URBANA, Ill. –The Illinois Neurodiversity Initiative (INI) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has received a major, five-year grant from State Farm to help fund the program, which provides academic and social support for students with autism and helps them prepare for the workplace and connect with potential employers.

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS – No matter how many times I do this, I always get nervous. I am demonstrating the proper use of a chainsaw to fell a tree and I want it to go well. After choosing the right tree, a medium-sized box elder, I walk through the steps out loud so that everyone in the class can hear me: One must assess any hazards, determine which way the tree is leaning and whether it might be rotten in the middle, find a safe escape route for when the tree starts falling.

URBANA, Ill. – Land conservation projects do more than preserve open space and natural ecosystems. They can also boost property values for homeowners living nearby. But a new study finds that those financial benefits are unequally distributed among demographic groups in the U.S.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Lauren Karplus, experiential learning coordinator and academic advisor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, is one of sixteen academic professionals and civil service staff members to be honored with the inaugural Chancellor’s Staff Excellence Award recognizing exceptional performance at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

Over the past few decades, it has become obvious that climate change, and consequent extreme weather events, can wreak havoc on crop yields. Concerningly, there is a large disparity in agricultural vulnerability between developed and developing countries. In a new study, researchers have looked at major food grains in India to understand the long- and short-term effects of climate change on crop yields.

The Center for Digital Agriculture will lead an on-site Research Experience for Undergraduates program titled “Drivers for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Practices (MAPs).”

URBANA, Ill. – As Corn Belt states seek ways to curb nitrogen flow from farms into the Gulf of Mexico, new University of Illinois research adds evidence for winter cover crops as an important part of the solution. A simulation study published in Science of the Total Environment finds widespread planting of cereal rye in Illinois could reduce nitrate in the state’s tile drainage water by 30%.

URBANA, Ill. – In 1876, when University of Illinois professor Manly Miles established the Morrow Plots, he couldn’t have imagined the plots would become the oldest continuous agricultural experiment in the Western Hemisphere. Nor could he imagine, more than a century before the dawn of the internet, that the plots’ data would be digitized and made available online to scientists, students, and educators around the world.