Happy Friday from beautiful Douglas Lake!
The University of Michigan Biological Station is buzzing with adventurous undergraduate students, talented research scientists, calling loons and mating toads. (Watch and listen to the amphibian love song here — including a surprise harmony at the end.)
It’s the start of the most wonderful time of year at our living laboratory of more than 10,000 forested acres in northern Michigan.
I’m pleased to report everyone is settling into life here and diving head-first into exploration and discovery. Right out of the gate on Day One of classes, students in the Observation and Modeling of Climate Change Biology course built a portable flux tower that holds different sensors and computers to measure atmospheric data and environmental conditions.
From move-in day to first steps into the field, meet some of the students in the spring term in this news story as they study northern Michigan ecosystems up close while building community along the way.
We welcomed a fascinating new researcher to the Pellston campus last week who is enlisting AI, machine learning and large language models to help us analyze more than a century of our historic field research archives. Meet Dr. Anshuman Swain, an assistant professor at the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a curator in the Museum of Paleontology. His words are music to my ears: “So many researchers have come and gone. It’s a major strength of UMBS. We can do more with the data they collected beyond their published papers. They have more to teach us.”
This field season we’re excited for the return of Dr. Nate Haan (University of Kentucky) and Dr. Tim James (University of Michigan) as, together, they dig deeper into the secret life of red pine cones — our feature story this month. From their respective backgrounds in ants and fungi, they’re launching a new line of interdisciplinary research after undergraduate students in their classes last year found a miniature ecosystem of ants occupying beetle-made tunnels, fungi growing in the cavities and a set of questions that now stretches across entomology, mycology and plant biology.
Please join me in celebrating the “MacGyver” of our Pellston campus on a big U-M honor he received in Ann Arbor. Congratulations to UMBS Facilities Manager Scott Haley, who won the 2026 Positive Contributions to LSA Community and Culture Award! Everyone who has the pleasure of working with Scott understands how much he deserves this award. In fact, all of us on staff at UMBS were falling over ourselves to tell gushing stories of how he creatively keeps this aging campus running and goes above and beyond to help anyone and everyone — far beyond maintenance and repairs. Read our profile of Scott.
Congratulations also are in order for all our UMBS alumni who graduated in Ann Arbor this month. We are thankful you made the field courses up north part of your time at Michigan. Wherever you go next, we hope you keep that curiosity and care for the natural world with you.
A message for all alumni, neighbors, friends and readers of this newsletter: we’d love to see you. If you’ll be in northern Michigan this spring or summer, please join us on a Wednesday evening for our Summer Lecture Series. Here’s the full schedule.
Read the full May 2026 newsletter here.
Sincerely,
Aimée Classen
UMBS Director
