Who? The program and content level is designed for adults, ages 16+ recommended.

When? The series is scheduled for the second Tuesday of every month, 11:30AM - 1:00PM. The 2023 series will be virtual during the winter months (January - March, November - December), and offer a hybrid option during the growing season (April - October). 

Where? During winter months, the program will be virtual only, using a Zoom webinar format. You can pre-register and access the webinar for the monthly talk.

During the growing season, the program will be hybrid. Those wanting to participate in person can join us in the Lindeman Center located at 2660 Fawn Lake Dr. NE, East Bethel, MN, 55005. No registration is required to attend in person. Those wanting to participate virtually will use the Zoom webinar format. You can pre-register and access the webinar for the monthly talk. The presentation will be streamed live from Cedar Creek. See additional information below.

Additional information for hybrid participants: The hybrid option from April - October will include a guided outdoor field tour related to the research for in-person participants only. No registration is required for in-person participants.

Need help with Zoom?

Instructions to navigate Zoom can be downloaded here: Joining a Zoom webinar

Questions can be directed to Kara Baldwin at [email protected]

See recordings of past programs.

Program description coming soon

About the Researcher - Dr. Eric Seabloom

Researcher biography coming soon

Dr. Sam Potter will discuss how climate change is projected to impact wildfire risk in Minnesota this century. He will walk through various publicly available tools you can use to evaluate local climate change, forest health, and wildfire risk and talk about climate adaptation actions we can take individually or collectively to reduce future wildfire risks.

About the Researcher - Sam Potter

Dr. Sam Potter, an Applied Climate Scientist with the University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership, grew up in Todd County and went to college at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He has a PhD in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from Princeton University and has spent time as an academic, a climate communicator, and a climate consultant. Sam's academic background is in climate modeling and the general circulation of the atmosphere but he is excited to learn and talk about all aspects of the climate system.  

As top predators, raptors provide powerful insight into the health of our shared environment. For more than 50 years, The Raptor Center (TRC) at the College of Veterinary Medicine has worked to protect these birds—delivering world-class medical care to injured raptors from across Minnesota and beyond, training professionals worldwide in best practices for rehabilitation and long-term care, engaging the public through meaningful education and outreach, and turning patient data into valuable scientific knowledge. In this presentation, Assistant Director Lori Arent and Education Director Evangeline Holley will highlight the critical role science plays in TRC’s mission, explain how the center responds to young raptors in need, and explore ways each of us can help protect raptors and the natural spaces we all depend on.

About the Scientists

Lori Arent is the Assistant Director of TRC with over 30 years of experience in raptor care and rehabilitation. She has served in multiple roles across the organization, including clinic manager and lead rehabilitator, where she oversaw the recovery of injured raptors and helped advance best practices in avian care. She later developed a suite of online self-study and instructor-led courses that train raptor professionals around the world. Lori holds a master’s degree in avian physiology, earned under the mentorship of Dr. Gary Duke, one of TRC’s cofounders. She is also a master falconer and the author of Raptors in Captivity: Guidelines for Care and Management, the gold-standard reference used by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for ambassador bird care.

Evangeline Holley is the newly appointed Education Director at TRC. Prior to this position, she directed a STEM outreach program at a non-profit and taught science to middle and high school students. She has a Masters in Environmental and Natural Science Education, and has always been passionate about environmental science and animals. Her undergraduate degree is in Biology with a focus on Ecology and Evolution, and she has previously conducted and published research on the behavior of zebra fish.

About the Scientist - Dr. Kathleen Thompson

Kathleen Thompson is a fungal ecologist who is fascinated by the many roles fungi play in our ecosystems. Currently, she is serving as a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Minnesota, assessing how dimensions of diversity — both within and surrounding — oak trees shape their associated fungi. She completed her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying mycorrhizal associations and their relationship to forest structure, and her master's degree at Iowa State University, focused on the diversity and conservation of lichens in the Driftless Area. When she is not ooo-ing and ahh-ing over fungi, she is doing so over slime molds. 

This June's Lunch with a Scientist will highlight two research projects by emerging professionals serving at Cedar Creek as an Environmental Education Apprentice and Minnesota GreenCorps Member. With support from UMN researchers, community organizations, and Cedar Creek Staff, these young professionals are supporting Cedar Creek initiatives and projects while learning more about the scientific process. 

Talk 1: Red-Headed Woodpecker Cavity Cameras

Dr. Elena West’s Red-Headed Woodpecker Cavity Cam platform has been collecting thousands of images and videos of red-headed woodpeckers and other cavity nesters at Cedar Creek since 2019. Datasets have been uploaded to the online Zooniverse platform, allowing volunteers from around the world to help Dr. West and her team identify species and behaviors to support ongoing research questions. As part of her apprenticeship at Cedar Creek, Megan Myers and her supervisor Dr. Kara Baldwin have been collaborating with Dr. West to create a data validation protocol to support using volunteer data in scientific publications.

Talk 1 Speaker: Megan Meyers

Megan Myers is an Environmental Education Apprentice at Cedar Creek. She graduated from Concordia College, Moorhead in 2023 with degrees in International Affairs and Spanish. After graduating, she worked as a Climate Impact Corps member at Urban Roots in St. Paul, where she helped with urban tree canopy restoration, invasive species removal, urban farming, beekeeping, and youth education programs. From 2024-2025 she served as a Minnesota GreenCorps member at Cedar Creek. She has experience as an Interpretive Naturalist Volunteer at the Como Zoo and currently volunteers weekly at the UMN Raptor Center.

Talk 2: Testing Black Locust Removal Techniques

As part of her Minnesota GreenCorps service project, Sierra Vilmo is studying Black Locust. It is difficult to remove Black Locust from our prairie landscapes, and her research focuses on finding more effective treatments for managing this invasive species. During this presentation Sierra will discuss what Black locust is, how this tree can impact native ecosystems, and what is currently being done to manage black locust at Cedar Creek. This talk will also highlight collaborations with Anoka County Conservation District and share an opportunity to get involved with data collection later this summer. 

Talk 2 Speaker: Sierra Vilmo 

Sierra Vilmo is a Minnesota GreenCorps Member serving at Cedar Creek. She graduated from Minnesota State University Moorhead in 2022 with a degree in Ecology and Evolutionary biology and an emphasis in Scientific Illustration. During undergrad she studied Merlin nesting behaviors and presented at the 2021 International Raptor conference. She also studied Avian ecology and Painted Turtle population ecology. 

Ecologists have long puzzled over the mechanisms of species coexistence, or in other words, the mechanisms that maintain diversity. As the world loses species at an unprecedented rate due to global change factors, there is a pressing need to understand how diversity is maintained to preserve the richness of our communities. Dynamic population models have been a key tool for understanding population growth rates, species interactions and coexistence mechanisms. One of the most widely used dynamic population models is the Beverton-Holt model. Originally developed to understand population growth for fisheries, it has now been widely applied to understand the coexistence mechanisms behind diversity in annual plant communities. This is because, in annual plant communities, individuals and the number of seeds produced are easily distinguished and counted, facilitating the application of the model to understand population growth. As a result, our current understanding of coexistence mechanisms, and therefore diversity maintenance, mainly involves annual plant communities and we do not know much about coexistence mechanisms in longer-lived systems. However, perennial plant communities, like the ones at Cedar Creek, are more common worldwide than annual communities, leaving us with gaps in our understanding of plant coexistence. My research aims to modify dynamic population model, like the Beverton-Holt model, to accommodate available percent cover data for perennial plant communities so that widely available long-term data may be leveraged towards understanding species coexistence in perennial systems. We applied a modified Beverton-Holt model to data from a perennial tall grass prairie experiment at Cedar Creek that manipulates Nitrogen availability in the soil and atmospheric CO₂ (BioCON). So far, we have found that simpler versions of our model were more effective at recuperating patterns in the data. Our results also showed that global change factors have the potential to alter the outcome of species coexistence. These results suggest that our model has the potential to leverage long-term cover data from LTERs, NEON, and even remote sensing to quantify species coexistence. Leveraging this data will ultimately give us the necessary tools to understand how to preserve biodiversity. 

About July's Scientist

Alejandra Martínez Blancas is an Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at El Paso. She is a quantitative plant ecologist working at the interface of population and community ecology. Her focus is on understanding the role of species interactions and abiotic factors on diversity maintenance in plant communities.

We are currently recruiting and scheduling for 2026 season. We will update this website as programs topics and speakers are finalized. 

We are currently recruiting and scheduling for 2026 season. We will update this website as programs topics and speakers are finalized. 

We are currently recruiting and scheduling for 2026 season. We will update this website as programs topics and speakers are finalized. 

Program description coming soon. 

About the Scientist - Dr. Adam Clark

I am broadly interested in how ecological communities persist across space and time. To me, the defining characteristic of ecological communities is that they self-assemble, and that they maintain themselves across large spatial and temporal scales even when faced with perturbations and disturbance. I find this fascinating because it suggests that predictive understanding of community ecology could help us engineer ecological communities that provide particular desired goods and services, but are able to maintain themselves with minimal inputs.

This December, we are excited to welcome Dr. Laís Petri. Her research incorporates 25 years of data from the E001 and E002 experiments at Cedar Creek, in which grasslands were disturbed and have undergone yearly fertilization since 1982, with weather data from the environmental station. Through this work, Dr. Laís Petri explored whether precipitation and temperature experienced up to two years prior are influenced by these global change events (i.e., disturbance and fertilization). 

About the December Scientist 

Dr. Laís Petri is a plant community and quantitative ecologist. She uses the scale and environmental breadth that invasion ecology provides to understand how plant communities assemble and respond to global change. Her research combines experimental and observational studies, data synthesis, and big data analysis in a Bayesian framework to study plant communities affected by invasive species within the context of a changing world. She has studied plant communities in tropical to temperate ecosystems, both in urban and natural environments. She is originally from Brazil, where she graduated with a degree in Biology at the Universidade Federal de São Carlos, campus Sorocaba, and earned an MS degree at the Instituto de Botânica de São Paulo. In 2018, she started her PhD at the University of Michigan, then did a 2.5-year postdoc at Michigan State University. In 2026, Dr. Laís Petri joined Southern Illinois University Carbondale as an Assistant Professor.