Master’s thesis by Biodiversity’s Giese leads to ‘Ecosphere’ article

Cofrin Center for Biodiversity Data Specialist Erin Giese, along with UW-Green Bay faculty members Bob Howe and Amy Wolf, graduate student Nick Walton, and Nature Conservancy biologist Nick Miller, have published a paper in the Ecological Society of America’s new online journal Ecosphere. The paper, titled “Sensitivity of breeding birds to the ‘human footprint’ in western Great Lakes forest landscapes,” documents how bird populations respond to human activities like road-building, logging, and housing density in the northwoods of Wisconsin and nearby states. The paper is an outgrowth of Giese’s master’s thesis in the UW-Green Bay Environmental Science and Policy program and has become the basis for an ongoing effort (www.uwgb.edu/biodiversity/forest-index/iec.asp) to measure forest health in the western Great Lakes based on birds. Howe says online scientific journals such as Ecosphere seem to be the wave of the future. Check out the article (for free) at: http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/ES14-00414.1