Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey, CALS and other institutions showed that all little brown bats exposed to G. destructans in their study developed white-nose syndrome while hibernating in captivity.

“Identifying G. destructans as causing the disease will help direct future research toward elucidating what makes the fungus pathogenic, what makes North American bats susceptible—and what environmental factors are important for disease progression and transmission to take place,” says Jeffrey Lorch, who was part of the research team as a forest and wildlife ecology graduate student in the UW–Madison Molecular and Environmental Toxicology Center.

Bat populations in the eastern U.S. have been declining at an alarming rate since 2006, when white-nose syndrome first appeared in New York state—a development of particular concern to the U.S. agricultural industry, which saves billions of dollars in pest control costs each year courtesy of insect-eating bats. Bat declines in the Northeast already have exceeded 80 percent.

As Lorch points out, understanding what causes the disease is a crucial first step in controlling it.

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“In high school I started looking for treatments and to help get them into clinical trials,” says Crandall. “And from there I started to take some genetics classes and found I really liked it.”

Crandall is committed to that investigation for the long haul and wants to earn a dual MD/PhD degree in medical genetics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “I hope it will prepare me to go out into the community and make a difference, not just in treating people who have cancer but other genetics-related diseases,” says Crandall, whose academic honors include a WALSAA Outstanding Sophomore Award and the Wallace Award for Genetics.

Crandall’s desire to serve takes him out of the lab and into the worlds of communication and campus leadership. In elementary school he began teaching himself computer programming and web design, drawn mostly by the challenge, he says, of finding easy-to-understand ways to convey complex information. He now heads his own web development and design business, SSII Designs, and also works as the website administrator for the Department of Genetics.

When he’s not studying or working, Crandall engages in student activities. He is a CALS Ambassador, charged with offering prospective students a peer’s view of CALS. He’s also president of the CALS student council and last semester was elected to the student services finance committee of the Associated Students of Madison (UW–Madison student government). There he plans to focus on a “metacouncil” initiative to create a much-needed representative body for all the student councils on campus, he says. Another project: to create a software enhancement to make DARS, the Degree Audit Reporting System students use to track requirements, easier to understand and implement.

One can’t accuse Crandall of not thinking big. The mystery is how he finds time for it. “A lot of sleepless nights,” he laughs. “I have this interesting schedule of doing 20-hour days. I’ll stay up until 4 a.m. or so, get a few hours’ sleep and then continue. And then on weekends I have huge naps.”

But it’s terrific terrain for goats. That’s why a land management firm was hired last summer to bring 85 Boer goats to this 4,000-acre DNR-managed property in Lafayette County. The goal is to restore the woodlands to oak savanna. This open mix of trees, sedges, wildflowers and grass dominated southern Wisconsin until settlers began controlling the wildfires that kept savannas free of brush.

“Oak savannas are of prime interest to both state and federal wildlife managers. That includes endangered species that require savanna habitat—red-headed woodpecker, vesper sparrow, brown thrasher—as well as game birds such as turkey and grouse,” says CALS landscape architecture professor John Harrington. Harrington leads a team that is evaluating the goats’ impact with support from a state program funding grazing research.

Goats love to browse on woody plants. They are used widely out West to get rid of such noxious weeds as leafy spurge and to clear brush from fire-prone hillsides.

But the idea doesn’t sit well with some conservationists. Free-ranging livestock have done major damage to wild areas through overgrazing, spreading weed seed and causing soil compaction leading to erosion. Harrington hopes the project at Yellowstone, in which the goats are carefully managed by landscape restoration experts, will change some minds.

“Environmentalists have been really gun-shy—or goat-shy,” says Harrington. “This study aims to see if we can use goats as a management tool without the problems grazing has caused in the past.” Harrington hopes to conduct further research this summer.

Graduate students Julia Ela and Katie Baumann, who monitored the animals, report that so far the damage has been negligible. There’s no evidence of soil compaction—and if there’s any problem with plant damage, it’s that there hasn’t been enough of it.

“The goats defoliate the shrubs, and they break and bend a lot of branches, but they don’t necessarily kill them,” Ela says. “It’s clear that repeated grazing cycles will be necessary.”

But just getting rid of the foliage opens up new management options, including reintroducing fire. “By opening up the cover, if we can get more grassy savanna plants growing back in, we can start applying both fire and grazing and achieve greater biodiversity,” Harrington says.

Getting goats to eat more has a benefit beyond brush clearance. The firms that provide the goats supplement their management fees by selling mature animals for slaughter, taking advantage of a Midwest market for goat meat that has been rising along with the presence of ethnic groups that prefer it. The plumper the animals are when they come out of the woods, the more they’ll fetch at market—and the more affordable this management practice can be.

I move on with the knowledge that CALS is on course. We receive more research awards than any other land-grant college in the nation and rank among the world’s top agricultural colleges in scientific impact. Recent achievements include discovering a key gene linked to obesity and diabetes, pioneering a sustainable way to grow potatoes that serves as a model for other crops and leading cutting-edge research on biofuels. Important discoveries at CALS continue apace; for more examples, see our feature on tech transfer success stories beginning on page 28.

While our current excellence is clear, our ability to sustain it is less so. State funding is declining and tuition hikes will not make up the losses, yet these two elements comprise the base budget that supports teaching and research. In coming years we will turn more to philanthropy to fill the gap.

In an environment of limited resources, it is more important than ever to make our priorities clear. Our new dean, Kate VandenBosch, will work with faculty, staff, students and the UW Foundation to define those priorities when she arrives in March. But a few areas are so central to our mission that they are certain to stay at the top:

• Need-based financial aid, which is offered at CALS through the Wisconsin Rural Youth Scholarship fund (see page 37 for more info). Forty percent of CALS students demonstrate significant financial need, and that percentage is likely to rise. We simply have to help our undergrads.

• Creating more endowed professorships, which enables us to hire more faculty. The college has lost 120 faculty positions since 1980. Since faculty members do almost all of CALS’ research and teaching, more positions mean more courses for students, more research dollars flowing into Wisconsin and more support for Wisconsin’s industries.

• Annual giving, which allows the college to put funding in areas of the most acute need. More annual gifts are needed in the current economic climate to help fill the gap between the cost of educating students and the dollars available.

Funding our future will be a challenge—but it’s a challenge we must meet together. Here at CALS, we look forward to supporting Dean VandenBosch’s leadership over the coming year and beyond.