University of Wisconsin-Madison forest scientists are heading into Canada to determine how fires in the great boreal forest alter its uptake and release of carbon dioxide. Their findings will help policymakers understand the region’s role in global warming.

If you fish for sport, you want a trout or bass that puts up a fight. But if you raise fish for the frying pan, you’re better off with fish that are more laid back.

They backpack, rock-climb and canoe. They sit around a campfire, talking late into the night.

Wisconsin hunters face a record deer herd and an unprecedented opportunity this fall.

In survey responses, many private woodland owners say that scenery, wildlife habitat and recreational opportunities are more important to them than timber harvests. Now a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher has come up with a method to estimate just how valuable those non-market goods are.

James Borman has moved on to the happy hunting ground, but his legacy will touch people throughout Wisconsin. Over his lifetime, he assembled a massive collection of preserved wildlife specimens from North America and elsewhere. Borman, who died in 1999, willed his collection to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Donald H. Rusch, age 60, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, died after suffering a heart attack Sunday, Sept. 12, 1999 while hunting grouse in the badlands of North Dakota with his wife and three bird-dogs.

Next time you admire the plant diversity in a southern Wisconsin woodland, thank the neighboring farmers. A University of Wisconsin-Madison study has shown that while deer numbers in parts of south-central Wisconsin were above most damage-threshold estimates, foraging whitetails did little damage to woodland plants because they filled up on farm crops.

Deer herds regularly thinned by hunting had little impact on riverbottom plant life, a University of Wisconsin-Madison study has shown. “Quality deer management” and traditional deer hunts seemed equally effective in preserving plant populations along the Wisconsin River, according to Rebecca Christoffel, a wildlife ecology graduate student at the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. On the other hand, a deer herd that flourished under a strict no-hunting policy took its toll on plant and animal life in the area, she found.

The patchwork of woodlands and farm fields in southern Wisconsin can support more than 100 deer per square mile – but drivers and farmers won’t support that many deer. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources regulates deer abundance by balancing the public’s tolerance for deer-vehicle collisions and farmers’ tolerance to crop damage against hunters’ desire for abundant deer and the public’s desire to see deer. Private woodland owners control access to and manage most wooded deer habitat in Wisconsin, making them