It started with a bird’s nest. And ended with her name in a prominent academic journal.
“As a young biologist, I never would have imagined I’d be a part of something that would get published,” said Adrianna Burghardt ’24, a University of Dayton environmental biology graduate from Troy, Ohio.
Burghardt was on a team of undergraduates who worked with Chelse Prather, associate professor in the UD Department of Biology, to study the six-acre solar prairie on campus.
They shared in the peer-reviewed journal Ecology and Evolution that American robins built their nests to compensate for the movement of tracking arrays, which tilt throughout the day to follow the sun.
“Undergraduates don’t often get the chance to publish in peer-reviewed journals, so this kind of work is remarkable,” Prather said. “This team wasn’t just learning science, they were contributing to it.”
Prather said the team found the nests were warmer and taller, which helped those eggs to actually stay in.
Undergraduate students were crucial in collecting the data for this research, including measuring the circumference and depth of nests, and recording week-long temperatures.
“This project taught me a lot about field research and what really made me proud was being able to present this at the Brother Joseph W. Stander Symposium and eventually getting our research published,” Burghardt said.
Prather and her students’ research at the prairie continues this year with a project examining insect and plant ecosystems surrounding the same solar arrays.
This second project is a long-term effort to see if native vegetation underneath the solar panels is attracting beneficial insect communities, such as pollinators.
The current team consists of Prather, graduate student Stephanie Murray and undergraduates Penelope Fisher and Shannon Wolfe.
“With field work there are always quirks to work out and you end up switching plans, so having a team like this where we all work together and figure it out is super important,” said Wolfe, a junior biology major from Dayton.
Their summer 2025 field work consisted of setting pitfall traps to catch ground-dwelling invertebrates and pan traps, which are brightly colored traps with ultraviolet paint to mimic flowers that attract bees, beetles and wasps.
They also used a technique called sweep-netting, which consists of using a large canvas net to sweep through the plants and vegetation to capture samples of insects in the area.
“This kind of work can be pretty tedious, and can be an all-day event, but it's really exciting when your work pays off and you discover something exciting,” said Murray, a doctoral student from Dayton working in the insect ecology lab.
The group has continued to meet to analyze their data and present their findings at conferences such as the Ecological Society of America in Baltimore, Maryland; the Solar Wildlife and Ecosystems Research Meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona; and the 2026 Stander Symposium.
“It has been exciting, but also nerve-wracking to get the opportunity to share our research with others, but it's such a rewarding experience especially as an undergraduate student,” said Fisher, a senior environmental biology major from Dayton.