If you take a look around Wisconsin, one thing is apparent: The land is continually changing. Housing replaces vacant lots and farm fields; farm fields have replaced prairies and savannas – grasslands with oaks. Cities, of course, arise and expand.
Two Midwestern scientists have edited a book that takes a close look at the ecological changes Wisconsin has experienced over the past decades.
“The Vanishing Present,” published by the University of Chicago Press and due out this fall, presents a picture of what has been lost, “how the land has been shifting under our feet in ways that don’t get much attention,” said Donald Waller, a professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Waller worked on the book with Thomas Rooney, formerly a scientist at UW-Madison and now an assistant professor of biological sciences at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.