Nature's classroom

U-M's Bio Station lures students from virtual to natural world

By Nancy Ross-Flanigan
U-M News Service

With her laptop, cell phone, iPod, Xbox, digital cameras, portable DVD player, Facebook profile and two personal web sites, U-M senior Stephanie Seto is as wired as any college kid. But Seto has been lured away from her workstation and into the wilds, morphing from computer geek to full-fledged field biologist. For the first couple of years of her college career, the Clarkston, Mich., senior was doing biochemistry research through U-M's Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, using computer simulations to study protein folding. It was fascinating stuff, but “it involved a lot of sitting in front of a computer all day, every day,” says Seto.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Searching for an alternative, she connected with ecology and evolutionary biology associate professor Philip Myers and ended up assisting him and graduate student Allison Poor with field research aimed at understanding the effects of climate change on Michigan mammals. In the summer of 2005, Seto, Poor and another student assistant stayed for a month on a 30,000-acre private land refuge in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where they spent their days laying out study grids, setting live-traps for field mice, checking traps, taking down data about the trapped animals before releasing them, conducting vegetation surveys and – for variety – recording bat communications with a sonar-detecting device.

“I had never handled wild animals before, so that took some getting used to, but it was great,” says Seto. “The isolation, as well. We had no e-mail, and only Allison’s cell phone worked – and then just on a certain rock. But it was nice to get away from the busy-ness of the university.”

The getaway experience is also part of the appeal of the U-M Biological Station, where Seto worked last summer as a teaching assistant in the field mammalogy course Myers teaches. Located in the heart of a wooded, 10,000-acre tract on the shores of Douglas Lake, near Pellston, at the northern tip of the of Michigan’s mitten, UMBS offers budding biologists opportunities to do research in a rustic, yet well-equipped setting.

Students have been studying bugs and birds and fishes and flowers and all sorts of other wonders of nature at the station since its founding in 1909, and many of the station’s signature courses are still being taught.

But because researchers-in-residence are doing work related to some of today’s most critical environmental issues – climate change, invasive species, endangered species and the effects of humans on the environment – the atmosphere buzzes with more than the high-pitched hum of mosquitoes. There’s an air of excitement and intellectual fervor.

“It’s one of those unique places on Earth where people are just brimming with ideas and the willingness to talk about them,” says station director Knute Nadelhoffer. “It’s a very intense environment and a very rewarding one. There are opportunities for people with different scientific skills and perspectives to interact with one another, and something positive usually comes out of it.”

For example, in one research project called PROPHET (Program for Research on Oxidants: PHotochemistry, Emissions and Transport), atmospheric chemists are using an instrument housed in a 100-foot tall tower at the station to study the exchange of gases and particulate matter between the forest and the atmosphere.

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

Students also are encouraged, both formally and informally, to mingle with faculty and researchers from diverse backgrounds. A program called BART (Biosphere and Atmosphere Research and Training) is expressly designed to facilitate such mixing. Graduate students in the program receive fellowships to spend two summers at the station, bringing their research advisors along.

“If their major professor is a biologist, they are charged with finding a second mentor who is an atmospheric scientist; if their major professor is an atmospheric scientist, they find a biologist,” says Nadelhoffer. “While the program still requires that people know a lot about their core discipline, it also challenges them to be able to speak the language of other disciplines and to think outside of their own disciplinary boundaries.”

At the same time, disciplinary boundaries themselves are expanding, and that’s another reason field studies are becoming more than just tromps through the woods with notebooks and bug nets.

“Biology is a much different science than it was even 15 years ago,” says Nadelhoffer. “Now we have the tools of molecular genetics, which allow us a more powerful way to look at how populations interact and exchange genetic information. We’ve also made great progress in developing formal mathematical understandings of systems, so that we can actually create an ecosystem in a computer and then make predictions about how it’ll respond to different climatic variations or different human disturbances. Recently, we’ve mounted an effort to make molecular and mathematical work easier to do at the Biological Station."

For example, newly acquired instruments allow student researchers to extract, isolate and amplify DNA from organisms on site, immediately after samples are collected, rather than months later in their university laboratories. Computer facilities and Internet connectivity at the Biological Station are upgraded annually to facilitate modeling of ecological systems as well as high-speed data and information exchange.

Students seem to be responding. While field stations across the country have experienced declining enrollments in recent decades, enrollment at UMBS is up 60 percent over the past five-year average.

And converts like Seto are helping to spread their enthusiasm for studying in a natural setting. In class projects last summer, Seto and students attached transmitters to bats and used radio antennas and receivers to monitor their foraging habits; collected and analyzed bat guano and insect samples with a mass spectrometer and an elemental analyzer; tracked radio-collared raccoons and plotted their home ranges with specialized computer programs; trapped and released other animals and hiked through fields and forests conducting vegetation surveys.

In the process, Seto hopes her students came to appreciate the efforts of field biologists – the exertion, preparation, organization and thought that go into their work and the wealth of information that results. But she also hopes they had as much fun as she had.

"I get so excited about what I'm doing, and I hope my students saw that," Seto says. "I absolutely love field work – it's the best way to experience biology."