Conservation News
Conservation draws students
By Mike Wowk
ARMADA -- Miami University researcher Rob Blair calls himself a conservation biologist.
A relatively new field, conservation biology is concerned with maintaining the Earth's diversity of animals and plants "through research and action both scientific and social," according to a Miami University Web site.
Blair said he is examining the genes of sugar maple trees because he wants to measure the effect that houses, roads, shopping malls and other construction have had on the forests of the eastern United States, where wetlands exist.
Forests today are fragmented, he said. "We have these dinky little patches of woods," Blair said, instead of the continent-spanning forests of centuries ago.
It's a field of study with which the high school students participating in his research say they can empathize.
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