Two UW Students to Present Research During Science Café in Cody April 4

Two University of Wyoming graduate students will present their research to the public during a Science Café Saturday, April 4, at 1:30 p.m.

The event, hosted by UW's Biodiversity Institute, will take place at Cody Craft Brewing, located at 1732 Sheridan Ave. in Cody. The event is free and open to the public. Beverages and pizza from Cody Craft Brewing will be available to purchase.

The two UW graduate students will present casual talks -- 10-15 minutes each -- about their research, with time for a question-and-answer session following each talk and at the end of the event.

"At the Biodiversity Institute, we believe it's important that students receiving our biodiversity graduate student research enhancement grants communicate their projects with the public. We encourage our awardees to connect with communities through public outreach that best suits their projects and audiences," says Abbey Morales, communications and marketing specialist for the Biodiversity Institute. "Our Science Cafés are particularly popular with communities and students as a way to share the amazing research that's happening at the University of Wyoming. We've hosted Science Cafés all over the state and look forward to connecting with people in a casual way."

The two UW graduate students and their projects are:

-- Walker Bensch, "Ground Nesting Bees and Elk: Grazing and Trampling Changes Pollinator Habitat." His research investigates how habitat disturbance by elk grazing and trampling changes habitat in ways relevant to the bee community with a focus on ground nesting bee habitat.

Of the nearly 4,000 bee species in North America, 80 percent of those species construct their nests in soil, Bensch says. For bees to reproduce successfully, they must have access to adequate floral forage, as well as suitable nesting habitat for the given species.

Pollinator conservation and management efforts are increasingly recognizing the importance of factors that influence the suitability of bee nesting habitat, such as ground cover composition and soil compaction. Prior research has shown that large grazing animals, such as cattle and bison, on managed rangeland influence the bee community, in part, due to their effect on nesting habitat.

"My research is the first to examine whether this relationship exists between bees and wild herding ungulates -- in this case, elk," Bensch says. "My talk will introduce listeners to the diversity of wild bees and their life histories; summarize some of the current science on bee conservation and management on rangelands; and will go over my project and its preliminary findings. We will discuss what this all means for pollinator conservation and management in the rangelands of Wyoming and the Mountain West."

Bensch, of Jupiter, Fla., is a second-year master's student studying zoology and physiology.

-- Marguerite Trost, "Botanical Exploration and Plant Biogeography in Northwest Montana." Trost was given the mission to conduct a two-year floristic inventory of Kootenai National Forest, a 2.2-million-acre forest of rugged mountains, deep valleys and big trees in northwest Montana.

Trost will discuss what she's learned about flowers, maps and mountains -- as well as about people -- in the process of collecting more than 10,000 specimens and identifying more than 1,200 species for the Rocky Mountain Herbarium.

"While you may think botanists have figured out by now where, how many and which plants grow in our environment, there's still plenty of gaps in knowledge -- and constant dynamic change -- when it comes to understanding what we collectively call the 'flora' of the Rocky Mountains," Trost says. "Northwest Montana's Kootenai National Forest is one such gap, a 'floristic hole' lacking comprehensive documentation of plant distribution and diversity, until now."

Trost, of Nashville, Tenn., is a second-year master's student studying botany.

For more information, go to the event's Facebook page or email Morales at [email protected].