Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Director of the University of Michigan Biological Station
Spotlight on the University of Michigan Biological Station (UMBS)
Similar to other ecologists, Dr. Aimée Classen grew up hiking and spending time outdoors, but she “didn’t really make the connection until high school that this could be a career.” Dr. Classen “fell in love with thinking about how you can connect the patterns and processes in the natural world.” Initially, she considered becoming a wildlife veterinarian when she entered college, but her fascination soon shifted to marine ecology. After graduating, she taught middle school while exploring various fields of science by working in different labs on weekends. Eventually, after three years of teaching, Dr. Classen decided to pursue graduate school and embark on a career that has taken her from Vermont and Tennessee to Copenhagen and Ann Arbor. Now, as a professor and Director of the University of Michigan Biological Station, she combines her love for “students, the natural world, and the puzzle of science.”
“It is my great honor to steward and manage this special place in northern Michigan for research and education,” Classen said. “Together in our community of scientists and students from around the world, we’re finding solutions for a sustainable planet and training the next generation of environmental problem solvers.”
The University of Michigan Biological Station (UMBS) in Pellston, Michigan, is 116 years old and spans more than 10,000 acres, holding both historical and scientific significance. Dr. Classen describes it as “an accumulation of 116 years of knowledge and information… allowing people to come and ask questions and think about the natural system in a way that you couldn’t anywhere else.” Like most of the lower peninsula in Michigan in the late 1800s, UMBS was subjected to slash-and-burn logging by lumber barons, which left much of the land barren. Even today, as you walk along some of the trails, “you can see the berms that were established where they wanted to lay down railroad tracks so they could move logs around.” Originally, the University of Michigan acquired the property for surveying, but as the trees began to regrow, the surveyors moved to Camp Davis in Wyoming, and biologists took over at UMBS.
Today, in the field station’s second century of operations, nearly 120 students take courses throughout the summer at UMBS along Douglas Lake, along with a mix of about 40 undergraduate and graduate students conducting research and another 20 or so students in tech positions. In addition to the summer courses, Dr. Classen and her team at UMBS are continuously exploring “year-round educational opportunities [they] can help facilitate” with residents around UMBS and regional partners. Each year, UMBS hosts two or three Artists in Residence, working to combine all of the sciences—natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities—and to “think about how we are part of the environment and how it might be changing over time, as well as challenge our understanding of and assumptions about the natural world.” The Artist in Residence also participates in a yearly summer lecture series that is free and open to the public. You can learn more about this summer’s Artist in Residence, Madeleine Wattenberg and Vera Ting, as well as other public outreach activities at the UMBS website. Last year, these opportunities attracted “well over 1,000 unique visitors,” accounting for about “14,000 user days per year.”
For Dr. Classen, one of the main highlights of going up to UMBS is seeing students “realize that they are part of the natural system and share incredible connections with organisms notches lower on the food chain” which might not be something that can be fully grasped within a traditional classroom setting. She also emphasizes the new research contributions they can make and the improved partnerships with community members. Scientists, students, and faculty outside of the U-M community are also able to take classes and use the research facilities at UMBS. This contributes to Dr. Classen’s goal of growing the “institutional diversity, background diversity, and learning diversity” of those who engage with UMBS. In addition to educational and research opportunities, UMBS offers publicly available real-time data from multiple locations on the northern Michigan campus. These sensors, accessible on the UMBS Community Resources website, provide information on air quality, wind speed, direction, and gusts, as well as water temperature, air temperature, dew point, relative humidity, sea level pressure, how much blue-green algae is present in Douglas Lake, solar radiation, and even snow levels. Dr. Classen believes that “information sharing is one of the most important things that we do with other scientists.”
Regarding her research as an ecosystem and global change ecologist who explores how ecological interactions influence the atmosphere’s carbon cycling process, Dr. Classen wishes that people understood how important snow is for “how nutrients are retained and move through ecosystems in the wintertime.” While people generally grasp how climate change is affecting winter and snow, they often do not understand how nutrients move during this season. Nutrient transportation in the winter is crucial for plants during the growing season, but those nutrients could also end up in our streams and rivers, which “can cause nutrient pulses at weird times during the year in downstream ecosystems leading to algal blooms.”
Dr. Classen’s advice for other educators in the sustainability space is “to have students be embedded in the place that they’re exploring and, to the best of your ability, take them out and allow students to learn from a place instead of just about a place.” While the courses for the 2024 spring and summer terms have wrapped up, be sure to check out the UMBS webpage in December 2024 for the 2025 course schedule. UMBS also offers scholarship funds for students from U-M as well as scholarship funds specifically for students from any college or university.
Dr. Classen reminds us that “we can change the world. It might look different. It’s going to look different. That doesn’t mean it has to be bad. We can envision the future we want to see under global change.”
As a part of the Year of Sustainability, we are interested in sharing, uplifting, and highlighting stories about the people who make up LSA and have experience teaching about sustainability. We sat down with a series of LSA faculty to discuss their background and courses and will feature these conversations in our Faculty Spotlight series.
To contact the LSA Year of Sustainability Team, please contact sustainable-lsa@umich.edu.
