Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative

In the US, science and sustainability has had a rough year. We've seen alt-facts, skinny budgets, climate denying administrators, and now withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. As I said on Twitter yesterday and today, the most mind-boggling part of yesterday's...

This is the talk that I gave at the 2015 Ecological Society of America Annual meeting in Baltimore, MD. (Will add images/graphs soon.) Thank you to Jesse Lasky for including me in the special session he organized, The Effects of...

This blog was originally written for Leopold Leadership 3.0. A bit more than a year ago, my lab and I spent a day trying to figure out who we were and what we were about…

The National Science Foundation requires that all grant recipients submit annual and final reports. I just submitted a final report for our grant, "Assessing temperature-related changes in introgression of hybridizing species across space and time." In the spirit of promoting the...

The following came up after my presentation, "What is global warming?" to 5th and 6th graders at the Stanley Clark School, South Bend, IN. Thanks to the students for being so attentive and for their great follow-up questions!   1....

On April 30, COMPASS published a commentary a paper in PLOS Biology on the journey from science outreach to meaningful engagement. This post is part of a series of reactions, reflections, and personal experiences to expand the conversation. Track the conversation by reading...

I delivered the following comments today as a reply to a conference presentation by Ken Miller (Brown University). Maybe these comments will stimulate thinking by others on the topic of science and public outreach. I'm not a scholar in this area, but...

A group of Leopold Leadership Fellows are presenting at the AAAS meeting in Boston, February, 2013. We are looking to engage conversation on our general session topic and specifically on time-effective methods of engaging in environmental outreach (Hellmann & Williams below). Join...

A while back I posted about writing a mission or vision statement for one's research lab and the idea was picked up by Nature magazine. I argued that universities and business do it, even centers and institutes. So why not a research...

I delivered the following lecture on Saturday, Nov. 10 to competitors at the Siemens science, math, and technology regional competition at the University of Notre Dame. Siemens competitors at high school students but my main points--that love of nature, sense...

Climate change will present new challenges to achieving ecosystem conservation and sound management of natural resources. Thanks to climate change, some species will increase, others will decrease, and the productivity of ecosystems will shift in ways that are difficult to...

March in the Midwest and East US was very warm, usually so. Chicago experienced 8 days over 80 degrees, when there is usually only one day over 80 degrees in April. Unofficial reports suggested that spring flowers and leaf flush...

LiveScience, in collaboration with the National Science Foundation, is running a really interesting series that profiles scientists, what they do and why, and how they got to their position today. You can find all of the ScienceLives entries here. I think that Sally Otto…

A study by Caroline Williams and Brent Sinclair of the University of Western Ontario, together with the Hellmann lab, was just published in PLoS One. The paper reports our findings that winter warming negatively affects overwintering butterflies by increasing their...

My lab and I recently participated in an exercise that I think might be worthwhile for most science groups. We—grad students, undergrads, postdocs, and research staff—sat down at a recent retreat and brainstormed about who we were and what we...

This week the University of Notre Dame made a public commitment to control its emissions of greenhouse gases (as well as reduce water use and trash generation). The article announcing the plan to the university community can be found here…

I've been frantically working on a paper for which I am suffering some significant writers block. So today I defer to an interesting blog post by Rob Socolow (Princeton University) on Climatecentral.org where he talks about a paper that he...

Mark Lynas's "Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet" has re-calibrated climate change for me. And that's saying a lot because I think about this stuff pretty much all of the time. I've just finished reading Six Degrees (though...

Just found this blog post by Joe Romm, and it seems very interesting.  I hope to write on this idea sometime in the near future as related to adaptation for nature/wildlife.  In the meantime, I suggest checking it out: Real...

I am at the Steve Schneider memorial symposium and am tweeting about a number of very interesting talks. In putting my own talk together, “Integrative climate science for this century: in training and practice,” I've been thinking about interdisciplinarity and...

There is a growing scientific literature about the role that humans might play in helping species move to new locations under climate change.  Colleagues and I first wrote about the idea in 2007 in an article in Conservation Biology called,...

I've been spending some time recently with colleagues in English and Sociology (John Sitter and Andy Weigert). We are creating a minor in sustainability--an entirely new entity for my university--and a new introductory course for students in this field. We're...