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.

You can read the full story on Pittwire.