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Professor Ronald A. Royer, Advisor
Ron Royer is professor and coordinator of science education programs at Minot State
University. He earned the B.S. in entomology from Iowa State University in 1972,
where he also completed a year of post-graduate research in entomology. Turning his
attention to science education, he went on to earn the M.A. in biology at Bemidji
State University in 1975 and the Ph.D. in Teacher Education in Science at the University
of North Dakota in 1984. He has taught a wide variety of science and science education
courses, and has directed a number of butterfly research projects, most recent among
them endangered species inventories in the Dakotas for such agencies as the U. S.
Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Forest Service, the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research
Center, and the North Dakota Natural Heritage Program. He has contributed to many
books on butterflies and butterfly conservation, including Butterfly Gardening Illustrated
(Xerces Society/Smithsonian), Eastern Butterflies (Houghton Mifflin/Peterson Field
Guide Series), A Field Guide to Western Butterflies (Houghton Mifflin/Peterson Field
Guide Series), and in 2003 he released a second edition of his own Butterflies of
North Dakota: An Atlas and Guide. He has been Great Plains Coordinator for the Lepidopterists
Society Season Summary since 1989, and a long-time member of the Society for Research
on the Lepidoptera, the Xerces Society, and Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society.
In addition to his butterfly work in the Great Plains, Ron has made numerous trips
to the tundra biome in search of Arctic butterflies, most recently to the Alaskan
North Slope, the northern Yukon and McKenzie Delta, the central mainland arctic and
Hudsons Bay coasts, and Victoria Island in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.
Email Professor Royer here.
