Month: April 2018

Biological Sciences’ Fred Benfield honored with emeritus status by the Board of Visitors

Post author By jcoker
Post date April 24, 2018

April 23, 2018 | Fred Benfield, professor of ecology and alumnus in the College of Science’s Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech, has been conferred the title of professor emeritus by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.

The emeritus title may be conferred on retired professors, associate professors, and administrative officers who are specially recommended to the board by Virginia Tech President Tim Sands. Nominated individuals who are approved by the board receive an emeritus certificate from the university.

A member of the university community since 1971, Benfield contributed to research on the responses of stream systems to current and historical land-use change as reflected by ecosystem level processes and biodiversity. His scholarship also spanned pollution ecology, aquatic insect toxicology, distribution and abundance of aquatic macroinvertebrates, and arthropod defensive behavior.

Benfield authored and co-authored approximately 100 publications and presented many papers at national and international scientific meetings. He has served as president of the Society for Freshwater Science, and in 2012, he received that society’s Distinguished Service Award for his many contributions.

He also served as the associate head of the Department of Biological Sciences for 17 years.

In the classroom, Benfield taught a variety of courses ranging from large sections of freshman biology to advanced graduate courses. He advised numerous graduate students during his career, serving as the graduate advisor for 16 master’s degree and 16 doctoral degree students. He also advised many undergraduate students and helped them develop successful careers after graduation.

Benfield received his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in biology from Appalachian State University in, respectively, 1964 and 1965, and a Ph.D. in zoology from Virginia Tech in 1970.

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Interfaces of Global Change IGEP News Special Events

IGC Fellows showcase their work during the 3rd annual IGC Graduate Research Symposium

Post author By jcoker
Post date April 23, 2018

The Third annual Interfaces of Global Change (IGC) Graduate Research Symposium was held on April 19, 2018 in Fralin Hall. The gathering provides a forum for students and faculty to interact and explore connections between labs across campus. Record numbers were set for participation this year, and the day included 13 oral presentations and a poster session by 27 students.

The symposium highlighted the latest research from the program’s graduate student fellows, whose collective work addresses critical global changes impacting the environment and society. This includes problems surrounding climate change, pollution, invasive species, disease, and habitat loss.

Platform awards for Best Presentation were selected for the top three oral presentations. This year’s winners were:

First Place Ryan McClure, “Hypolimnetic oxygenation increases methane ebullition in a eutrophic drinking water reservoir”

Second Place Tamara Fetters, “A summary of my dissertation work on changes in physiology and life history in an invasive lizard”

Third Place Ernie Osburn, “Soil microbial response to Rhododendron maximum understory removal in Appalachian forests”

(Left to right) GCC Director, Bill Hopkins; IGC Fellows: Tamara Fetters, Ernie Osburn, Ryan McClure; IGC Director, Jeff Walters.

Kudos to all the student participants! Your work is truly inspiring, important and impactful to the Virginia Tech community and beyond. Thank you to the GCC Faculty and other researchers on campus who came out to show their support for the IGC Fellows!

See more photos from the Symposium on FLICKER

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Accolades Faculty Spotlight News Research

Geosciences’ Michelle Stocker seeks evolutionary story behind snake-like animals that use heads to burrow

Post author By jcoker
Post date April 13, 2018

From VT News

April 12, 2018 | Virginia Tech College of Science Assistant Professor Michelle Stocker is using a National Science Foundation grant to map the repeated evolution of similar head shapes among animals that use their head to dig into the ground.

During the multi-university study, Stocker and her team will examine what developmental and biomechanical properties led to a repeated evolution of body shape designed for burrowing. Stocker is part of the Department of Geosciences and is a member of Virginia Tech Global Change Center, part of the university’s Life Science Institute.

“The main goal of the project is to examine how and why we get the repeated evolution of similar head shapes in very distantly related animals from more than 400 million years ago to today,” Stocker said. “How and why convergence of body shape occurs is a fundamental evolutionary puzzle. We’re looking at how anatomy, development, relationships and ancestry, and biomechanics interplay to result in these shapes.”

The $77,000 project examines the anatomical, biomechanical, developmental, and natural selection pressures that have driven the evolution of limblessness and head-first burrowing in scores of animals across hundreds of different species.

Among the animals to be studied will be lizards, snakes, and caecilians that are alive, as well as fossils of extinct animals called microsaurs that have a similar shape. Stocker will use three-dimensional images from CT scans as well as bone material properties to study the anatomy and biomechanics of the skulls of these animals.

“Some species we’ll include have not had their skeletal morphology documented fully because the skeletons of living animals aren’t always examined when we have the ability to look at their color and the number of scales and types of teeth they have,” Stocker said.

Stocker said the final goal of the project really is to test predictions of ecomorphology — this animal looks like X so it must have done Y, without actually seeing it do any such thing — by quantifying the shapes.

“We’ll take the relationships we determine among form, function, and evolutionary constraints in living species and apply them to selected extinct, possibly head-first burrowing, species to test prior predictions of head-first burrowing made for those taxa across deep time,” she added.

Working with Stocker will be researchers at State University of New York at Oswego and Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Graduate and undergraduate student researchers from Virginia Tech also will be brought into the project with Stocker seeking help from those in geosciences, biological sciences, and computational modeling and data analytics, among other areas.

Virginia Tech researchers fill critical gap in fossil record of Chinese phytosaurs

Geoscience’s Michelle Stocker finds fossils of worm-lizard that lived 40 million years ago

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Accolades Faculty Spotlight Global Change News

Statistics’ Leah Johnson seeks to improve quantitative models for fighting diseases in humans, trees

Post author By jcoker
Post date April 11, 2018

From VT News

April 10, 2018 | Leah R. Johnson, an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics, part of the Virginia Tech College of Science, is using a $700,000 National Science Foundation CAREER grant to improve mathematical and statistical models to help fight deadly diseases.

The vector-borne diseases that Johnson is targeting include dengue in humans and huanglongbing, commonly known as citrus greening, in fruit trees. The dengue virus, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is spread by mosquitos and infects 400 million people per year, mostly in tropical and subtropical climates. Huanglongbing — translated as “yellow dragon disease” — is a bacterial infection of citrus trees spread by small insects that cause leaves to wilt and, as the name indicates, fruit to become discolored.

“I’ve been working on models for vector-borne diseases for a few years now, focusing on improving how we include environmental factors, such as temperature, into mechanistic models of disease spread,” said Johnson. “Mostly I’ve concentrated on expanding existing simple models and better incorporating sources of uncertainty.”

As part of her research, Johnson has been running a research collaboration network known as VectorBiTE, focusing on facilitating interactions between researchers in vector-borne diseases. She said the CAREER grant will allow her to take the effort further, both to improve the current models and start incorporating more detail and data.

“Infections such as dengue and Huanglongbing are data-rich, so we can test the models we develop against observations of transmission,” Johnson said.

The grant also will allow Johnson to partner with scientists at the Virginia Department of Health’s Division of Environmental Epidemiology to develop improved tools for forecasting, planning, surveillance, and control of vector-borne diseases while simultaneously improving quantitative training for public health workers focused on vector-borne infections.

She hopes the work with the grant will lead to more projects. “Part of the excitement of this kind of project is that you get to spend time thinking about the really novel and interesting questions in our fields,” she added.

“I’d like to keep thinking about how environment impacts transmission of vector-borne diseases, but expand into other infections and insects. I’m especially curious about tick-borne infections. Ticks have pretty complicated and long lifecycles, which makes building models for them more challenging, but I think it could be a lot of fun.”

Johnson is an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Biological Sciences and the Academy of Integrated Science’s Computational Modeling and Data Analytics program, all in the College of Science, and the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech, part of the university’s Fralin Life Science Institute.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from the College of William & Mary in 2001, and a master’s in physics in 2003 and doctoral degrees in applied mathematics and physics in 2006, all from the University of California Santa Cruz. Johnson joined Virginia Tech in 2016.

The CAREER grant is the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award, given to creative junior faculty considered likely to become academic leaders of the future. Johnson is one of three College of Science faculty to receive a CAREER Award thus far in 2018, with the other recipients being Guoliang “Greg” Liu and Nick Mayhall, both assistant professors in the Department of Chemistry.

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Conservation New Publications News Outreach

Personal outreach to landowners is vital to conservation program success

Post author By jcoker
Post date April 6, 2018

From VT News

April 5, 2018 | Virginia Tech College of Natural Resources and Environment research published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE shows that private landowners trust conservation agencies more and have better views of program outcomes when they accompany conservation biologists who are monitoring habitat management on their land.

Engaging private landowners in conservation and sustaining that interest is critically important, particularly in the eastern United States, where more than 80 percent of land is privately owned. Outreach from conservation professionals can connect private landowners with voluntary conservation programs, such as those administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and could also help keep landowners involved in conservation.

Federal conservation programs funded through the Farm Bill, such as Working Lands for Wildlife and the Regional Conservation Partnership Program, provide private landowners with financial and technical assistance to conduct conservation on their lands. Since 2012, efforts through these two programs have helped landowners create young forest habitat to benefit wildlife, such as the at-risk golden-winged warbler.

cnre-forestlandowners — Left to right: USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service District Conservationist Brad Michael and Emily Heggenstaller, a golden-winged warbler biologist, meet with private landowners Mike and Laura Jackson to discuss young forest habitat management on their property. Photo by Justin Fritscher.

According to lead author Seth Lutter, a master’s student in fish and wildlife conservation, the goal of the research was to understand how effective these habitat programs are from a social perspective. The researchers were interested in evaluating how outreach could influence landowners’ program experiences and possibly their future management for wildlife on their land.

Lutter worked with Ashley Dayer, assistant professor of human dimensions in Virginia Tech’s Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation, to survey landowners to supplement a wider NRCS Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) assessment. The CEAP assessment, led by Jeffery Larkin, professor of biology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and forest bird habitat coordinator with the American Bird Conservancy, evaluates the effectiveness of young forest management in creating quality habitat for the golden-winged warbler and other wildlife species.

The phone survey was conducted with a group of landowners who had participated in NRCS programs to manage young forest since 2012. These landowners had voluntarily allowed biological technicians onto their properties to monitor bird populations and vegetation regrowth as part of the assessment project. Some landowners accompanied these technicians on site visits, while many chose not to. In addition, some landowners received another form of outreach — personalized mailings that described the birds detected on the monitored property.

The survey investigated landowners’ experiences with the habitat program and what they thought the effects of management were for their land and its wildlife. The researchers then compared responses from landowners who had received additional outreach with those from landowners who had not.

Landowners who had accompanied technicians expressed higher trust of the agency and better perceptions of program outcomes. Meanwhile, the mailings contributed to increased landowner knowledge about birds, but did not improve landowner trust of the agency or perceptions of program outcomes.

These findings suggest that outreach, particularly in-person interactions, can have a significant effect on shaping landowner experiences with conservation programs. At a time when funding for agency outreach is tight, these results are particularly important.

“This study shows the value of investing in face-to-face interactions and relationship building,” Lutter explained. “Further, the results show an important and unexpected role that biological monitoring technicians can play in building landowner trust with the agency delivering conservation programs.”

Dayer and Lutter hope their results will help agencies like NRCS focus their efforts on effective outreach strategies, including training technicians and field staff on landowner interactions, encouraging site visits, and providing feedback to landowners on management outcomes.

“This study gives NRCS a unique perspective on how landowners perceive the conservation planning help we provide them to manage sustainable working lands and emphasizes the importance of including landowners when assessing outcomes of conservation efforts,” said Charlie Rewa, the NRCS biologist coordinating CEAP’s wildlife component.

Dayer added, “Private landowners are critical to the health of our nation’s wildlife populations. Ensuring that conservation programs are designed and delivered in a way that works for landowners and fosters their continued interest in conservation is essential.”

Moving forward, Lutter and Dayer will further explore the experiences of landowners in programs to manage young forest in an effort to understand what causes some of them to manage habitat after incentives from conservation programs have ended. This research will build on a literature review about management persistence after conservation programs that Dayer and Lutter published last year.

Dayer, who is affiliated with the Global Change Center housed in Virginia Tech’s Fralin Life Science Institute, will also follow up on this study’s findings with research into the effects of outreach in the context of biological monitoring for eastern hellbender salamanders in Southwest Virginia.

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Accolades Interfaces of Global Change IGEP News Outreach Student Spotlight

GCC Fellow Fadoua El Moustaid is recognized for her service as a Citizen Scholar

Post author By jcoker
Post date April 5, 2018

From VT News

April 4, 2018 | Each year, the Graduate School offers a challenge to graduate students: Create and implement a project that connects your research with a community.

Students who accept the challenge and develop such projects are recognized as Citizen Scholars. The Graduate School offers a Citizen Scholar course each year to help students fulfill this goal, but students can be nominated for recognition by their programs.

“I consider the Citizen Scholar program to be an example of the outreach and service exemplified by Virginia Tech’s land-grant mission, as well as an informing students’ research,” said Vice President and Dean for Graduate Education Karen P. DePauw. “It is an example of what we call ‘the public good’ and helps build strong links between the community and the university.”

Associate Dean and Professor William Huckle, who taught the Citizen Scholar course, said the projects were excellent examples of linking work to the needs of a greater community. “What has impressed me the most is the enthusiasm and passion they brought to their work,” Huckle said.

This year the Graduate School saluted six graduate students who completed community-focused projects. Megan A. Lorincz, Joanna Papadopoulos, Fadoua El Moustaid, Nicole Hersch, Sarah Bush, and Shelby Ward were recognized during Graduate Education Week for their work.

El Moustaid, of Marrakesh, Morocco, is a Ph.D. student in biological sciences. She mentored an undergraduate student using computer modeling to track disease and helped the student develop biological models to study the transmission process of West Nile Virus.

“We met once a week to go over what he learned together and I explained to him the mathematical and statistical methods he needed to develop a model,” she said. That effort led to a new mentorship project with two undergraduate students.

“Coming from a quantitative background myself, I understand their struggle and what they need to succeed and hopefully pursue a graduate degree,” she said.

Megan A. Lorincz, Joanna Papadopoulos, and Fadoua El Moustaid were recognized as Citizen Scholars by the Graduate School.

Click here to read the full article.

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