UW-Madison Biology

09/17/2026

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Daijiang Li for earning an NSF Career award to study urban biodiversity! The award will support Li's efforts to create an open access database of biodiversity in cities around the world.

"With increasingly available community science-based datasets, now is a really good time to build the pipeline and assemble this information in a central database,” Li says. “Biodiversity provides lots of essential ecological services to us, so it’s really critical to understand the status of urban biodiversity and also try to forecast how things are going to change in the future.”

09/15/2026

What’s your favorite Bascom Hill shortcut? (And why is it through the Botany Garden!)

09/08/2026

🐟Fisheries management is about more than just the fish. 🎣🚣

According to Zach Feiner, angler behavior can be harder to predict than the behavior of the fish. The new faculty member, alumnus and Wisconsin native strives to produce research that benefits the state’s ecosystems and communities alike.

Read more: https://biology.wisc.edu/2026/09/03/faculty-qa-zach-feiner-studies-fisheries-to-sustain-them-for-both-anglers-and-the-ecosystem/

09/03/2026

Professors Ken Cameron and Anne Pringle are featured in On Wisconsin's "Mighty Mycology" article! Give it a read! https://onwisconsin.uwalumni.com/mighty-mycology/

Welcome to our fall issue! See why University of Wisconsin-Madison football is poised to bounce back; join us on the best campus walks; test your Badger knowledge with 10 real Jeopardy! questions; learn how UW fungal researchers are improving our lives; master the ABCs of crypto; and meet bestselling author Chloe Benjamin. Click https://onwisconsin.uwalumni.com/

08/24/2026

More energy, less competition 🌾🍚🥣🧬💪

Researchers University of Wisconsin-Madison and their collaborators discovered grasses evolved additional, more efficient pathways to create starch and lignin, giving them an evolutionary “leg up” to become some of the most dominant plants in nature and agriculture.

Learn more:

Words: Elise Mahon | Photos: Sarah Friedrich One hundred million years ago, long before human intervention, ancestors of grasses, like wheat, rice and maize generated “bypasses” of chemical pathways that are used to create two critical compounds: lignin and starch. These more efficient pathways ...

08/19/2026

“You can’t conserve anything if you don’t know how to describe and name them.” 🌱🧬

Nisa Karimi (Botany PhD ‘18), Professor David Baum, and their collaborators have discovered a 9th species of Baobab through intense fieldwork in Madagascar and diligent genetic analysis back in the lab at UW–Madison.

Learn more about how their discovery could have implications for conservation of the charismatic but endangered tree.

🔗Read the full story https://biology.wisc.edu/2026/08/17/research-differentiates-new-species-of-endangered-baobab-tree-in-madagascar/

08/13/2026

Just a few weeks left of Summer and we can't wait to have you back on campus! ☀See you soon, Badgers!🦡

(Photos by Taylor Wolfram/UW–Madison)

08/06/2026

Deserts ≠ Wastelands
Assistant Professor Kristina Young specializes in ecology and land management in arid and semi-arid regions. She knows that just because an area is dry doesn't mean it's lacking life, that life just looks different.
Learn more about her research on these under-studied and often under-appreciated places.
https://biology.wisc.edu/2026/08/06/faculty-qa-kristina-young/

07/31/2026

Congratulations to Nathan Kiel (PhD IBio '24), Eileen Mavencamp ('23) and Professor Monica Turner!
These researchers have been awarded the W.S. Cooper Award for Outstanding Contributions in the Fields of Geobotany and/or Physiographic Ecology for their paper, “Sparse subalpine forest recovery pathways, plant communities, and carbon stocks 34 years after stand-replacing fire". The paper emphasizes that post-fire forest resilience is variable and increasingly uncertain under changing climate and fire regimes, with long-term consequences for ecosystem structure and function.

A paper by Nathan Kiel (PhD iBio ’24), undergraduate student Eileen Mavencamp (’23), and Professor Monica Turner has been awarded the W.S. Cooper Award for Outstanding Contributions in the Fields of Geobotany and/or Physiographic Ecology. Their paper, “Sparse subalpine forest recovery pathways...