Mud layers trapped within stalagmites from caves in a variety of environmental settings have been interpreted as flood deposits.  Here we present a combined petrographic and isotopic analysis of one glacial-age stalagmite, AUS-118 from Cape Range, coastal Western Australia.  Stalagmite AUS-118 was thin sectioned and visually inspected and 121 mud layers were identified.  The distance of each layer was measured from the bottom of the stalagmite.  Read More…

During the summer of 2011, I spent three weeks in Provence, France, traveling with a group of students seeking to understand the connections between people and the terrain in this country so famous for its cuisine. From bustling marketplaces to vast swaying lavender fields, we explored many different centers of regional agriculture and spoke to some very passionate individuals about the work that they do. Read More…

 We quantified home range size and movements of hatchling and juvenile ornate box turtles (Terrapene ornata ornata) at Hawkeye Wildlife Area, Iowa, during the summer of 2011.  Ten hatchlings and juveniles were followed using radio telemetry from May through July. Read More…

The ornate box turtle, Terrapene ornata ornata, displays significant sexual dimorphism. Males generally have thicker and longer tails, modified hind toes, a concave plastron, more muscular hind legs, and vividly red or orange irises and antebrachial scales, as opposed to the pale yellows and browns of juveniles and females (Legler, 1960). Read More…

Approximately one third of the global population lives in the area affected by the Indo-Australian monsoon. Understanding the variability and dynamics of Australian monsoon rainfall, especially in response to global climate change, is of critical importance. Research in Borneo and Indonesia has demonstrated that the strength of the Indo-Australian monsoon is tied to millennial-scale climate anomalies originating in the North Atlantic.  Read More…

Our ability to understand multi-decadal to centennial-scale trends in tropical cyclone activity is limited by the short duration of, and limitations in, historical records. In order to extend these records for tropical Western Australia, we have analyzed mud layers in stalagmite KNI-51-11 from the Kimberley region of north-central Australia that appear to be formed by cyclone-induced flooding.  KNI-51-11 grew over the last 250 years and contains 39 mud layers. Read More…

Mining, even with modern precautions, puts the world’s delicately balanced biosphere in peril. While staying in the Province of Azuay, Ecuador, I witnessed firsthand the people’s resistance against the Canadian mining company “IAMGOLD” that is currently in the preliminary process of exploitation at the source of the community’s water system. Read More…

Few paleoclimate records preserve high-resolution information for the middle Holocene in (near) coastal Portugal, but this region contains many caves within a few kilometers of the coast.  In addition, shells of shallow marine invertebrates record sea surface conditions and some of these were harvested and preserved in archaeological middens. Read More…

Ecological health depends on a wide diversity of all life forms. The greater the biodiversity the more opportunities there are for adaptive responses to environmental challenges such as climate change and economic development.  Loss in biodiversity may limit medical and pharmacological discoveries.  Biodiversity-rich ecosystems are more resilient and boost ecosystem productivity. Read More…

Coral colony orientation data obtained from Late Pleistocene reef coral assemblages preserved on Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, Great Inagua and San Salvador Islands, Bahamas, indicates that the same gradient in hurricane frequency observed today also was present during Late Pleistocene time. We conduct an independent test of this hypothesis by examining the successional patterns exhibited by epibionts that grew on coral colonies during a distinct reef-building event that is spectacularly preserved in the upper Hato Unit of the Lower Terrace Limestone, exposed on Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles. Read More…

Recent studies from Borneo and Indonesia have increased our understanding of the evolution of the Indonesian-Australian Summer Monsoon (InAuSM) system over the past 10,000 years (the Holocene epoch).  However, little is known about the InAuSM in Australia or at centennial time-scales. Read More…

Biological control of plant pathogens has steadily grown in popularity over the past several decades as an alternative to the use of pesticides which negatively affects the environment. A problem in the use of biocontrol agents is the unpredictability of interactions they face once introduced to the soil, some of which impair the production of antibiotic and antifungal compounds. Read More…

Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) is a technique that combines gas-liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry to characterize substances within a sample. We first used this technique to analyze turtle nest volatiles to determine if turtle nest predators use olfactory cues to find nest sites. Read More…

As global climate change persists, anthropogenic impacts will continue to exacerbate current environmental degradation, particularly to coral reef ecosystems. To mitigate this critical situation, coral reef conservation efforts have focused on the development of effective marine protected areas (MPAs). However, successful ecological conservation and restoration require an understanding of previous community states – unaffected by anthropogenic impacts – to serve as a basis for comparison. Read More…

Gurania bignoniacea and Gurania acuminata are two species of flowering vines in the cucurbit family native to tropical South America. Although each is currently considered to be a single species with widespread geographic distribution, these two names encompass more than 20 historical species epithets applied to type specimens collected across the continent. Read More…

Flies of the genus Blepharoneura, found throughout South America, are highly diverse and highly specific to the plant species they infest. The flies are parasitized by wasps, called “parasitoids” because the wasps kill their hosts (the flies). If the wasps themselves exhibit high degrees of host specificity, they may have influenced the high degree of speciation exhibited by the fly species. Read More…

Benthic marine faunas are currently experiencing rapid shifts in community structure which are already having deleterious effects on marine ecosystems. Since many systematic surveys of marine communities occurred after those communities had been disturbed, our knowledge of “what is natural” is incomplete: a phenomenon that has been termed the “shifting baseline syndrome.” Read More…

We examined the distribution and fates of natural nests of ornate box turtles (Terrapene ornata) in the Hawkeye Wildlife Area, Johnson County, Iowa. Read More…

A 152 cm tall stalagmite (KIM1) was collected from the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)-sensitive and monsoon-dominated Kimberly region of northwestern Australia. Read More…

Two morphologies of Millepora, currently classified as separate species, exist off the coast of the Bahamas. Read More…

Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of organisms to change their phenotype in order to adapt to their environment. Read More…

Nest predation is an important source of mortality in turtles. We have been studying nest predation on ornate box turtles (Terrapene ornata) for several years at Hawkeye Wildlife Area, Johnson County. Iowa. Read More…

Last summer we expanded on the ongoing project of the Physics Department of developing, fabricating, and testing Dye Sensitized Solar Cells (DSSCs). Read More…

Female turtles are capable of storing sperm from multiple males, potentially enabling offspring from a single clutch to be fathered by several males. Read More…

For the better part of thirty years, a mining project near Crandon, Wisconsin, was pursued by multi-national corporations. A struggle to permanently block mining there intensified during the last decade of the 20th century.In 2002, the project was finally closed when the site was purchased by a coalition of Native American Tribes. Read More…

When discussing the issues surrounding current global warming, is not uncommon to hear people bring up the so-called “Medieval Warm Period.” Such conversations are littered with debates about what the Medieval Warm Period actually was, how it impacted the world of the Middle Ages, and what an accurate comprehension of it could mean for our future. Read More…

Diversification of phytophagous insects is often associated with changes in the use of host taxa and host parts. We focus on a group of newly discovered neotropical tephritids in the genus Blepharoneura and report the discovery of an extraordinary number of sympatric, morphologically cryptic species all feeding as larvae on calyces of flowers of a single functionally dioecious and highly sexually dimorphic host species (Gurania spinulosa) in eastern Ecuador. Read More…

Biodiversity is partly dependent on the availability of resources and competition for those resources. Competition can potentially exclude weaker species, thus decreasing diversity. Read More…

Over an eight year period four beaches on San Salvador Island, Bahamas have been monitored with respect to their dynamic erosion and depositional processes. Read More…

We used Island Biogeography Theory (IBT) to generate predictions of the number of tree species found on islands in lakes of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Read More…

Do unplowed areas of remnant tallgrass prairie offer the best examples of unaltered or “natural” prairie systems? Remnants that are on floodplains may show evidence of human alteration even though the area has never been plowed or intentionally altered. Read More…

Constituent particle analyses have been applied to many different sedimentary environments, especially in the Bahamas and the Caribbean, but have rarely been used in analyzing sediments from Western Australia. Read More…

Aquatic Environmental Chemistry is the study of sources, reactions, transport, and fate of chemical entities in water, as well as their effects on human health and the natural environment. Read More…

Iowa history is rarely viewed as exciting, and is often overlooked in textbooks. Moreover, relatively few Iowans are unaware of the countless abandoned towns that litter the prairie landscape. Read More…

This short story, After Chicago, was written in the Superior National Forest of Northern Minnesota during Cornell’s Wilderness Term in September, 2005. Read More…

Modern epibionts foul, or encrust, host organisms. Ancient epibionts are informative because they are fossilized in life position, preserving interactions between epibionts and hosts. Read More…

The goal of this project was to use a Geographic Information System (GIS) to locate areas within Linn County , Iowa for prairie restoration and preservation. Read More…

The Rhinoceros family, Family Rhinoceratidae, was once one of the most successful and diverse mammal families in the world. Read More…

Surveys of windward and leeward patch reefs adjacent to San Salvador Island, Bahamas, and Belize, Central America, were completed prior to and after significant environmental disturbances; a severe El Nino event (1998) followed closely by a major hurricane disturbance (Hurricanes Floyd and Mitch, respectively). Read More…

The Linwood Mine, located in Scott County, Iowa, contains a variety of interesting mineralization. Read More…

The Linwood Mine, located in Scott County, Iowa, contains a variety of interesting mineralization. Read More…

Scientists interested in global climate change have increasingly turned to proxy climate records provided by stable isotopic and elemental analyses of massive coral skeletons. Read More…

Numerous species of fishes from multiple orders produce and recognize chemical alarm signals. In Ostariophysan fishes, the alarm substance originates in epidermal cells and is released when their skin is damaged. Read More…

Although two species of the fire coral Millepora are recognized in the tropical western Atlantic, colonies of this hydrozoan exhibit extensive variation in their morphologies. The purpose of this study is to determine whether selected colony morphotypes are matched by genetic isolation. Read More…

Globally, coral reefs appear to be suffering from a combination of anthropogenic and natural disturbances. Read More…

As human activity alters the natural environment, the environmental suitability for supporting some forms of life is reduced, while its ability to support other forms is enhanced. Read More…

I performed a brief comparative study of foraging versus construction uses of different species of trees and shrubbery found upon beaver lodges in the Boundary Waters Conservation Area. Read More…

Two species of the Bahamian “fire coral,” Millepora complanata and Millepora alcicornis, exhibit four morphologies: fully encrusting, encrusting and upright branching, upright bladed, and upright branching blades. Read More…

abstract: The Cornell campus mapping project was my most resent research project. The purpose of this project was 1) to create a 2-dimensional map of the Cornell College campus, 2) to create a 3-dimensional map of the campus, and 3) to create a multi-layered 2-D and possibly 3-dimensional historical map of the Cornell College campus. Read More…

Estuarine areas are important ecological and geological systems worldwide. Estuaries store and provide nutrients for a diverse coastal ecosystem, naturally treat waters and sediments and remove pollutants and toxins through biological, physical, and chemical processes. Their sheltered and navigable waters, along with a unique setting, make estuarine areas an attractive place for development by humans. Landscape alteration associated with development is the most common stress on estuarine systems and has led to contamination and pollution of many estuaries in the United States. One area in which extreme urbanization has had deleterious effects on estuaries is southwest Florida, one of the fastest growing areas in the country.

Rapid urban and suburban growth in southwest Florida has stressed the water supply and altered the natural drainage of the land as water is diverted to prevent flooding of newly urbanized areas. By altering natural conditions and water quality within estuaries, humans may be altering the ecosystems they support. The purpose of this study is to assess whether such changes have occurred by comparing mollusk populations in a pristine and altered estuary near Naples, Florida.

Analysis of infaunal molluscan death assemblages reveals that community distribution patterns vary between pristine and altered estuaries. The altered estuary appears to have stronger gradient in infaunal benthic communities than the pristine estuary, suggesting that pre-alteration community composition is more homogeneous. Strong stratification of salinity in the altered estuary compared to a very weak stratification in the pristine estuary suggests alteration of groundwater flow is responsible. Studies of benthic molluscan communities are useful in establishing ecological baseline data for estuarine management.

Jessica Wilkening, ’00 Brooklyn, WI
Majors: Geology and Environmental Studies

Sponsor: Benjamin Greenstein