The Commons – February 2023

  • Kilgour attends the UW–Madison Leadership Institute's 20th anniversary event. Photo courtesy of UW–Madison

    Christopher Kilgour Joins Nelson Staff

    To help ring in the new year, the Nelson Institute staff welcomed a new team member: Christopher Kilgour.

  • UniverCity Year Better places together

    Wisconsin Idea to the Ninth

    In a record-setting cohort, University of Wisconsin–Madison’s UniverCity Year program will be partnering with nine communities across Wisconsin during the 2022–25 academic years and leveraging university resources to move forward their goals.

  • Wisconsin Agriculture Stressed by Climate Change

    WICCI’s Agriculture Working Group addresses challenges and shares recommendations.

  • Campus map

    10 Environmental Campus Features

    The landscape of UW–Madison is one aspect of campus that distinguishes us from our Big Ten rivals.

  • Carol Barford

    Director’s Cut

    I’m happy for this opportunity to introduce myself and to write about the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), which has been my professional home for over 20 years!

  • Photo by Todd Brown, Media Solutions / UW–Madison

    Expanding Forest Conservation One Datapoint at a Time

    From boreal evergreens in the north to tropical jungles in the south, the forests of our world provide humanity with the potential to be an important solution to climate change.

  • Xie working on irrigation location detection using satellite images, machine learning, and cloud computing. Photo by Chelsea Mamott

    Map Maker

    Yanhua Xie, a researcher at the Nelson Institute’s Center for Sustainability and Global Environment, has been working to build agriculture irrigation maps at a level that has never been done before.

  • Outrider logo on black with a small circle outside of a large circle

    Tracey Holloway among Inaugural Advisory Board for Outrider

    The Nelson Institute’s Tracey Holloway was recently named to the inaugural advisory board of the Outrider Foundation, a Madison-based nonprofit that that addresses issues of nuclear security and climate change through multimedia storytelling.

  • Shawn Steffan

    Q & A: Meet Shawn Steffan

    It’s the circle of life – which is something Department of Entomology faculty member and U.S. Department of Agriculture–Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) research entomologist Shawn Steffan knows all too well.

  • Photo by Bryce Richter / UW–Madison

    A Legacy Recorded

    “Is Lake Mendoza frozen yet?” Believe it or not, that’s a common wintertime question from alumni seeking reports from their alma mater (particularly alumni who have migrated to warmer climates).

  • Corn ethanol — made at refineries like this one in Minnesota — has driven land-use changes and crop choices that have resulted in carbon emissions negating any climate benefits from replacing gasoline with ethanol. Photo credit: Tyler Lark

    Two Nelson-Affiliated Papers among Most Mentioned Studies of 2022

    Each year, the UK-based, climate-focused Carbon Brief website releases a list of the top 25 most mentioned scientific papers.