As Aldo Leopold was the Chair of Wildlife Management for the University of Wisconsin. The Riley Cooperative also served as a research area for the University. Graduate students were often assigned to the area for census work, banding of game, and supervising plantings in the game cooperative. The Riley area is dairy country, closely grazed and cultivated, hence deficient in both winter food and winter cover. The average farm comprises 160 acres and maintains 25 cows and 35 hogs.
Pastures occupy the creek bottoms which are too wet and the ridges which are too stony to plow.
The only ungrazed cover consists of woodlots isolated by fields and bogs, too soft for cattle to enter, and odd corners. To these has now been added a system of small fenced evergreen plantations or remises. The original vegetation was prairie interspersed by groves of bur oaks. After farming had checked the free sweep of prairie fires, new stands of black and red oak seeded in on the prairie slopes and ridges. Riley lies at the foot of the terminal moraine of the Wisconsin glacier.