Please join us for our Annual Member Meeting (which was postponed from Dec. 2024) and Monthly Program! A vote to approve our 2025 Board will happen right before the program.

Overview:

Dr. Benjamin Van Doren will discuss the latest scientific understanding of how migratory birds use urban areas, the challenges they face, and how we can help mitigate these impacts, with a focus on Illinois and Chicago.

About our speaker:

Dr. Benjamin Van Doren studies the responses of migratory birds to environmental change. His research spans spatial and population scales and unites ecology, evolution, behavior, and conservation. Dr. Van Doren earned a Ph.D. in Zoology from Oxford University, and he has received achievement awards from the American Ornithological Society, Linnean Society of London, and Zoological Society of London. Dr. Van Doren recently joined the University of Illinois as a faculty member in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, where he leads the Migration Biology Lab. His lab’s recent work focuses on how light pollution and human-dominated landscapes influence migratory birds’ ecology and behavior and how new machine learning techniques and modeling approaches are pushing ecology forward while facilitating opportunities for conservation action.

About Our Monthly Programs:

Guest speakers present on a variety of topics throughout the year. Programs are typically held in the Urbana Free Library auditorium on the first Thursday of the month (no programs in January, June, July, or August).