ESA Great Lakes Chapter

03/27/2026

Meet out keynote speaker for the Great Lakes regional meeting 2026!

01/23/2026

Great Lakes Ecology: Where everything meets
Regional meeting April 10-12, 2026
Cleveland State University
Cleveland, OH
A regional event for ecologists of all stripes.
If you live/work/do ecology in states & provinces that border the Great Lakes, come join us!

Call for abstracts open until March 10, 2026.
Submit your abstract here: https://esa.org/greatlakes/chapter-meetings/2026-regional-conference/
Registration coming in March.

08/13/2025

08/03/2025

This month's highlight is Ken Zidell. Ken is a masters student at University of Buffalo studying hemlocks in lower Michigan. He is building species distribution models for future distribution, and working on building a tool that can identify populations most at risk due to the combination of climate change and the hemlock woolly adelgid. Way to go Ken!

08/03/2025

This month we are highlighting the exciting work of Aruni Kadawatha. Aruni is a PhD candidate at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH. Her research explores the mechanistic relationships between plant responses to environmental heterogeneity, specifically light heterogeneity created by forest edge management practices like edge feathering. She studies these dynamics, combining fieldwork, greenhouse experiments, and an ecological model-based approach to understand plant plasticity, diversity, and ecosystem restoration potential. In this photo she is at the CWRU Farm working on the second chapter of her dissertation, which examines how light heterogeneity affects plant trait expression. Way to go Aruni!

06/11/2025

This month we are highlighting the research of our member and past-chair Dr. Binney Girdler. Dr. Girdler teaches Biology and Environmental Studies at in Michigan. Her research interests include studying the structure and dynamics of terrestrial plant communities. More recently she has zoomed in on the demography of Pitcher's thistle, an imperiled thistle on Great Lakes shoreline dunes. She also has an interest in applied conservation biology, and develop relationships with area natural resource agencies and non-profit conservation groups in order to match her expertise with their research needs.

***if you want your research to be highlighted in our social media, please send a DM**

04/24/2025

Share your work on ESA GLC social media
We’d love to highlight the work of our members. Use this google form to write 3-4 sentences about what you are doing, share a picture to illustrate it, and give us permission to put it on our accounts.
http://bit.ly/3CFCLYx
We’d also love to have more photos for our web page on the ESA website. If you have any you would like to contribute, you can share them on the google form as well (just let us know it’s a photo-only submission for the web)

04/23/2025

Funding from the Great Lakes Chapter is available for travel to ESA 2025 annual meeting in Baltimore. Our intention is to award $450 to three individuals - one student, one early career, and one non-academic. If there are no applicants in one category, we will give an award to the runner-up in one of the other categories. Preference will be given to Great Lakes Chapter members.

Fill out the application at : https://forms.gle/wHzovt252a5nxQCE6

The deadline for applying is May 15, 2025.

02/11/2025

We hope to offer another regional meeting in Spring 2026, tentatively in the Cleveland area. But that means planning has to start soon! We are looking for several volunteers to serve on a planning committee. Some tasks can be done remotely, so you don’t need to be in the area in order to volunteer.

We are also looking for people to serve on the 2025-26 executive committee for the chapter. Please consider nominating yourself or a willing colleague.

Please send us a direct message if you are interested and would like more information.

02/11/2025

Join our Spring Zoom Meet & Greet! A chance to increase connections between chapter members and talk about plans for the GLC at the ESA annual meeting in Baltimore in August, including our business meeting/social and how we hope to offer financial support to help some people attend.

Register here: https://csuohio.zoom.us/meeting/register/EXKKw8osR127auHPe74x7Q