THE NRES SECONDARY MAJOR IS SUPPORTED FINANCIALLY BY THE OFFICE OF THE PROVOST, COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE, COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES, DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGICAL & AGRICULTURAL ENGINEERING, AND GENEROUS ALUMNI AND DONORS LIKE YOU!

Grassland vegetation trends between 2001-2015 in Pottawatomie County.

Eleven students – from three colleges and seven different majors – successfully completed the NRES capstone course in Spring 2016.  Faculty advisors were Dr. Shawn Hutchinson (Geography) and Dr. Trisha Moore (Biological & Agricultural Engineering).

Students worked on two different projects including “Green Infrastructure at KSU” and “Statistical Analysis of Grassland Trends and Phenology using Satellite Time Series Imagery of the Flint Hills Ecoregion.”  Project reports and scientific poster presentations can be viewed and downloaded from the NRES website.

Congratulations to students Alison Cioffi (Biological Systems Engineering), Jade Edmonds (Biological Systems Engineering), Jackie Gehrt (Wildlife Ecology), Emily Johnson (Fishery, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology), Ryan Keast (Geology), Peter Masters (Biological Systems Engineering), Brooke Mechels  (Recreation Business), Kevin Moluf  (Civil Engineering), Kendra Risen (Geology), Tyler Vaughn (Geology), Tabitha Wyckoff (Physical Sciences).

Dr. Jim Stack presents “Plants, Pathogens, and Public Health” during the Spring 2016 semester.

The Spring 2016 NRES Seminar Series featured guest presentations by four K-State faculty.  Special thanks to Jim Stack (Plant Pathology), Nathan Nelson (Agronomy), Gerad Middendorf (Sociology), and Jida Wang (Geography) for their terrific talks.  Most seminars can be seen on the NRES YouTube channel in the NRES Seminar Series playlist.

The seminar series helps us achieve our student learning outcomes by expanding students broad-based knowledge of natural resources/environmental science and by illustrating the commonalities (and differences) in academic perspectives for studying and solving contemporary natural resources issues.

This series, which continues to grow in popularity since its inception in Spring 2014, is focused on undergraduate students and was established to help build a sense of community, an appreciation for the breadth and depth of issues and approaches, and awareness of current research in natural resources and environmental science fields.

At their Fall 2015 meeting, the NRES Governing Board approved the following course as a new block elective:

GEOG 508 Geographic Information Systems I
Applied Science and Technology

The NRES Secondary Major is pleased to include this course to our list of approved block electives.  If you have a suggestion for a new course that should be considered for inclusion in the program, please see the procedure outlined in our Suggest a New NRES Course web page.

Dr. Jim Sherow, Department of History.

We welcome back Dr. Jim Sherow from the Department of History as the newest member of the NRES Board of Directors.  Dr. Sherow is a historian Moore is an ecological engineer with teaching and research interests in sustainable soil and water use.  Long affiliated with the NRES Secondary Major, Dr. Sherow teaching and research interests are environmental history, Kansas history, North American Indian history, and the history of the American West.  His term runs from 2016-2019.