Spotlight

In the Spotlight: June 5, 2020

In the Spotlight: June 5, 2020

Kudos to these faculty, staff and programs

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  • The Northern Arizona University Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) programs at the Flagstaff and Phoenix Biomedical Campus received a full 10-year accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education (CAPTE) this spring. The physical therapy program, accredited since its inception, was started in 1978 with the first class graduating in 1980 with baccalaureate degrees. Over the past 41 years, the program has adapted to changes in academia, the profession and health care, and offers master’s and doctoral degrees in physical therapy.
  • Joe Collentine, professor of Spanish, presented his work titled, “Corpus research in the acquisition of Spanish as an L2” for the Graduate Program in Applied Linguistics (LAEL) at the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He discussed his recent research projects on the acquisition morphosyntactic complexity with corpus linguistic tools.
  • Assistant research professor of biological sciences Bradley Butterfield and his colleagues collaborated with the USGS Restoration Assessment and Monitoring Program for the Southwest (RAMPS) to write three articles featured in a special edition of Restoration Ecology: Arid Lands, a journal dedicated to advancing the science and practice of ecological restoration for the benefit of biodiversity, ecosystems and humans. This journal edition is a collection of the most innovative and impactful articles previously published by the journal on arid lands.
    • “Beyond traditional ecological restoration on the Colorado Plateau” synthesized past and current restoration activities on the Colorado Plateau—one of the most intensively-studied arid regions in the world—and their effectiveness in achieving management goals. This assessment helps guide new areas of research in arid land restoration and the critical policy and public-private collaborations necessary to achieve positive outcomes.
    • In the most extensive regional assessment of public land vegetation treatments to date, “Long-term trends in restoration and associated land treatments in the southwestern United States” identified trends in the type, extent, cost and drivers of land management activities across the western United States. This study helps inform managers and policy makers when planning and carrying out increasingly expensive, wildfire-driven land treatments across the region. First author Stella Copeland was a former NAU postdoc in Butterfield’s lab.
    • As the first author on the article titled, “Prestoration: using species in restoration that will persist now and into the future,” Butterfield and his colleagues introduced the idea of “prestoration”—using species in restoration that will persist now and into the future. The case study from the Colorado Plateau demonstrated a new analytical approach to identify new, native species that should be used in restoration to account for climate change impacts, incorporating assisted migration of entire plant communities into restoration projects in quantitative and predictive ways.
  • Also featured in Restoration Ecology: Arid Lands were two articles by associate professor of forestry Matthew Bowker.