Sarah French had a paper from her PhD work just accepted at Insect Conservation and Diversity!  This paper (“The movement responses of three libellulid dragonfly species to open and closed landscape cover” French & McCauley) represents a huge project Sarah undertook to address one of the really difficult questions in landscape ecology – how do conditions in the matrix environment affect the movement of animals?  Addressing this question is difficult even in animals that can be tracked with active tags (e.g. satellite or radio tags) but with small insects? It’s almost, but not quite, impossible!  To tackle this question Sarah conducted a massive translocation experiment that moved three species of dragonflies to different conditions within the terrestrial matrix and then followed their flight behaviour.  She found that open environments appear to facilitate the movement of these animals more than forested environments.  This has important implications for the how landscape connectivity between populations of these animals will be affected by forest regrowth which is common in the upper Midwest and Northeast.  Nice work Sarah!