This rural Pennsylvania field station is an ecologist’s dream
It’s autumn at the Pymatuning Reservoir. The water lies flat and blue; color is beginning to tinge the trees; and the summer’s cohort of students and researchers has mostly left Pitt’s lakeside biological field station, the Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology (PLE).
But the students have left a little reminder of their presence on the lab’s white boards: whimsical sketches of the semi-aquatic, croaking creatures they study. There are frogs eating ice cream. Frogs dressed as princesses. Frogs with pouting lips.
PLE Director Cori Richards-Zawacki chuckles when she spots them. She knows exactly which of her lab’s researchers are responsible for the amphibian art.
Richards-Zawacki is — as her students hinted at with their drawings — an amphibian biologist who lives and works each summer at PLE, studying the role of climate change and disease on biodiversity. With a decade of service under her belt, she’s also somehow the shortest-tenured staffer at the field station. The people who work at PLE tend to stay, the researchers who visit almost always return and the students who learn there largely regard it as a highlight of their college careers.
“We’re all lifers,” says PLE Assistant Director Chris Davis.
In other words, PLE is a special place.
Part of the lore is its longevity. Pitt established its first field station at Presque Isle State Park in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1926 before relocating to Pymatuning State Park in 1950 in search of more space. In that century of existence, the station has hosted some of the country’s most promising and prominent ecology researchers, beckoned by the PLE’s other asset — its location.
Situated alongside the reservoir and within a short drive of both wetlands and forests, the spot is an ecology researcher’s dream. As Richards-Zawacki puts it, PLE’s 30 dedicated acres and the surrounding landscape of state park and game lands offer access to “a matrix of terrestrial and aquatic habitat types” to study.
Prolific publishers
Researchers at the Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology have published more than 450 papers since 1951, including important investigations on pesticide use, pollination and pathogens, among other topics. Many of those publications have appeared in prestigious journals like Nature Ecology and Evolution, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Animal Behaviour, Aquatic Toxicology and Ecology Letters.
And Pitt researchers aren’t the only ones taking advantage. Each summer, investigators from across the country descend on the PLE. Duke University’s Steve Nowicki has spent more than 20 seasons there studying songbirds to understand the causes and consequences of variation in animal communication and behavior. The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Jessica Hua, meanwhile, is investigating how ecological alterations can drive evolutionary change.
Researchers have full access to PLE’s three locations: the housing site, complete with cabins, apartments, two dorms and a dining hall; the Sanctuary Lake Site, with eight fully equipped laboratories and high-speed internet (a much-needed and often difficult-to-come-by field station asset); and its most sought-after site, a lab that sits in a field flush with plants and pollinators.
“You wouldn’t think that a lab smack dab in the middle of a field would be a spectacular asset, unless you do ecological research and you know you need space to set up big, replicated experiments,” Richards-Zawacki says.
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Despite its name, the Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology isn’t just a place to conduct research. Each summer, the PLE runs nearly a dozen field courses for undergraduates from Pitt and neighboring universities, like Pennsylvania Western University’s Clarion and Edinboro campuses. It also hosts outreach programs for local middle and high school science classes, and it increasingly has become a retreat for those who don’t study science but are still inspired by nature, like writers and artists.
For the staff, it has also become something else — home.
Richards-Zawacki is often accompanied on her trips north by her two daughters, who regard the director’s cabin as their vacation house and fight over who gets to ring the dinner bell at the dining hall. Davis, whose wife grew up in the area, lives just half a mile from PLE, so his family has become deeply embedded in and fond of the community.
Besides, Davis adds with a grin, at no other office can you start your morning “sipping a cup of coffee, overlooking a beautiful lake and watching an eagle fly by.”
Meet the Manager
The Pymatuning Lab of Ecology staffers aren’t the only Pitt-related people in Crawford County. Last winter, environmental studies alumna Jessica Fischer (A&S ’09) officially took on the role of park manager at Pymatuning State Park.
Fischer, an Erie native, previously managed the Little Buffalo State Park in Perry County and worked stints at Presque Isle, Moraine, Point, Laurel Hill, Cook Forest and Clear Creek state parks.
The move to Pymatuning puts Fischer in charge of the park’s nearly 17,000 acres and the state’s largest lake. Just as exciting, it brings her back to western Pennsylvania, where she grew up, attended college and started her career.
“This is truly a full-circle moment for me,” Fischer says.