michigan’s birds.  The third annual Ornithological Congress will be held April 3-5 at North Central Michigan College in Petoskey.

ESPP affiliate Kim Hall will address the need for conservation efforts that incorporate climate change.  Birds depend on certain plant and insect species for food, she said, but earlier blooms and hatches brought on by a changing climate could cause a mismatch between the birds’ migration and food availability.  Hall is a Nature Conservancy climate change ecologist and an adjunct researcher at the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability.

MSU zoology professor Catherine Lindell will also speak at the conference, which is sponsored by the Michigan Bird Conservation Initiative, a partnership among state and federal agencies, universities and nonprofits.

To learn more or sign up for the conference, call (517) 373-1263 or visit www.mibci.org.

-Andy McGlashen