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Researchers use car collisions with deer to shed light on mysterious animal-population phenomena
LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas researcher and colleagues uncovered an unexpected relationship between spatial synchrony and animal population cycles by parsing data on weather, deer populations and deer-vehicle collisions in Wisconsin. The findings could transfer to a wide range of other species and ecological systems, with ramifications for agriculture, fisheries, transportation managers and the insurance industry.
Law Journal Symposium to explore international legal challenges
LAWRENCE — Legal scholars from around the world will present papers and discuss the topic of “International Legal Challenges Facing the New U.S. Administration: Critical Analyses from the American Heartland” at the Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy’s annual symposium Feb. 12. The online event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Virtual exhibition reveals story of ‘Lonely Homesteader’ during western land rush
LAWRENCE — Lily Stearns was a nimble liar, a master manipulator and an all-around opportunist. She was also a beautiful writer and an intrepid homesteader, according to a University of Kansas researcher who created a virtual exhibition dedicated to this pioneering woman titled “American Land Rush: ‘A Lonely Homesteader’ Searches for Security in the Montana Homestead Boom.” The exhibition is hosted by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society in Munich, Germany.
KU scholar documents African refugees’ journeys to Europe, helps improve programs to assist transition
LAWRENCE — War, famine and persecution have prompted millions to flee their homes as refugees around the world. While working in Italy, a University of Kansas scholar saw scores of African refugees arrive there, which grew into a research project to understand their experiences and assess how local agencies can better help them assimilate in a new society.
Full stories below.
Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected], @BrendanMLynch
Researchers use car collisions with deer to shed light on mysterious animal-population phenomena
LAWRENCE — For at least a century, ecologists have wondered at the tendency for populations of different species to cycle up and down in steady, rhythmic patterns.
“These cycles can be really exaggerated — really huge booms and huge busts — and quite regular,” said Daniel Reuman, professor of ecology & evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas and senior scientist at the Kansas Biological Survey. “It attracted people’s attention because it was kind of mysterious. Why would such a big thing be happening?”
A second observation in animal populations might be even harder to fathom: Far-flung communities of species, sometimes separated by hundreds of miles, often fluctuate in synchrony with one another — an effect known as “spatial synchrony.”
Now, Reuman and colleagues have written a new study in the peer-reviewed journal Ecology Letters showing these two effects to be linked, but not in the way that could be expected. By parsing data on weather, deer populations and deer-vehicle collisions in Wisconsin, the investigators show spatial synchrony could be driving population cycles, rather than the reverse.
Reuman compared the linked population phenomena to a famous physics experiment where two grandfather clocks are placed next to each other against a wall.
“Over time, the pendulums become synchronized,” he said. “The reason is because both produce tiny vibrations in the wall. And the vibrations from one of them in the wall influences the other one just a little bit — enough to get the pendulums to eventually become synchronous. One reason people think these cycling populations are easy to synchronize is if a few individuals can get from one to the other, like vibrations that go through the wall for the grandfather clocks. It’s enough to bring these cycling populations into synchrony. That’s how people thought about things before we started our work with this paper.”
But Reuman and his co-authors describe this process can actually go the other way around. The researchers found weather patterns driven by El Nino influenced predictable fluctuations in deer populations across the state as well as synchrony between different deer populations.
Looking at datasets on local temperature and snowfall variations across the state, the team averaged them out, finding “buried underneath all of that randomness a hardly noticeable, but synchronous fluctuation,” Reuman said.
The three-to-seven-year weather fluctuation directly influenced synchronous population cycles in the state’s deer.
“All that local variation would cancel out because it might be a little bit warmer in one place, a little bit colder and another place — but that overall synchronous component, which is related to El Nino in this case, reinforces all the local variation,” Reuman said. “And it’s the same years with deer. So, the reason why the synchrony is causing the cycling is because the synchrony is occurring only on the relevant timescales of the fluctuation. It’s only that component of the three-to-seven-year oscillations that synchronize. All the faster and slower oscillations are all local variation that cancels out when you average across the whole state.”
Moreover, the researchers found these deer population fluctuations predicted the numbers of car collisions with deer statewide more than traffic volume or other factors.
“It was a surprise to us when we figured out that that’s what was going on,” Reuman said. “What it amounts to is a new mechanism for these major population cycles and a new way that they can come about. That’s fundamentally different from the old way that people were thinking about it.”
Lead author Tom Anderson, assistant professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, said the work shows it’s “still possible to discover new information about well-studied scientific phenomena.”
“Researchers have been examining population cycles for more than 100 years, yet our study still uncovered new information,” Anderson said. “That is partly what makes science, and this project in particular, exciting, to be able to uncover new ways of thinking about something that others have thought about extensively. Our work also has important implications in a variety of other areas, including how fluctuations in populations of plants or animals will respond to climate change and that organisms that are economically and socially important to humans, like white-tailed deer, can undergo periods of high and low abundance due to naturally occurring processes across large spatial scales, which might have implications for their subsequent management.”
According to co-author Lawrence Sheppard, postdoctoral researcher with the KU Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and the Kansas Biological Survey, the unexpected relationship between spatial synchrony and population cycles was revealed by “new methods to study the different timescales of change in an ecosystem.”
“We trace how particular timescales of change arise in the data and are communicated from one part of the system to another using ‘wavelets,’ which I first learned to apply to biomedical data during my Ph.D.,” Sheppard said. “In particular, here we find that spatial synchrony on a particular timescale arises from an association with winter climate on that timescale, and the spatial synchrony in the deer population has a substantial statewide impact on human interactions with the deer.”
Additional authors were Jonathan Walter of KU and the University of Virginia and Robert Rolley of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
Reuman said the findings could transfer to a wide range of other species and ecological systems, with ramifications for agriculture, fisheries, transportation managers and the insurance industry.
“We started out trying to understand the nature of synchrony in these things and trying to figure out what was causing it, and what its consequences are,” Reuman said. “It’s turned out to be related to these overall climatic indices. Now for deer, basically it’s bad winter weather that we’re talking about that synchronizes things. For another particular species, the nature of their relationship with the weather in a location is going to make the difference.”
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Law Journal Symposium to explore international legal challenges
LAWRENCE — Legal scholars from around the world will present papers and discuss the topic of “International Legal Challenges Facing the New U.S. Administration: Critical Analyses from the American Heartland” at the Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy’s annual symposium Feb. 12.
The symposium will run from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. The online event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Preview the complete schedule online.
“After a tumultuous political year, our symposium offers a great opportunity to discuss upcoming challenges facing the Biden administration,” said Symposium Editor Reiley Pankratz, a third-year law student. “The symposium will discuss the global perspective about where the U.S. goes from here. We are excited to host international speakers.”
The symposium will advance contemporary discourse and provide a timely forum after the 2020 U.S. presidential election and President Joe Biden’s recent inauguration.
Presenters include:
1. Raj Bhala, University of Kansas School of Law, international trade law
2. Laura Clark Fey, Fey LLC, privacy law
3. David Gantz, University of Arizona College of Law, trade and international economics law
4. Anupam Jha, University of Delhi Faculty of Law, international criminal and human rights law
5. Mark Johnson, Dentons U.S. LLP, election law
6. Petros Mavroidis, Columbia Law School, foreign and comparative law
7. Asif Qureshi, Korea University School of Law, international economic law
Scholarship associated with the program will be published in a future issue of the Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy. Contact Pankratz at [email protected] for more information.
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Contact: Jon Niccum, KU News Service, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
Virtual exhibition reveals story of ‘Lonely Homesteader’ during western land rush
LAWRENCE — Lily Stearns was a nimble liar, a master manipulator and an all-around opportunist.
She was also a beautiful writer and an intrepid homesteader, according to Sara Gregg, associate professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Kansas.
“Stearns tried her best to make a place for herself and her family, given some extremely adverse circumstances,” Gregg said. “I have been struck by how easy it was to piece together a full account of the type of human being she was, even though the records of her life are somewhat sparse.”
Gregg has created a virtual exhibition dedicated to this pioneering woman titled “American Land Rush: ‘A Lonely Homesteader’ Searches for Security in the Montana Homestead Boom.” This open-access exhibition is hosted by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society in Munich, Germany, and it offers a microhistorical survey of Stearns’ homesteading days in northeastern Montana from 1912 to 1918.
The exhibition explains how Stearns’ struggle to “sink roots in Montana contextualizes the larger economic, social and environmental challenges for those who envisioned taming the land — and themselves — in the face of larger climatic and geopolitical forces.”
While it’s just one of millions of stories concerning individuals homesteading in the western United States, Gregg connected with how timeless this drama was, despite it taking place more than a century prior.
“You see firsthand how our contemporaries have complex lives. But all those dramas and complications were really evident in Lily’s life as well,” she said.
“‘Lily was orphaned at 8, jumped around from relative to relative until she got married at 23, left her first marriage because of physical abuse, left her second marriage because of verbal abuse and left her third marriage because of financial conflict. Throughout it all, she stuck it out, determined to make a place for herself in the world,” Gregg said.
Homesteading might seem rather hard to relate to for people who live in modern, metropolitan environments. Yet Stearns faced similar unfamiliarity with the challenges that confronted her.
“Many of those who homesteaded over time had actually come from urban areas,” said Gregg, who grew up primarily in Virginia. “They imagined finding new opportunities on a farm of their own. Many of the people who homesteaded had been farmers elsewhere, but many of them were bookkeepers, stenographers, doctors or patent medicine salesmen who moved out in search of security, just like Lily.”
Not all of them were suited for (or lasted in) these rural areas. But they were keen to take a piece of the vast continent that had been wrested from the hands of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains, a new generation of residents lured by the optimistic promise of “free land” and a bright future.
“That desire for a farm resonates right now with American audiences who are leaving cities in search of more bucolic areas where they can telecommute, find quiet and enjoy a little bit more space in the COVID-19 era,” she said.
Gregg, who came to KU in 2010, ran across Stearns’ original letters at the Montana Historical Society while doing research for a book several years ago. It wasn’t until the following year when she returned to the Montana town of Tampico that she felt a true sense of the place Stearns was describing in these letters and the court case related to her claim.
“The ways in which the landscape both opened and confined her options were an important part of the story that I have pieced together. The virtual exhibition provides a tiny set of snapshots of that work, but the format of the exhibition allows for a diverse range of sources, and it pulls together many of the photographs I use as a means of situating some of the stories Lily had to tell about herself,” she said.
When most people think of homesteading, they envision it as a being a Kansas or Nebraska phenomenon, associated with the 1870s and 1880s. In fact, the vast majority of successful claims were entered in the 20th century in the northern Plains of North Dakota and Montana.
Stearns’ tale is part of Gregg’s larger book project titled “Little Piece of Earth: The Hidden History of the Homestead Era.” Each story culminates in the history of four representative settler-colonial families — including Stearns — that moved on to the Plains. Long before the homesteaders arrived, the nation-state had moved in to modify these areas to open them up for re-settlement. But well before the state, the Plains landscapes were modified by diverse human uses of the land, and each homestead chapter is paired with a section on the Indigenous communities that would have moved across the landscape and situated other lifeways on the Plains.
An environmental historian whose focus is on U.S. land policy in the 19th and 20th century, Gregg appreciated Stearns both as a historical subject and as a human being.
“I admire her intrepidness, her willingness to keep going in spite of incredible odds and the ways in which she could capture the urgency of her condition in her letters. I have no record of whether she attended school regularly or if she learned to read and write on her own. But her eloquence and force of will really comes through in some concrete ways in her letters,” Gregg said.
If the professor could ask her subject any question, what would it be?
“I’d ask what Lily thought she would find on the Great Plains,” she responded.
Ultimately, Gregg believes she’s learned the answer through her own perseverance.
“Lily found resilience … the reservoir of strength and creativity in herself,” she said.
“She entered a fraudulent stock-raising homestead claim for her daughter, which was patently against the law. Over the decades she looked for ways she could develop partnerships with men to support her desires — or needs — and to make the farm run. Deep down, she was searching for security and stability. But I would still be eager to know what she thought she would find in Montana … and whether she ever imagined she would stay on that farm.”
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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
KU scholar documents African refugees’ journeys to Europe, helps improve programs to assist transition
LAWRENCE — War, famine and persecution have prompted millions to flee their homes as refugees around the world. While working in Italy, a University of Kansas scholar saw scores of African refugees arrive there, which grew into a research project to understand their experiences and assess how local agencies can better help them assimilate in a new society.
Terry Koenig, professor of social welfare at KU, has partnered with the Universitá Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in leading a study abroad program to Italy for the past seven years. Student participants visit agencies where Italian social workers assist clients, including homeless shelters, psychiatric clinics, disability centers, foster care settings and health and aging facilities. The group saw boats of immigrants arriving in Italy or returning there after being turned away from other nations.
Eventually, Koenig partnered with Cometa, a foster care agency that also supports a vocational training program in Como, Italy, dedicated to helping young adults, including many African refugees, learn Italian and gain job skills. That led to a partnership in which researchers interviewed more than 30 African refugees, Cometa staff and internship business partners to learn about the migrants’ journeys and the effectiveness of the program to help them settle in Italy.
“I was fascinated by their journey,” Koenig said of the sub-Saharan African refugees. “In the seven years I was going to Como, the refugee crisis broke out and we often witnessed the stories about migrants who didn’t make it, got stranded, human-trafficked or kidnapped along the way or drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. That all happened when we had students there, and we were seeing the face of Europe change.”
Koenig worked with Paolo Nardi of Cometa and Michael Williams, retired professor of journalism at KU, to conduct interviews in June 2019, write a study and present findings at the European Research Network Vocational Education and Training Conference.
While all of the participants described experiencing trauma during their journey, their individual experiences were not fully considered as part of the training at Cometa, the researchers found. Such vocational training programs often have dropout rates as high as 30 to 40%.
Koenig, who was a practicing social worker at veterans’ hospitals prior to entering academia, said that is largely due to a lack of consideration of participants’ journey, where they are from and how such factors affect a person’s ability to work in a new society.
“It’s almost like the person is devoid from the training. These young people had seen violence, been trafficked, had fallen into slavery and been forced to work for almost nothing,” Koenig said. “It’s taken many of them as long as four years to make their journey because of all these hardships. I didn’t realize going in just how dramatic and traumatic their journeys were.”
The findings are not intended as a criticism of Italy’s vocational training but instead as a way to help those working with refugees to improve their success rate. While social work with refugees is newer in Italy and much of Europe, Cometa staff and local officials showed commitment to improve their services. Participants reported awareness of Europe’s longtime role in colonialism, war and economic policies that have driven many in Africa to seek refuge. They also indicated a desire to help because inaction would only lead to further misunderstandings and potentially violence between Italian locals and refugees.
The case study with Cometa indicated the importance of training refugees in the local language, providing social support, identifying barriers to the job market and the social exclusion participants experienced. Several of the participants shared success stories in receiving job training, language education and social and family support. Participants have successfully landed jobs in Como’s hospitality industry as well as work in printing and textiles.
Koenig said she hoped to return to Como on sabbatical and follow up with the participants who shared their stories and see how well they have fared, as well as to work further with local citizens to better understand how the two can work together.
“Their journeys were punctuated by violence, but they were also punctuated by kindness,” Koenig said. “There were also a lot of moments of awakening the young people spoke about, where they became conscious, or aware of the situation around them and became more understanding of violence and discriminatory realities. We have to be able to acknowledge who these young people are, where they are from and their experiences to help them integrate into society. It’s not just about learning skills, it’s the emotional and social adjustment as well, and I think that’s the case everywhere.”
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