Regional reporting on land, water & wildlife
Evidence-based reporting on wildlife, habitat, restoration, and environmental change across southwestern Indiana, southern Illinois, and western Kentucky.
LWR examines what is happening on the ground — old mine lands, changing forests, rivers and wetlands, wildlife, land use, public access, and the management decisions shaping this region.
LWR follows the connections between habitat, wildlife, environmental change, land use, and the decisions people make about the places around us.
What reclamation fixes, what it does not, and what decades of mining mean for soil, habitat, and ecological recovery.
Explore mine landsThe plants and other introduced species changing local forests, old fields, wetlands, and restoration sites.
Explore invasivesThe Ohio River, bottomland forests, floodplains, wetlands, watersheds, and the wildlife tied to them.
Explore waterwaysWildlife habitat, behavior, human conflict, population pressures, and the management choices surrounding them.
Explore wildlifeAccess, ownership, regulation, economics, and management decisions often determine what happens to habitat long before the ecological results become obvious.
Public lands, private ownership, hunting access, recreation, development, agriculture, habitat fragmentation, and competing uses of the same ground.
Explore land useWildlife and habitat policy, agency decisions, environmental regulation, adaptive management, restoration programs, funding, and the economics behind environmental choices.
Explore policyIndiana requires mined land to be reclaimed. That does not necessarily mean the original ecosystem comes back. Understanding the difference between reclamation and restoration explains much of what we see across the region’s former mine lands today.
Reclamation solves important physical problems. Ecological recovery is a different question.
State lines matter to agencies and regulations. They matter much less to rivers, forests, wildlife, invasive species, watersheds, and former mine lands.
LWR focuses closely enough on this region to connect stories that can disappear when environmental reporting is viewed one state at a time.
New reporting on wildlife, land use, restoration, management decisions, and environmental change across the Tri-State.
Indiana’s gray foxes are declining. New research from southern Indiana points toward disease, low reproduction, unusually large home ranges and the importance of connected…
Patoka River National Wildlife Refuge is selectively removing competing trees from young hardwood plantings across four tracts. The work sounds counterintuitive, but it shows…
Flooding is not automatically a failure of a river system. Periodic high water connects rivers with bottomland forests, wetlands, fish habitat and floodplain soils…
Environmental issues are complicated enough without turning every story into a political argument.
Look closely at the places, species, land uses, and management problems affecting this region.
Use agency records, peer-reviewed research, field information, and documented management experience.
Go beyond saying something is a problem and explain why it happens and what actually drives it.
Connect land management decisions to habitat, wildlife, water, restoration, and the people living here.
Follow Land & Wildlife Report for new regional stories, restoration research, wildlife issues, and environmental questions worth paying attention to.