Vision -- January-February 2005

Vision is published six times a year by the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station in the U of A System's Division of Agriculture and by the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences. It is produced by the Communication Services unit of the Department of Agricultural and Extension Education, 110 Agriculture Building, U of A, Fayetteville, AR 72701. 479-575-5647.

Editor: Howell Medders, (hmedders@uark.edu).
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Writers and photographers: Fred Miller, Karen Eskew and Amalie Holland.

(E-mail items for Vision to ahollan@uark.edu)

Illinois center director named Entomology Department head

Robert N. Wiedenmann, director of the Center for Ecological Entomology at the Illinois Natural History Survey in Champaign, has accepted an appointment as professor and head of the Department of Entomology, effective March 15.

Robert N. Wiedenmann

In addition to his position with the Natural History Survey, Wiedenmann is assistant dean for Natural History Survey programs in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois, and is an adjunct faculty member in the UI departments of crop sciences, entomology, and natural resources and environmental sciences.

As center director, Dr. Wiedenmann leads a staff of 10 faculty members and 20 support professionals. The Natural History Survey, an agency of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, has been the nation’s premier natural history survey since its founding in 1858 and is located on the UI campus.

Dr. Wiedenmann will lead the entomology faculty of 17 based at Fayetteville, Little Rock and other locations. Faculty members teach on the Fayetteville campus and conduct statewide Division of Agriculture research and extension programs. Fred Stephen has served as interim department head since January 2002, when former head Bill Yearian retired, and he will remain in the department.

The department includes the Arkansas Arthropod Museum, which has the most extensive collection of insects and other arthropods from the Ozark and Ouachita regions and the Mississippi River bottom forests of Arkansas.

At the Natural History Survey, Dr. Wiedenmann has maintained research and outreach efforts with a focus on biological control of crop insects and weeds. He also teaches an upper-division course in biological control at UI. He has taught the course via live distance technology with faculty at Purdue and Iowa State universities.

Dr. Wiedenmann makes extension presentations throughout Illinois. Since 1994, he has been a coordinator of the Midwest Institute for Biological Control, in which specialty courses are taught annually to graduate students, extension educators and other professionals. He helped teach the 1999 and 2003 courses at the USDA-ARS European Biological Control Laboratory in France as well as the 1997 course at the Pan American School of Agriculture in Honduras.

Dr. Wiedenmann has been instrumental in a project that developed curriculum for K-12 students on native biodiversity and use of biocontrol tactics to control invasive weeds. In more than a hundred Illinois classrooms, students raise purple loosestrife plants and the beetles that eat the plants. They then release the beetles into wetlands where loosestrife is an invasive weed.

Dr. Wiedenmann was 2003-2004 president of the North Central Branch of the Entomological Society of America and is president of the Nearctic Regional Section of the International Organization for Biological Control. He has been appointed to the National Invasive Species Advisory Committee, which advises the federal departments of agriculture, commerce and interior on invasive species issues.

A native of Allentown, Penn., Dr. Wiedenmann has B.S. and Ph.D. (1990) degrees from Purdue. He was a research associate and assistant research scientist in the Entomology Department at Texas A&M from 1990 to 1994. He joined the Center for Economic Entomology, Illinois Natural History Survey, as an associate professional scientist in 1994.