The Nelson Institute Blog

Congratulations to Sarah Olsen (Environment and Resources and Population Health Sciences PhD with Jon Foley and Jonathan Patz)! She recently won one of two US - International Association of Landscape Ecology Best Student Paper Awards. The award includes a $500 prize.

Sarah won for her presentation titled “Malaria Patterns and Hydrology in the Amazon - Will Land Use and Cover Changes Alter Risk?” She presented the paper at the 2008 US-IALE Student Paper Competition in Madison.

Last Thursday, June 19, the Dane County Lakes and Watershed Commission honored its 2008 Dane County Waters Champion Award recipients at a reception downtown. These awards are given annually in recognition of individuals, organizations, businesses, and youth that have made outstanding contributions towards the protection and improvement of Dane County’s water resources. This year’s awards included two individual awards and one award to an organization. Among the recipients were two of our own: Student Services Program Manager Emerita, Barbara Borns, and Land Resources alumna, Carolyn Betz. Both were honored with individual Waters Champion Awards. The third award was made to the Mad-City Ski Team, which has been instrumental in raising significant funds for maintaining and improving some of Dane County’s lakes.

We know Barbara as our former (now retired) graduate advisor in the Academic Programs Office. But overlapping that work has been her many years of effort toward restoring and protecting the Black Earth Watershed. For the past seven years Barbara has served as President of the Black Earth Watershed Association (BECWA). In her work with BECWA Barbara has been very involved in all phases of the association’s work, from organizing public awareness days and watershed clean-up events to publishing informational materials and working with local schools on education efforts. In particular, she has been instrumental in bringing together all interested constituencies through her advocacy of “good neighbor” meetings throughout the watershed.

The second recipient of an individual award is also a long-time supporter of the Nelson Institute. Carolyn Rumery Betz received her M.S. degree from our Land Resources program in 1983. After graduation she served as a Sea Grant Fellow, assisting the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology with hearings related to water and agricultural issues. Following that appointment she work for 23 years in the Bureau of Watershed Management of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, specializing in lake management and nonpoint source pollution control programs. This year she accepted a position with the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she has joined the UW Aquatic Sciences Center as a Science Writer.

Congratulations, Barbara and Carolyn!

The Nelson Institute community is very saddened by the news that Emeritus Professor Reid Bryson died Wednesday at his home in Madison. He was 88. (Read UW news release.)

Reid played a crucial role in the early years of the institute, first serving on a faculty committee in the 1960s that recommended its creation, then as its founding director from 1970 until his retirement in 1985.

Trained as a meteorologist, he was an early and fervent advocate of interdisciplinary teaching and research - a hallmark of the Nelson Institute. His own scholarship ranged across the fields of limnology, meteorology, climatology, archaeology, and geography, in which he wrote or co-authored five books and more than 260 other publications during an academic career that spanned six decades.

His tenure at the helm of the Nelson Institute - then called the Institute for Environmental Studies (IES) - followed professional achievements that included establishment of UW-Madison’s Department of Meteorology (now Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences) in 1948 and of the Center for Climatic Research (CCR) in 1962.

On accepting his appointment as head of IES in 1970, Reid charted an ambitious course. “The institute is Wisconsin’s answer to the call for a Survival U,” he said. “I hope to make it the best of its kind in the country.”

Thirty-eight years later, the Nelson Institute carries on his deep commitment to interdisciplinary studies.

We offer our sincere condolences to Reid’s wife, Frances, and to the rest of his family. A memorial service for Reid will be held at a future date.

Each of the three active graduate programs and the undergraduate certificate program committees met this spring, below is a link to each program’s minutes. For a list of the program committees, please see our Committees of the Institute web page.

Graduate Programs

• Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development: May 16, 2008
• Environment and Resources: April 10, 2008
• Water Resources Management: May 8, 2008

If you have any questions regarding the minutes or the meetings of the graduate programs, please contact Jim Miller (263-4373).

Undergraduate Program

• Undergraduate Certificate: May 7, 2008

If you have any questions regarding the minutes of the meeting of the undergraduate committee, please contact Mary Mercier (262-7520).

There’s still time to propose presentations for the second international EcoHealth forum, to be held December 1-5 in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico.� The abstract submission deadline has been extended to June 30.

Mexico’s National Institute for Public Health will host the gathering, which will highlight the connections between ecology and human health.� Student scholarships and travel assistance are available.

Nearly 300 human and wildlife health experts, ecologists, conservation biologists, and social scientists convened at the first EcoHealth forum two years ago in Madison. Nelson Institute associate professor Jonathan Patz, who chaired that meeting, is again on the steering committee for this winter’s conference.� Patz is president of the International Association for Ecology & Health.