News

Col(LAB) members Maddie T, Jordan J, Maddie H, and Kaitlyn C presented their research in progress today for the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences 2024 AESS Student Research Symposium. Congrats to them on a job well done! Learn more about the conference here.

Dr. Stack Whitney and Dr. Whitney have a new article out in the latest issue of Environmental Humanities, Squished Bugs: Teaching and Learning Reflexivity in Ecology. Read it here.

As part of the global GLUE project and network, Dr. Stack Whitney is a co-author on a new paper out today, Does urbanisation lead to parallel demographic shifts across the world in a cosmopolitan plant?, led by Dr. Aude Caizergues at the University of Toronto - Mississauga. Read it here.

Erika Mitchell, current STS Aberg research fellow, recently presented their research on worldviews and environmental attitudes at the Eastern Psychological Association 2024 conference in Philadelphia, PA. 

Dr. Stack Whitney presented on the Col(LAB)orative's work over the past 5 years on roadside ecology and environmental humanities in practice to the RIT life science seminar series.

The final report for roadside research focused on the impacts of reduced mowing on pollinating insects and vegetation, led by Dr. Stack Whitney in collaboration with many current and former student colleagues, conducted 2019 through 2022 is now online. Read it here.

Maddie, Rodhy, Erika, and Hannah all presented research in progress at the Rochester Academy of Sciences annual paper session, held November 4 at RIT. Great job! Learn more about the RAS annual conference here.

Col(LAB) member Erika has been awarded the Fall 2023 RIT STS Aberg fellowship, to continue their research and present at several upcoming conferences. Congratulations, Erika! Learn more about the STS Department Aberg fellowship here.

Nature News has written about the reproducibility study, Many EcoEvo Analysts, that Dr. Stack Whitney is a co-author on. The study is currently under review. Read the news article here and the preprint here.

Dr. Stack Whitney is a co-author on a new pre-print, Same data, different analysts: variation in effect sizes due to analytical decisions in ecology and evolutionary biology. The work is a global collaboration to understand variation in how scientists approach analyzing and peer reviewing data, with implications for understanding the reproducibility crisis. Read it here.

Dr. Stack Whitney was recently interviewed by Joe Lamp'l's gardening podcast about her recent Catalyst article on ladybugs, militarized rhetoric in pest control, and the slippery slopes of villianizing 'non-native.' Check out the episode here.

Erika Mitchell, current STS Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow, presented their findings in progress at the RIT Undergraduate Research Symposium today. Learn more about the RIT undergraduate research symposium here.

Dr. Stack Whitney was recently interviewed by WROC about local concern for perceived insect declines. Read/watch it here.

Dr. Stack Whitney's recent scholarship on militarized home and garden pest control was featured in the RIT News. Read the RIT News article here.  Read the Catalyst research article it's based on here.

Congratulations to current and former Col(LAB) members who graduated this spring, including Rowan Christie (BS Bioinformatics), Ariella Knight (MFA Industrial Design), Claire Corbasson (BS, Environmental Sustainability Health and Safety), and Pema Lama (BS Sociology & Anthropology)! We are so excited to see what they get up to in the future. 

Dr. Stack Whitney recently published an article, "Bugs in My Basement Freezer: And Other COVID-Conscious Changes to Pollinator Field Research," in the TR News magazine, published by the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering Transportation Research Board. The article focuses on the challenges and successes of conducting essential research through the pandemic. Learn more about TR News magazine here and the issue here.

Col(LAB) member Hannah DeFelice presented her research results in progress at the NTID Student Research Fair this morning. She has been studying the environmental impacts of tabletop electric composting machines, such as heat and smell pollution, and comparing the results to those from other approaches to manage household waste. You can learn more about all the presenters here, read Hannah and other students' abstracts here, and learn more about the RECIPES wasted food network team and projects here.

Dr. Stack Whitney has a new article published, as part of a special section on the 'Domesticities of War' in the journal Catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. Read the whole special section and issue here.

Col(LAB) student Maddie T is presenting ongoing NSF-funded RECIPES research in progress at the annual NYS Organics Summit, hosted by the New York State Association for Reduction, Reuse, and Recycling. Learn more about RECIPES here.

Dr. Stack Whitney, as part of the MAREN collaboration led by Dr. Emily Mohl, have a new article "Common milkweed seeds exhibit latitudinal clines more consistent with adaptation to growing season length than temperature" published today in Restoration Ecology. Read it here.

Please join us in celebrating Pema, who has been named an Outstanding Undergraduate Scholar in the RIT College of Liberal Arts! More on the award and all awardees here.

As part of the MAREN collaboration, Dr. Stack Whitney and colleagues led by Dr. Emily Mohl have had an article, "Common milkweed seeds exhibit latitudinal clines more consistent with adaptation to growing season length than temperature" accepted in Restoration Ecology.

Dr. Stack Whitney published an op-ed, "How local governments can protect bees," in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle newspaper on February 5 print edition.

Dr. Stack Whitney was an invited panelist for the Rights of Way as Habitat Working Group recent Research Roundtable on habitat management on December 7, presenting on the ongoing experimental highway roadside work across the state, which is supported by grants from UTRC and the deCoizart foundation. Watch it here.

Dr. Stack Whitney, in collaboration with coauthors from Kent State University, has just published a new preprint explaining the results of their examination of how "open access" journals incorporate disability accessibility. They found most "open" journals are not including best known accessibility considerations for multimodal representation of information. Read the whole pre-print here. Learn more about the broader project, on barriers to reproducible science and knowledge, here.

Dr. Stack Whitney and many co-authors just published the article 'People, infrastructure, and data: A pathway to an inclusive and diverse ecological network of networks' in Ecosphere. This work emerged out of the 2019 NEON (National Ecological Observation Network) science summit, and explores how a network of networks may bring people and data together to learn more about the environment. Dr. Stack Whitney's contributions focused on accessibility and inclusion. Read it here.

Dr. Stack Whitney reviewed the recent book Turn on the Words!: Deaf Audiences, Captions, and the Long Struggle for Access by Dr. Harry Lang, emeritus professor of RIT/NTID for the journal Disability and Society. It's about the critical role of deaf professionals and grassroots advocates in the history of captioned media in the US. Read the review here. 

Former collab member and NTID/RIT RISE fellow Rowan Christie is lead author with Dr. Stack Whitney and Kent State colleagues on a newly published paper in PeerJ, examining how study parameters shape the conclusions researchers may draw about black-legged tick populations. Black-legged ticks are vectors of Lyme disease, a critical and growing public health concern. Read the paper here. Learn more about the overall NSF-funded project here. Learn more about the NTID/RIT RISE program here.

Dr. Stack Whitney just published a write up for the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government on the potential benefits and limitations of the new FDA rule on over the counter hearing aids - and the policy patchwork and history that got the US to this point. Read it here.

Dr. Kristoffer Whitney and Dr. Kaitlin Stack Whitney's work on (in)accessible media for deaf/signing children during the COVID-19 pandemic is now a chapter in an edited volume Children and Media Research and Practice during the Crises of 2020 from Routledge. Learn more here.

Dr. Stack Whitney presented on roadside solar and renewable energy as part of the Sustainable Finger Lakes webinar series. Learn more here (recording to be posted and slides posted next week). Some of the work presented was part of her Nathan Public Policy Fellowship, through the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government. Learn more here.

Ariella Knight has published a new blog post for the RECIPES network, about her collaboration with Claire Corbasson this summer, using convergence methods to tackle wasted food. Learn more about Ariella's work here.

Col(LAB) members Ariella and Dr. Stack Whitney presented "Preventing and Reducing Wasted Food in Counties, Towns, and Villages—Case Studies from the Rochester and Albany Metro Regions" at the Locally Sourced: Municipal Green Policy Solutions event, hosted by SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government / SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry, on Friday Sept 9. This presentation was co-authored with Claire, about ongoing research as part of the RECIPES convergence network. Learn more about the conference here and more about the RECIPES network here.

Hannah presented her ongoing research on animal-related collisions associated with highway roadside restoration for pollinators at the joint Ecological Society of America / Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution on August 17 in Montreal, Quebec. Learn more about the meeting here.

Hannah, col(lab) member and current U-RISE research fellow, presented research in progress about roadside pollinator habitat and animal related vehicle collisions at the Deaf/HH Scientists Roc conference (DeafRoc), hosted by NTID and the University of Rochester on August 11 and 12 this week. Learn more about the event here. Learn more about U-RISE at RIT here.

Congratulations to Claire and Hannah, who presented their summer research at the RIT Undergraduate Research Symposium on July 28, 2022. More on the URS session here.

Seth Jones (2022 RIT graduate and colLAB alum) just published his oral history collection, resulting from his STS Aberg Family Fellowship with Dr. Stack Whitney as his mentor. Seth collected oral histories of Great Lakes marathon swimmers. Listen to and/or read the oral history collection here.

Dr. Stack Whitney, as part of her ongoing Nathan Public Policy fellowship through the Rockefeller Institute of Government, was recently interviewed for the Policy Outsider podcast. Listen and/or read the transcript here.

Col(LAB)orative member Seth Jones, currently the RIT STS Department Aberg family fellow, has recently published a piece in Arcadia. Read it here.

As part of her ongoing Richard P. Nathan public policy fellowship for the Rockefeller Institute of Government, Dr. Stack Whitney has a new analysis and blog post published on the many potential innovative uses of state highway roadside right-of-ways (ROWs). Read it here. 

Several student collaborators are graduating this week! Congratulations to Thomas Murphy, Seth Jones, and Alexandra Bros!

2022 Aberg Fellow Seth Jones presented his ongoing fellowship research, a project collecting oral histories of Great Lakes marathon swimmers, to the second annual Global Humanities Conference hosted by RIT. More on the conference here.

Dr. Stack Whitney was competitively selected to participate in the National Science Foundation workshop "Using the Rules of Life to Address Societal Challenges," focused on Stewarding an Integrated Biodiversity-Climate System.  Learn more about the NSF Rules of Life program and workshops here.

The RIT team, including Dr. Stack Whitney, that collaborated on the GLobal Urban Evolution (GLUE) project was featured in WROC local news. Read/watch it here.

Dr. Stack Whitney and 5 RIT former students are co-authors on a new article published today, on the cover of Science, as part of the Global Urban Evolution Project led by Marc Johnson's lab at the University of Toronto. Learn more about the project here. Learn more about white clover here, from Dr. Stack Whitney's Plant Love Story piece. 

ColLAB alum Joshua Greene (MS 2021, Environmental Science) was recently interviewed for the RIT Reporter magazine about their thesis research, for an article on redlining and greenlining in Rochester. Read it here - and read the open version of Josh's thesis here.

MS graduate Alyssa Schoenfeldt (BS 2021, MS 2021 Environmental Science) and Dr. Stack Whitney have published a new article in Northeastern Naturalist, examining bumble bee abundance in highway roadside habitats, across a range of traffic and mowing levels. Read it here.

Dr. Stack Whitney was recently awarded a $92,239 2-year grant from the Sarah K. de Coizart Article TENTH Perpetual Charitable Trust, focused on assessing NY highway roadside management for pollinating insect habitat, with a focus on monarch butterflies. Learn more about the trust here.

Seth Jones was recently awarded the 2022 Aberg Family Fellowship in Science, Technology and Society! Congratulations to Seth. He'll be using his fellowship to conduct environmental history research on open water swimming in the Great Lakes, supervised by Dr. Stack Whitney. Learn more about the Aberg fellowship here.

Dr. Stack Whitney, with collaborators led by Dr. Jessica Burnett, recently published a new article, "Ten Simple Rules for Creating a Scientific Web Application" in PLOS Computational Biology. Read it here. 

Dr. Stack Whitney is one of ~90 authors of a new article, Harnessing the NEON data revolution to advance open environmental science with a diverse and data-capable community, in the journal Ecosphere. This work comes out of the NEON Science Summit back in 2019, which Dr. Stack Whitney was competitively selected to attend. Read it here. More articles should be coming out in the special feature soon.

Dr. Stack Whitney, along with collaborators across the US in the Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN) and National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), have a new article forthcoming in the winter issue Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America on their flexible learning modules using NEON data, designed for in person, remote, or hy-flex learners. Learn more about the modules here.

Congratulations to lab alum, Joshua Greene (MS 2021), on accepting a new job as an environmental planner! Learn more about his graduate work here.

Dr. Stack Whitney is one of 7 RIT faculty and 40 researchers around the US that are part of the new Wasted Food Network, a $15 million dollar new project funded by the National Science Foundation. Learn more here and here.

Dr. Stack Whitney is presenting at the ICOET (International Conference on Ecology and Transportation) 2021 conference. For a limited time, you can watch her captioned presentation here.  More on the conference here.

Dr. Stack Whitney is presenting a lightning talk on accessibility in open science at the international Metascience 2021 conference Thursday (9/23) evening. More on the session here. More on the overall conference here.

The write up of the 2019 EDSIN conference, Bringing Conversations on Diversity and Inclusion in Data Science to the Ecological and Environmental Sciences, is now available on QUBES. Dr. Stack Whitney is a co-author and presented at the conference. Read it here.

Dr. Stack Whitney, in collaborator with participants in the EREN-NEON Flexible Learning Projects 'Backyard Beetles + Pollinators' project, has published a dataset of insect floral visitation. This dataset can be used for teaching or by other researchers. Explore it here - and learn more about the larger project here.

Amanda has accepted and will soon start a new job as a Life Scientist for the EPA Region 1 Office, working on brownfield issues. Congrats, Amanda!

Josh Greene, recent MS alum, has a new pre-print up based on his thesis research: "Examining the associations between neighborhood socioeconomic status and the potential distribution of four urban ecosystem services in Rochester, NY."  Read it here.

Dr. Stack Whitney has been selected as a 2021 Richard P. Nathan Public Policy Fellow by the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government. She will focus on US state environmental initiatives in roadsides. Read more on the fellows and their proposed work for 2021-2022 here.

Dr. Stack Whitney has published an encyclopedia entry titled "Wild Bee Conservation in North American Roadside Rights of Way" for Imperiled: The Encyclopedia of Conservation. Read it here.

Jay has published a new blog post on their ongoing summer research, as part of the larger NSF-funded EAGER project led by Dr. Christie Bahlai at Kent State University and Dr. Stack Whitney, focused on examining (in)accessibility as a barrier to reproducible science. Read it here.

Dr. Stack Whitney presented a poster as part of the Open Electronics session in the Society for Experimental Biology annual conference. An archived version of the poster is here.

Dr. Stack Whitney and colleagues from across the US have published a new paper "Examining cultural structures and functions in biology" in the journal Integrative & Comparative Biology. This work resulted from selection and participation in an NSF-workshop on integrating biology subfields - and this group focused on cultural and structural barriers to integrating biology. Read it here.

Dr. Stack Whitney was part of the NEON Science Summit - which has led to a special issue forthcoming in Ecosphere. As part of that issue, she is part of a large team that has a now accepted article "Harnessing the NEON Data Revolution to Advance Open Environmental Science with a Diverse and Data-Capable Community."

Dr. Stack Whitney, as part of the NSF-funded EAGER with Dr. Christie Bahlai at Kent State University, has a new blog post up about one of their ongoing projects focused on understanding and unpacking claims about insect declines. Read it here.

Dr. Stack Whitney, in collaboration with now-alumna Briana Burt Stringer, have just published a new pre-print analyzing whether the US state pollinator plans use best practices for evidence based policymaking. Read it here - and find the published open source dataset here.

Dr. Stack Whitney presented at the SUNY Rockefeller Institute for Government 'Local Government Lab' on "Evaluation of US state pollinator plans using 3 frameworks for evidence-based policymaking." Learn more about the event here. Presentations are captioned and will be archived online.

Dr. Stack Whitney and colleagues, led by Dr. Christine A. Bahlai at Kent State University, have a new paper published in Ecological Informatics. This article and associated methods tackle thorny issues about using short term ecological studies for long term inference. Read it here. 

Dr. Stack Whitney and colleagues from across the US have a forthcoming article ("The Broken Window: An algorithm for quantifying and characterizing misleading trajectories in ecological processes") in the journal Ecological Informatics. Led by Dr. Christie Bahlai at Kent State University, this work is part of an NSF-funded EAGER collaboration. Learn more about the project here.

Many SWEET Col(LAB) members and former members are graduating this week! Congratulations to Virginia (BS 2021), Matthew (BS 2021), Jacob (BS 2021), Alyssa (BS 2021, MS 2021), Josh (MS 2021), Madison (BS 2021), and Amanda (MS 2021)!  You can watch the festivities remotely - more info here.

Congratulations to Alyssa for the successful defense of her MS thesis research on April 30, on the impacts of road traffic and roadside mowing on insect pollinator habitat quality and bumble bee abundance in New York highway roadsides. She will graduate with both her BS and MS degrees this month! 

Josh passed his oral and written thesis defense on Friday April 23. Congratulations to Josh on the successful defense and completion of his Masters degree requirements and research! He will walk in the Spring 2021 graduation ceremonies next month.

Josh is giving his public seminar on his Masters thesis research, titled "Examining the associations between neighborhood socioeconomic status and the potential distribution of four urban ecosystem services in Rochester, NY" on Zoom (meeting ID: 912 4139 1307, email for password) this Friday afternoon (April 23) at 12:30pm. 

Josh presented some of his thesis findings to STGlobal conference, a national graduate student conference focused on science and technology policy and STS. Learn more about the STGlobal Consortium here and the 2021 presentations here.

Dr. Stack Whitney presented "The Future of Science Is Accessible: "Access" in Citizen Science Must Include Disability Accessibility - Or, what citizen science can learn from feminist disability studies" as part of the American Philosophical Society's 'Promises and Pitfalls of Citizen Science' symposium April 5-9. Her slide deck and transcript with alt-text is here.

Dr. Stack Whitney has been selected as one of the inaugural class of fellows in Open@RIT. Learn more about Open@RIT here. 

Dr. Stack Whitney and colleagues from Gallaudet and MIT have published an invited commentary on disability access and inclusion as a necessary part of intersectional DEI efforts at conferences and more broadly in sustainability. Read it here.

Congrats to Jay on winning the Baldwin scholarship through the RIT School of Life Sciences! Learn more about the awards and past winners here.

Amanda Walker recently won a RIT College of Science Emerson summer 2021 research fellowship! This will support her independent research on her MS thesis, which is focused on youth environmental education curricula.

Led by Aberg Family fellow in STS, Sarah Bacchus, several members of the col(lab) have a new pre-print up focused on understanding how forests and vegetation in the area around Rochester (Monroe County, NY) is changing. Read it here. Ongoing work by Sarah looks and whether these changes are associated with corresponding socioeconomic shifts.

Work led by lab member and RISE research fellow Rowan Christie on how study design and sampling strategies for deer ticks, the Lyme disease vector for humans, shapes scientists' understanding of population trajectories. Read it here. 

Congratulations to SWEET col(lab) alums Virginia Aswad and Matthew Madsen for winning their colleges' respective RIT Outstanding Undergraduate Scholar Awards for 2020-2021! Read about all the winners here.

Dr. Stack Whitney's work has been accepted to be part of the American Philosophical Society's "Promises and Pitfalls of Citizen Science" symposium, April 5-9 2021 (free, public). Her paper and presentation are titled "The Future is Accessible: Access in Citizen Science Must Include Disability Accessibility." More on the symposium here.

Dr. Stack Whitney presents preliminary results from the ongoing highway roadside project at the virtual Transportation Research Board meeting, taking place across 2 weeks in January. You can see/read the results here.

Dr. Stack Whitney worked with a group of students in her spring 2020 Environment and Society course to write about how wildlife crossing design impacts different taxa in Banff National Park, Canada. It was just published in the January 2021 volume of Case Studies in the Environment. Read it here.

Alyssa presents some of her thesis research this month at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology virtual conference, taking place from January 3 - February 28, 2021. Her poster is titled "Assessing road traffic and roadside mowing levels on pollinator habitat quality in highway roadsides" and can be viewed here.

Dr. Stack Whitney has an invited book review of Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein (MIT Press) in the winter 2021 American Scientist magazine. Read the review here.

Students in Dr. Stack Whitney's environmental history course, 'Great Lakes' can choose to make zines as their final projects. Students who make their zines public have made them available for reading, downloading, and noncommercial use. See the updated collection here.

Dr. Stack Whitney and Dr. Whitney co-authored a new paper just published today in the Journal of Children and Media. It was competitively selected as part of a special issue on 'The Clarity of Crisis,' focused on how COVID-19 is impacting children. Read it here.

Dr. Stack Whitney has a new pre-print with the Open Life Sciences team focused on access and inclusion for collaborative team calls. Read it here: https://osf.io/k3bfn/

Josh and Alyssa will be presenting their ongoing thesis research in the RIT graduate showcase Nov 16 - 20. Their presentations will be accessible by registering here. 

Alyssa's research looks at the potential synergistic impacts of traffic and mowing on bees in highway roadsides. Josh's research examines the association between socioeconomic status and urban ecosystem service supply in Rochester neighborhoods. 

Joshua Greene (MS expected May 2021) shares his thesis research results, examining the association between socioeconomic status past (e.g. redlining) and present (e.g. segregation, income) on ecosystem service supply in neighborhoods in Rochester. View the poster here.

Dr. Stack Whitney has a new pre-print up examining how three local seed mixes may potentially contribute to pollinating insect conservation in western NY.

As a PI on an ongoing NSF-funded research project to make flexible experiential learning for a range of learners and course formats during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Stack Whitney has developed and published a new collaborative and open course-based undergraduate research module. Learn more here.

Dr. Stack Whitney published a new open, course-based undergraduate research teaching module. Students observe insect pollinators and other floral visitors in their backyards, or campus, or nearby natural areas to describe plant-pollinator networks and assess how the assemblages from their sites compare to those in a range of landscapes. Learn more here. 

Learn more about the project and open educational materials here.

New pre-print up on the NSF EAGER 'Managing Our Expectations' collaborative work with the Kent State University Bahlai lab!  Check it out here and learn more about the project here.

OneZero talks to Kaitlin Stack Whitney, assistant professor in the science, technology and society department and the environmental sciences program, about the effect of corporations' efforts to protect honeybee populations. More >