About Us

Welcome to Dr. Lisa Schulte Moore's lab at Iowa State University! We study human-landscape interactions, and are particularly interested in the causes, consequences, and design of land-use change. Through this research, we hope to improve the scientific basis for decisions that impact people and our natural resources. We hope to foster resilient, sustainable ecosystems and prosperous human communities.

You can find more information about our members, research, and outreach on this website. Contact us and let us know what you think.

News and Upcoming Events

August 6: Going to the Ecological Society of America meeting in Portland, Oregon? Lisa will be presenting Thursday morning in a session on ecological modeling.

July 29: Congrats to lab graduates Usman Anwar, Stephanie Enloe, and Eddie Shea for having their Master's research accepted for publication in scientific journals this summer. Usman is now a developer with AgSolver, Stephanie works for the Center for Rural Affairs and will shortly be beginning a PhD program at Cornell University, and Eddie works on wetland conservation for the Wisconsin DNR. We're very proud of you and all your accomplishments!

July 27: Find Lisa presenting on "Your Farm as an Ecosystem" at the Saving Our Iowa Land (SOIL) conference at Drake Law School.

July 17: We're excited to welcome Elise Miller back to the lab for the summer! Elise is a Volpert Scholar and Honors student at Stanford University who contributes to the PEWI and STRIPS projects.

June 27: Find PhD student and PEWI developer Robert Valek at the North American Agroforestry Conference in Blacksburg, Virginia.

The Lab Blog

Improving the statistical power in grassland and passerine bird nesting studies: Testing two new technologies

July 25, 2017: Grassland birds, such as dickcissels, meadowlarks, and upland sandpipers, have declined by almost 40% over North America between the late 1960s and today 1968–2011. This decline is being driven by loss or degradation of grassland habitat continent-wide, including replacement of grassland with agricultural land, fragmentation of remaining grasslands, degradation of rangelands in the western US, and re-forestation in the eastern US. Stopping and eventually reversing the loss of grassland habitat will be necessary to halt the decline of North American grassland birds. I study the effectiveness of an innovative approach to restore grassland habitat for at least some species of grassland birds is called prairie strips.

Does diversity tell the whole story?

May 21, 2017: Maintaining Iowa’s highly productive agricultural landscape demands high inputs of fertilizer. When fertilizers run off the landscape in rain events or snow melt, negative consequences for water quality may arise due to enrichment by nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. Developing strategies to sustain high levels of agricultural productivity while reducing nutrient runoff and its harmful consequences for water quality is a major concern of conservation science. Luckily, conservation measures such as prairie strips offer one strategy to reduce nutrient runoff from row crop fields. Prairie strips are diverse native prairies strategically planted within or at the edge of fields of row crops to slow down water flowing at or within the soil surface, trap and filter out nutrients carried in the flow, and thereby reduce nutrient and soil addition to surface waters. The diversity of these prairie plantings is a primary factor contributing to their success as filters for agricultural runoff, but the impact of individual species planted within strips is less well known. As I describe here, this topic was the focus of a research project I conducted at Iowa State University.

Staying afloat with PEWI

December 9, 2016: I’m a programmer on PEWI, a simple web-based learning tool designed to help people understand human-landscape interactions and ecosystem service tradeoffs. One day, while working on PEWI’s code, I got pretty curious about whether there were other, similar tools out there. Also, being somewhat competitive by nature, I wondered what ‘the other groups’ were doing. I figured creating watershed tools is probably the vocation of a few, with groups working in this area just a small subset of the scientists and stakeholders interested in the impacts of human decisions on the environment. You can imagine my surprise when I set out to find a few oases in the software desert and, instead, found myself inundated with applications. The good news is that, among the flood of wonderful tools, PEWI still holds a unique place. Read on to learn about the results of my exploration.

Wakonse: Who do you want to be?

June 15, 2016: Learning has been a central part of my life for as long as a I can remember. As a youngster, I learned basic skills, like how to tie my shoes, the colors and alphabet, and how to share with my sister. As a student, I sat in countless classrooms with dozens of teachers and faculty members, learning theories, concepts, facts, and skills. I learned how I learn, and I began applying what I was learning to ask scientific research questions. As a graduate student, I continue to learn and grow as a research scientist, but I’m also experiencing learning in a new way....

Field Notes: Musings from the Natural Resource Ecology & Management Department

March 16, 2016: Each year, Iowa State University’s Natural Resource Ecology and Management (NREM) Department publishes a collection of articles designed to provide a slice of what has been happening in NREM over the past year. The graduate student publication, called Field Notes, highlights undergraduate and graduate research, catches up with recent graduates, and welcomes our new faculty. This past year, I wrote an article for Field Notes detailing part of my doctoral research, titled “Learning how to have our cake and eat it, too: Identifying opportunities for co-production of commodities and ecosystem services in Iowa.”

Landscape Ecology and Sustainable Ecosystem Management Lab

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