Wildlife are impacted by every decision we make on the land. Many of these impacts are positive, such as grassland breeding birds benefiting from the riparian buffer that armors the creek running through a farm or the wetland bird making a home on the nutrient treatment wetland constructed to receive water from drainage tile. Some of these impacts are more challenging, like the factors that force land in perennial vegetation like pasture or forest to be converted to row crops. Research can help us understand where opportunities exist for wildlife and water conservation in Iowa's agricultural landscapes that work alongside sustainable and profitable farming enterprises. And that's the type of research we seek to do and profile on this page! This page profiles research led by or in collaboration with Dr. Adam Janke and his collaborators and students who principally study wildlife and water conservation in Iowa's agricultural landscapes. Many other researchers at ISU and in NREM also work on these important questions, and you can learn more about their work on individual faculty profile pages.
Grazing and Conservation Reserve Program
Overview
This project aims to understand and measure the ecological impacts associated with grazing cattle on CRP lands planted with native-warm season grasses. Our goal is to understand how cattle grazing in CRP fields may impact environmental outcomes from those fields and how we may be able to find mutually beneficial practices for agriculture and the environment. To do this, we'll be monitoring plants, animals, soil, and cattle performance in CRP fields with a range of grazing treatments applied to them over the next few years. Learn more about the study at this link.
Water quality wetlands
We are examining wildlife use of wetlands constructed to improve surface water quality in Iowa by receiving water from tile-drained landscapes. Our research methods employ a variety of techniques, including capture-mark-recapture studies of turtles, coverboards for sampling reptiles and amphibians, and acoustic recording units to monitor vocalizations of birds and amphibians around wetlands. This research is funded by the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship. Learn more about the study at this link.
Acoustic monitoring
We often use Acoustic Recording Devices to study the habits and health of bird and amphibian populations across Iowa. If you found a device and have questions about it, you're on the right page!
The units are like a trail camera for sounds. It's called an Autonomous Recording Unit (ARU). We place them in public land along roadsides or on private land where we have landowner permission to record sounds during specific times of the day. The units record nearby sounds for around 2-hours a day and we use computer algorithms to identify all the wildlife that occur on the recordings.
Please do not disturb these units! We'll be back in a few weeks to pick them up and process the sound files. If a unit is in your way, please contact us and tell us what county and unit number (written in marker on the unit). We'll come the next day to get it moved.
