News and Events

Kipling Klimas inspects a forest after a 5,000 acre wildfire in Utah’s Uinta mountains.
A dedicated member of Sewanee’s swim team, Kipling Klimas (C ‘18) graduated with a B.S. in Ecology and Biodiversity. In May, Kipling finished his M.S. in Forest Resources at Clemson University, and his research on the impact of prescribed fire on water quality is featured here. Kipling is now studying Fire Ecology as a doctoral student at Utah State University. In the short time since his graduation from Sewanee, Kipling is first author on three publications in the journals Fire, Journal of Environmental Quality and Fire and Fuels Management. Congratulations Kipling, your research is on fire!

Sewanee’s corpse plant (Amorphophallus titanum), a “rock star” of the botanical world, according to Herbarium Director and Professor Jon Evans, bloomed on July 4 in the Webb greenhouse. Check out this article in the Tennessean about Sewanee celebrating first bloom of giant stinky 'corpse flower'

Eric Keen and co-authors published an article in Wildlife Research entitled, “Determining marine mammal detection functions from a land-based survey site”, drawing on field observations that Sewanee students helped collect in 2018 and 2019 (Molly Mueller, C’18, Katie Hall, C’18, Julia Wren, C’19). 

Ken Smith was interviewed by Southern Living about fall leaf colors in Sewanee, and he was also one of several department heads and deans interviewed by the Forest Landowner magazine to address how COVID was affecting forestry and natural resource programs across the US.

Dr. Max Dahlquist comes to Sewanee following a postdoc at UNC-Charlotte studying the physical breakdown of rocks via environmental stresses. He will be teaching courses in Sedimentology, Physical Geology, Geomorphology, and Field and Structural Geology this semester. His research focuses on the evolution of the Earth's surface in response to tectonic, climatic, and anthropogenic stresses. Locally, he is looking forward to studying ongoing erosion into the Cumberland plateau, specifically the headward progress of coves surrounding the Domain. Outside the classroom and lab, Max and his wife Meryn are engaged in the lifelong project of raising their 2-year-old son Rookh and 4-month-old daughter Selah.

Dr. Katharine Wilkinson (C’05 and Sewanee’s 25th Rhodes Scholar) joins our faculty this fall as a visiting professor in Religious Studies. She is editor-in-chief at the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown and co-founder of The All We Can Save Project in support of women’s climate leadership. Her writings include The Drawdown Review, the New York Times bestseller Drawdown, and Between God & Green. She is co-editor of the new book All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, recently highlighted in the Washington Post. In 2019, Time magazine named her one of 15 “women who will save the world.” This semester, she is teaching a seminar course on “The Call of Climate.”

Eric Keen published the essay, “Why are blue whales so gigantic?”, in Scientific American. In this article, he draws on the latest findings in whale energetics, paleo-oceanography, and marine foraging ecology to synthesize a framework for understanding how blue whales came to be so much larger than any other animal species ever.

Dr. Benjamin Mangrum joins the Sewanee community as an Assistant Professor in the English Department, where he will offer courses on modern and contemporary American fiction. One of his primary areas of teaching and research within this field is the intersection of literature and the environment, especially regarding issues of environmental justice. This fall he will offer a course on race and the environment in modern American fiction. Before joining Sewanee, Ben held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Michigan Society of Fellows; prior to that, he held a two-year visiting position at Davidson College.

Pradip Malde’s work is featured in the inaugural issue of Leaves, published by the Scottish Society for the History of Photography, a journal devoted to “nature, health, wellbeing and creativity. 

Leaves is available from mid-July, from https://studiesinphotography.com

Leaves’ focus is our essential relation to the natural world, from the large scale of the global and the fine view that opens our eyes, to the minute examination enabled by the microscope. Bringing together scientific inquirers, artists and enthusiastic amateurs, the journal aims to give us both pleasure and enlightenment." -- Sara Stevenson, emeritus curator of photography, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. 

Malde’s work was part of a fundraising sale of photographic prints by Scotland’s leading photographers with proceeds going to Support in Mind: a Scottish organisation providing support and resources for those living with a mental health issue.

Crystal Ngo (C’20) graduated cum laude with a double major in Economics and Environment and Sustainability. Crystal (right with Bernice Leveque C’21) presented research at the 2020 Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

Crystal was the recipient of the Leroy Environmental Service Award. A Bonner leader and a Raulston Scholar, Crystal was a founding member of the Office of Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability’s Green Fund Committee, administering $25K to support community and environmental projects.

Among her many accomplishments, Crystal studied abroad in Panama where she surveyed coffee farmers. As an intern for the Sewanee Haiti Institute, she examined the impact of carbon payments on farmers’ incomes and decisions to plant trees and she presented this capstone research at the 2020 Human Development Conference at Notre Dame University.

Last summer, Crystal worked as an intern for an environmental engineering firm that evaluates remediation of petroleum contaminated sites. She is now working with public school students for Americorps City Year in Sacramento CA. Crystal’s goal is to work in the field of sustainability in Viet Nam.

BIODIVERSITY FROM CAVES AND OTHER SUBTERRANEAN HABITATS OF GEORGIA, USA recently published in the Journal of Cave and Karst Studies. Since graduating from Sewanee, Bre completed a Masters in Environmental Science at Trinity College Dublin.

Karen Kuers is co-author on a recently-funded National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, “Developing online teaching tools for field ecology and data science through an EREN-NEON partnership.” This grant is part of a new partnership between the Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN) and National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). The grant is led by Laurie Anderson (Ohio Wesleyan Univ) and Tim McCay (Colgate Univ). Kuers is one of the founding members of EREN.

This funding will support a group of EREN faculty from several institutions working to create versatile (remote to face-to-face) field ecology and data science projects for faculty and students. Activities will be posted online, and will be freely available to other faculty for use in their courses. Kuers will work on a project with Dr. Jason Kilgore from Washington and Jefferson College. She plans to implement components of the project into laboratory activities for two Sewanee courses this year: FORS 121 Introduction to Forestry (Fall) and FORS 230 Urban Forest Management (Spring).

Matt Schrader and recent Biology grads Madolin Keller (C’20) and Lucey Garrett (C’19) co-authored the paper Adaptation to monogamy influences parental care but not mating behavior in the burying beetle, Nicrophorus vespilloides published in Ecology and Evolution.

Emma Zeitler (Biology C’20) defended her Honors Thesis Carryover Effects of Wastewater Reduce Anuran Success. This study was a comprehensive evaluation of how local frogs grow and survive when they develop in treated wastewater. This research is ongoing evaluating behavioral mechanisms behind changes in frog growth and survival and how microbiomes of the larval environment are related to the terrestrial one. Emma was this year’s Yeatman award recipient for her leadership and inspiration in biological research. Emma began her research career at Sewanee under the mentorship of Dr. Kristen Cecala as a second-semester first-year student. By her junior year, she had published her first paper in Journal of Freshwater Ecology, as well as presented her research at numerous venues and received grants from the Tennessee Herpetological Society and the Appalachian College Association. Emma participated in the Island Ecology Program, studied abroad in South Africa during her spring semester of 2019, and continued onto an REU internship in Iceland for the summer, where she conducted research examining lake biogeochemistry. More is written about Emma in the Sewanee Purple. Congratulations Emma! We are excited to see where your research takes you next!

Along with colleagues at NOAA Southwest FIsheries Science Center, Eric Keen co-authored a study of porpoise echolocation clicks in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

In collaboration with Eli Walker (Natural Resources C’19), researchers at Appalachian State University, and the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute, Kristen Cecala had a paper published in Freshwater Biology Early View documenting how stream fish affect the life history and ecology of headwater salamanders.

Katie McGhee had a paper come out in Scientific Reports that examines how the predation risk experienced by different Alaskan populations of threespine stickleback affects the maternally-provisioned steroid profiles in their eggs.

Describing sacred waters and their associated traditions in over thirty countries and

across multiple time periods, this book identifies patterns in panhuman hydrolatry.

Supplying life’s most basic daily need, freshwater sources were likely the earliest

sacred sites, and the first protected and contested resource. Guarded by taboos, rites

and supermundane forces, freshwater sources have also been considered thresholds

to otherworlds. Often associated with also venerated stones, trees and healing flora,

sacred water sources are sites of biocultural diversity. Addressing themes that will

shape future water research, this volume examines cultural perceptions of water’s

sacrality that can be employed to foster resilient human-environmental

relationships in the growing water crises of the twenty-first century. The work combines

perspectives from anthropology, archaeology, classics, folklore, geography, geology,

history, literature and religious studies.

For Daniel Carter, second-generation farmer and owner of Carter Farms, farming isn’t just a hobby or a job – it’s a way of life.

The project “Blue Money: the Cultural Value of Water” represents a synthetic culmination of Wilder’s two personal and professional passions: water resource management and socially responsible investment. Wilder will travel to India, Algeria, Australia, Bolivia and Peru to understand how water is culturally valued and explore how financial mechanisms can be used to protect these sacred relationships. While at Sewanee, Wilder has studied water in many ways, including doing wastewater chemistry at the constructed wetland, sampling for microplastics, and conducting summer research on water resources in Tunisia as a Biehl Fellow. He led a student movement to advocate for transparent and socially responsible investment of Sewanee’s endowment. Wilder is Sewanee’s 49th Watson Fellow.

The 2017 TenneSwim, a collaboration between Dr. Andreas Fath and Martin Knoll, has led to a proposed bill banning single-use plastic bags in the state of Tennessee. Fath, from the Faculty of Medical and Life Sciences of Furtwangen University in Germany, is currently a visiting professor working on microplastics research at the Tennessee Conservation Institute. This collaboration between Sewanee and the Tennessee Aquarium will involve students in Knoll’s Hydrology and other environmental studies courses.

Eric Keen had three papers published early in the new year, two of which were also presented at the World Marine Mammal Science conference in Barcelona, Spain in December. Two articles discuss his team’s research about whales and collisions with ships in British Columbia using a seafloor array of hydrophones. The third, published in Marine Mammal Science, reports an alarming decline in humpback whale calving success.

JoyAnna Hopper and Clint Swift presented a paper entitled “Updating and Synthesizing our Understanding of State Legislative Support for Climate Change Policy” at the annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Their working paper evaluates how various pressures, including environmental, economic, and political pressures, affect the attractiveness of climate change initiatives for state legislators. They find that while some environmental factors (e.g., temperature anomalies) appear to pressure elected officials, political factors, such as legislators’ ideology and their place in the chamber, are much more powerful predictors of climate policy support. Hopper and Swift see this as problematic, as politics continues to drive climate policy decisions even as the environmental situation worsens

The aroma of each tree is a portal into stories of ecology and human culture. The accompanying audio features original violin compositions for each tree by Katherine Lehman, formerly on the Sewanee faculty now Executive Director of the Boulder Philharmonic. David’s book, The Songs of Trees was named winner of the Iris Book award by the Center for Religion & the Human at Indiana University Bloomington. The award honors “outstanding work offering new insights into the meaning of being human in relation to science, religion, and nature.” The book previously was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished natural history writing. David is on leave in 2020, working on a new book about the diversification and extinction of sound worldwide, from rainforests to concert halls to city streets.

The 40 Acres in Mississippi is part of the "United States of Anxiety" series hosted by Kai Wright at New York City's NPR station, WNYC. At the end of the Civil War, 90 percent of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta was still wilderness -- covered with hardwood forests and frequently inundated by the flooding Mississippi River, but with the richest soil then known on earth. That unique environmental context supported the remarkable growth of a black landowning class in the region, and in 1900, two-thirds of the Delta's farm owners were African Americans. Among those gaining land by the turn of the century were ancestors of Elbert and Pearline Lester, black farmers who still live on the family's farm today. While they can pace out the boundaries of their acreage, the Lesters didn't know how their forebears acquired the property or managed to keep it through the trials of the Jim Crow years. Listen to the program or read the transcript here to learn how tens of thousands of freedmen gained land in the Mississippi Delta.

This is part of larger programming surrounding Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion within the National Audubon Society, which has been a focal point at Strawberry Plains and their Land & Community initiative, established by Alum Mitch Robinson (Natural Resources C’07) to engage the public about the Center’s historical land-use including former Chickasaw grounds, a slave/cotton plantation, and a sharecropping operation. According to Robinson, who manages Conservation Education at Strawberry Plains, “Acknowledging the legacies of regional land degradation are as central to understanding habitat resilience as the legacies of our communities’ collective memory, both part of an indissoluble and necessary historical narrative that best informs just, sustainable, and prudent conservation and land management practices ahead.”

CRE will welcome its fourth cohort in the Certificate in Contemplation and Care for Creation for a year-long program with a residence in Sewanee, May 21-26.