It’s beginning to look a lot like the end of the year, and that means we’re looking back at some of the stories that shaped the Center for Limnology in 2017. It was a year of many changes, retirements, exciting research and well-deserved awards. You can read (and download) the entire newsletter in a PDF format here, or read below for some highlights.
Steve Carpenter Retires from CFL
Steve Carpenter, director of the CFL and Stephen Alfred Forbes professor of Integrative Biology (Zoology), retired after 28 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Widely recognized as one of the world’s most influential researchers in the fields of limnology and ecosystem science, Carpenter leaves a legacy that will endure not just here at the CFL, but throughout the ecological sciences and in lakes, rivers and streams across Wisconsin and the globe.“If you went to any freshwater research institute in the world,” says Jake Vander Zanden, new director of the CFL, “and asked the researchers there who the leading scientist was in their field, they would all say ‘Steve Carpenter.’ Steve helped change not only the way we study freshwater systems, but also how we manage them and work to conserve them.” Read more ->
Madison in Bloom: CFL Helps Get Algae on the Front Page
June 16th was a hot, sunny Friday in Madison and Steve Carpenter couldn’t believe the view from second-floor perch in the HaslerLaboratory for Limnology. West to the UW-Madison Rowing team’s boathouse and east all the way to James Madison Park, the calm waters of Lake Mendota looked just like teal-blue paint. The massive bloom of toxic blue-green algae was “the worst one I’ve seen in a long time,” says Carpenter, recently retired director of the CFL. In fact, the bloom was the largest to mar Mendota’s shoreline since the summers of 1993 and 1994. Read more ->
The Power of a Picture
Through my summer spent trying to tell the wider world what it is we do here, I learned that understanding the language of science is not much different than understanding Chinese, German, French or English. It requires translation through metaphor, visuals and humanization. Sixty-five percent of us are visual learners. I don’t remember anyone in my third grade class who objected to our science teacher popping a Bill Nye the Science Guy video into the VCR and pleaded with her to read “Chapter Eight: Plate Tectonics” instead.Why? Because visuals—whether moving or still—transport us to the content of that image and increase our engagement with and enjoyment of it. Read more ->
Read the Newsletter in its entirety here: http://blog.limnology.wisc.edu/2017-newsletter-year-of-changes-at-the-cfl/