RMBL’s Douglass Distinguished Science Lecture

Over the past two decades, the United States has lost a quarter of butterflies. This includes loss of common species like monarchs and cabbage whites, and rare species on the verge of extinction. We know this from data accumulated by thousands of individuals, and not only scientists, who have done tens of thousands of surveys and recorded millions of butterflies. Solutions to reverse declines are in our grasp, but need to be acted on now. Nick Haddad is an ecologist and conservation biologist at Michigan State University. He is a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and a member of the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior Program. Haddad is also the co-director of the Long Term Ecological Research site at the Kellogg Biological Station. He has published over 100 research articles in a diversity of the top science journals, including a recent book titled The Last Butterflies: A Scientist’s Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature. He is a pioneer of the concept of landscape corridors. For example, Nick started and has maintained the Savannah River Site Corridor Project as a graduate student (1993), and he has developed more global efforts, such as Conservation Corridors. If this isn’t exciting enough, he has worked in the artillery range at the US Military base, Fort Liberty, which turns out to be a “good” habitat for a rare and endangered butterfly that prefers naturally disturbed habitats like by beaver meadows. Nick’s most recent challenge is serving as the co-Director of the Kellogg Biological Station’s Long-Term Ecology Research where he is blending conservation, population biology, and large, landscape experiments in working or agricultural landscapes in the midwest. Nick is an RMBL alumnus (’91).