Woods has been selected to serve as the program chair for the August 2007 national meetings of the Ecological Society of America. The annual meetings of the Ecological Society of America are the largest professional, scientific meetings of ecologists; they attract national media attention, and over 4,000 scientists typically attend. Sessions, workshops, and symposia present a wide range of current scientific research and offer forums for interaction between scientists, policy-makers, and environmental managers. The 2007 meetings will be in San Jose, CA and hosted jointly by the Society for Ecological Restoration. In prior years Woods has presented at the Society’s annual meeting in Portland, OR and at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Over Field Work Term 2005, Woods offered a three-week field course, Desert Ecology. Woods and a group of students were based at several natural areas in the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona. In 2004 he was appointed Director of Research for the Huron Mountain Wildlife Foundation, an organization that promotes and sponsors research in this region of Michigan. In this capacity, Woods participated in a conference in October 2004 at the University of Michigan Biological Station, part of the organizational phase of the new “National Ecological Observatory Network” (NEON). NEON is a program mandated by Congress that promises to substantially increase federal support for ecological monitoring and research.

In Spring 2003, Woods participated in a National Park Service workshop at Acadia National Park.

Since 1989, Woods has conducted ongoing research on two stands of old-growth forests in northern Michigan. In August 2002, Woods and a student field crew collected data from one of the stands, which was hit by a severe thunderstorm during the previous month. Their data, assessing the immediate impact of the storm and providing baseline measurements for following the stand’s response, could prove important in understanding the structure of these forests. In June 2003, Woods presented initial results of the research at the national meetings of the Society for Conservation Biology. He has also given seminars on this and related work at the University of Toronto and the University of Quebec at Montreal. A report on the effects of the storm will be published in June in The Journal of Ecology. Woods’ work on this project is supported by grants from the U.S. Forest Service and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.