ANN ARBOR—Shifting scientific and world views. Conservationists urging wise use of increasingly scarce natural resources. Pleas for policies based on solid science.

These scenarios could have been taken from today’s headlines, but in fact they describe America in the early 20th century, when the University of Michigan Biological Station (UMBS) was established. Celebrating its 100th session this summer, U-M’s “campus in the north woods” is a very different place than it was at its inception, but its mission of combining research and education, with a focus on crucial environmental issues, is unchanged.

“In 1908, when Colonel and Mrs. Charles Bogardus gave the first 1,441 acres to the University of Michigan for research and education purposes, it was a worn piece of land,” said Knute Nadelhoffer, director of the UMBS. The property had been clear-cut for lumber and its soil was too sandy for farming, but U-M saw its potential value as a living laboratory for studying the recovery of the region’s forests.

“Establishing the station was clearly a response to Progressive Era thinking about ‘wise use’?what we call sustainability today?and the need for conservation strategies to be informed by science,” Nadelhoffer said.

The following year the station’s first director, along with another professor and two assistants, set up a camp on Douglas Lake near Pellston, and 14 students showed up to study botany and zoology in an outdoor setting. Tents and two abandoned cabins provided laboratory, classroom and living space.

Today, forests have regrown and facilities, course offerings, and research opportunities have expanded, along with enrollment. Students now use computers and state-of-the-art tools of molecular genetics to complement their field work, but the tradition of intensive study in an informal environment endures.

Visit UMBS on a spring or summer day and you may see students banding piping plovers, hiking through fields to conduct vegetation surveys, or investigating bat dietary preferences by analyzing guano samples with a mass spectrometer. With facilities for studying everything from atmospheric chemistry to zoology, UMBS attracts researchers and faculty with a range of scientific skills and perspectives, and students are encouraged to mingle with them all.

“It’s unusual to have atmospheric chemists living in the same environment as people who study fish and insects,” Nadelhoffer said, “but invariably people find common ground and ways of communicating, and truly creative interdisciplinary efforts emerge.”

Those efforts have resulted in more than 2,700 journal articles, book chapters, textbooks and monographs, 220 dissertations and theses and 3,600 undergraduate research papers.

UMBS and its scientific legacy will be celebrated with a public open house from 2-6 p.m. June 28. The event will include a tour of the facilities, a special historical presentation and refreshments. A gathering of alumni, donors, researchers and staff is planned for later in the summer.

The summer’s celebrations are fitting tributes to an historic institution that continues to contribute to scientific understanding of some of the world’s most pressing problems, Nadelhoffer said.

“We have learned much in the past 100 years, yet new scientific questions command our attention,” he said. “Our residents now focus on topics such as endangered and threatened species, biotic sensitivity to water and air quality, invasive species and the effects of climate change on ecosystems. The publications they produce provide information needed to develop scientifically based management strategies called for by the last century’s progressive thinkers and today’s policy makers.

“Now, more than ever, we understand that organisms and the physical environment interact to influence not only local habitats and landscape, but the life support system of the Earth itself.”

UMBS is at 9133 E. State St. in Pellston, Mich. (off C-64 or Riggsville Rd., between I-75 and US-31). For a map or more information, visit: www.lsa.umich.edu/umbs/ or call UMBS at (231) 539-8408 or the UMBS Ann Arbor office at (734) 763-4461.

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