From VT News

Researchers from Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources and Environment have received a $3.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior to study the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on piping plovers, shorebirds that have been listed as threatened since 1986.

Breeding populations of piping plovers exist in three distinct locations — the Atlantic Coast, the American and Canadian Great Plains, and the Great Lakes — but birds from ...