As an Office of Undergraduate Research Fellow, Nina conducted research this summer titled, "Responses of bur oak leaf physiology and spectroscopy to elevated temperature, CO2 and precipitation variability". She presented this work at the Fall Undergraduate Research Festival.

Riley and Mainul represented our lab very well at the 3MT yesterday! Congratulations to both of you for your hard work. Congratulations to Mainul, who won the People's Choice award for Social Sciences and Humanities.

Congratulations to Sam for being awarded a NASA Iowa Space Grant Fellowship in the amount of $6,000, which will support his dissertation work on detection of harmful algal blooms with remote sensing.

In the Capture Your Research Competition, Mainul won 2nd place for People's Choice, and Jalissa won 3rd place in the Graduate division. Thank you for sharing images from your research. Congratulations!

Jalissa Pirro and Sam Taylor were invited to spend the week at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. They are getting facility tours, participating in PlantCV workshops, and sharing their research, which will be incorporated into PlantCV.

Congratulations to Jalissa Pirro and Mainul Islam for being finalists in the 2025 Capture Your Research Competition! Vote now for the People's Choice Award.

“The bur oak is an icon for Iowa,” says Mainul Islam, a doctoral student in the School of Earth, Environment, and Sustainability (SEES). “If you go to any park or backyard here, you will see at least one bur oak tree.”

This summer, Nina Osborne participated in a growth chamber experiment led by Dr. Dannenberg and Dr. Meerdink. Students used the LICOR and spectrometer to measure the response of bur oak leaves to different levels of temperature, precipitation, and carbon dioxide.

A H M Mainul Islam attended the ESA's annual conference in Baltimore to share his research titled, "Exploring the impact of Bur Oak Blight (BOB) on the Photosynthetic Capacity of Bur Oaks".

Sixteen undergraduate students from across the country gathered for the 2025 Edge of Space Academy, an immersive, hands-on research experience focused on space-based instrumentation for observing Earth and space.

On July 12, 2025, Meerdink and Pirro represented LOQATE at the BioBlitz by taking the drone and thermal camera to the Ashton Prairie Living Laboratory.

On July 1st, the School of Earth, Environment, and Sustainability (SEES) was launched. Check it out: https://youtu.be/gR7xr4DkTcg

This year's Iowa City Citywide Garage Sales will take place on June 20-21, and Dr. Meerdink has volunteered to map the address locations for the garage sales to make it easier for shoppers to find those deals.

Congratulations to Nina Osborne and Isaac Young for winning the Nicholas L. Paape Memorial Scholarship. This award is for meritorious students pursuing a degree in Geographic Information Sciences.

Congratulations to Sam Taylor, Riley Pacer, and Jalissa Pirro for receiving Graduate Student Research Awards to fund their summer research. Sam's proposal titled "Improving the Spatiotemporal Capacity of HAB Monitoring in Small, Freshwater Lakes by Fusing Daily NASA Satellite and Weather Products" is supported by the Professor Gerry Rushton Academic Excellence Fund. Riley's proposal titled “Assessing the Biogeophysical Cooling Potential of Restored Prairie with Eddy Covariance & UAV Remote Sensing,” is supported by the Andrea Hauer and David Perret Student Success Fund. Jalissa's proposal titled “Assessing the Long-Term Productivity of Miscanthus x giganteus Using UAS-based LiDAR and Multispectral Remote Sensing,” is supported by the Harold H. McCarty Memorial Fund.