UW-Madison Department of Biological Systems Engineering

A Public Service Announcement from BSE - Be prepared and stay safe!

https://www.facebook.com/136323011443/posts/10158015091001444

Wisconsin’s Tornado and Severe Weather Awareness Week is coming up quickly, April 12-16. Don’t forget to put April 15 on your calendar to participate in Wisconsin’s statewide tornado drill! https://www.weather.gov/mkx/Tornadodrill2021

Shameless self-promotion time. We think we're pretty good - now it's official!

Biological systems engineering graduate program ranks highly in U.S. News 2022 guide – eCALS Biological systems engineering graduate program ranks highly in U.S. News 2022 guide April 2, 2021 | UW–Madison graduate programs are once again ranked among the nation’s best in the 2022 edition of U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Graduate Schools,” including one housed in CALS. “Our gr...

Dr Brian Luck will present as a part of Extension’s Badger Crop Connect on April 14th. The topic is Planter Setup and Operation.
Info and a link to register at

Extension’s Badger Crop Connect begins it’s 2021 season in March Agronomists, crop consultants and farmers can get timely crop updates from University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension experts by joining the Badger Crop Connect webinars.

More BSE in the news!
In the latest issue of the Soil Science Society of America Journal, Jordi Francis is featured on the cover for a paper that Professor Robert Anex and he published. Jordi is pictured with one of the automatic soil chambers for monitoring N2O emissions that was designed and built at Biological Systems Engineering.
Check out the article:

Flux intensity and diurnal variability of soil N2O emissions in a highly fertilized cropping system Manually sampling N2O soil fluxes is labor‐intensive and sampling frequencies are often insufficient to capture daily variation in N2O soil flux, compromising the accuracy of emission estimates. Know...

Dr Xuejun Pan was quoted in a recent article in Wired Magazine about the possibilities of wood made in a lab.

Nature Makes Wood. Could a Lab Make It Better? For millennia, humans have been chopping down trees and harvesting plants. Lab-grown plant material might change that.

Dr. Zhou Zhang will present on Feb 25th for the Weston Roundtable Series. Register at the link below to get the Zoom link
https://forms.gle/sUmvPCtNSmX9N9s8A

Title: Alfalfa Yield Prediction Using UAV-Based Hyperspectral Imagery and Ensemble Learning
Abstract:
Alfalfa is a valuable and intensively produced forage crop in the United States, and timely estimation of its yield can inform management decisions. However, traditional yield assessment approaches are laborious and time-consuming. Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained attention due to their efficient data acquisition. In addition, compared with other imaging modalities, hyperspectral data can offer higher spectral fidelity for constructing narrow-band vegetation indices for yield modeling. In this study, we performed an in-season alfalfa yield prediction using UAV-based hyperspectral images.

Congrats to BSE student MaKayla Erdman for receiving the MREA & Straubel Foundation Clean Energy Leadership Award !
https://www.midwestrenew.org/scholarships/

BSE Extension faculty have created a course titled "Manure Management to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions".

This course has the objective to give you a general understanding of manure management operations in dairy farms, the intensity and mechanisms through which GHGs are emitted from manure management operations, and strategies to reduce these emissions at the farm.
The course is divided in 5 parts (for a total of 1.5 hours): 1) Introduction to GHG emissions, 2) GHG emissions from agriculture and dairy, 3) Manure management, 4) Manure storage, and 5) Manure land application. Each module has a presentation recorded in a video format and a Quiz to review the main concepts of each module.
You can REGISTER HERE: ttps://uwccs.eventsair.com/emissions/reg
If you have any questions contact Horacio Aguirre-Villegas at: [email protected]

Check out the cool things happening at the Dairy Innovation Hub https://www.facebook.com/dairyinnovationhub.

Dairy Innovation Hub Harnessing research and development for Wisconsin's dairy community