Western Carolina University

Bobcats and foxes: are they cool with coyotes?

Bobcats and fox have called the Western Carolina Mountains home for hundreds of years. Coyotes have only been around for 30 years. Researchers are using various tracking methods to studying how the animals are interacting, including sharing food resources and territory.

Iconic Beach Town Studying Storm Surge & Sea Level Rise

The town of Duck conducts a vulnerability assessment with help from the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines

Feburary 22, 2019

Nest Egg Science

Researchers look at the connection between nest construction, climate and the survival and growth rates of Carolina Chickadees.

Life of the Vikings

WCU Professor Leads International Team on Viking Research
June 25, 2016

Cherokee 101

Cherokee has been spoken for thousands of years. However, during most of that time, it was never written down. There simply wasn’t a need to do it.

The Cherokee syllabary, with symbols based on letters from the Latin alphabet, was developed between 1808 and 1824. Unlike the traditional languages and alphabets to which we are accustomed, those symbols represent syllables, not just letters.

This is hello written in the Cherokee syllabary:

Saving A Lost Language

By 2000 BC, Cherokee language and culture spread throughout the North Carolina mountains, and yet, it was almost lost to history. Now Western Carolina University researchers are working with the Eastern Band of Cherokee to study, preserve and grow the language once again.

Training Cadaver Dogs

It turns out that students in the forensic sciences aren’t alone using Western Carolina University’s Forensic Osteology Research Station. The outdoor human decomposition research facility is also used to train cadaver dogs and their handlers.

That may sound unusual at first, because it would seem that a search dog simply follows its nose to do its job. But it turns out a search dog needs to be taught what it is searching for and human remains contain a wide variety of volatile compounds that the canine nose can detect.

Grave School Lessons

Forensic anthropologists study the process of human decomposition at Western Carolina University’s Forensic Osteological Research Station to understand and solve real-life situations, including murder and mishaps, to learn how a person died and what happened to their remains.