The Department of Crop Sciences honored D.K. Lee as the Jack A. and Marjorie S.

When Danika Ford learned about the environmental impacts of fast fashion in high school, she started looking for college programs combining traditional environmental science with social science to understand how human motivations, behaviors, and policies affect environmental problems and solutions. 

Midwestern soils are among the most productive in the world, thanks in part to extensive tile drainage systems that remove excess water from crop fields. But water isn’t the only thing flowing through tile drains. Nitrogen moves along with soil water into drainage ditches, streams, and ultimately into the Mississippi River Basin, where the nutrient contributes to massive algal blooms and hypoxic conditions that impact aquatic life in the Gulf of Mexico. 

Elephant conservation is a major priority in southern Africa, but habitat loss and urbanization mean the far-ranging pachyderms are increasingly restricted to protected areas like game reserves. The risk? Contained populations could become genetically isolated over time, making elephants more vulnerable to disease and environmental change. 

Illinois has made transitioning to clean energy a major priority in recent years with the passage of the Future Energy Jobs Act (FEJA) in 2016 and the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA) in 2021. Both pieces of legislation prioritize an equitable transition, aiming to avoid and address historical wrongdoings associated with environmental injustice. 

Among the snowbirds returning north for the summer, A24 is special. For one thing, A24 is an actual bird: a Black-crowned night heron, to be exact. And it has just returned to Chicago to join hundreds of its kind nesting near Lake Michigan. But unlike the human snowbirds that share A24’s migratory habits, this bird is helping to inform conservation efforts in the city and far beyond. 

This April, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign students were among 25 teams participating in the National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest hosted by Iowa State University near Ames, Iowa. The Illinois team earned first place in the team-judging category and 13th in the competition overall.

A group of 150 Illinois Conservation Police Officers (CPO) gathered in Decatur for a hands-on workshop on aquatic invasive species (AIS) during their annual meeting this spring.

Today, the Walder Foundation of Chicago announced the recipients of its 2024 Biota Awards, recognizing early-career researchers working to understand, protect, and restore the unique and diverse ecosystems in Chicago and around the world.

As greenhouse gases go, nitrous oxide (N2O) is a doozy. With a global warming potential 273 times that of carbon dioxide, mitigating N2O could make a big difference. But before mitigation can happen, it’s important to understand where the compound is coming from.