Mountain Lake Biological Station

What is MLBS? Mountain Lake Biological Station is a full-service residential field station located atop Salt Pond Mountain in the southern Appalachians of southwest Virginia. Programs include summer field courses, Research Experiences for Undergraduates, numerous faculty-driven research projects, scientific meetings, outreach activities, and more. An average high-season day at MLBS hosts 50-100 people, including undergraduate and graduate students, research faculty from around the world, and family members. Everyone in the community works, eats, and lives together everyday, integrating research and mentorship in the truest sense of a Jeffersonian “academical village.” The Station is remote but accessible, and is surrounded by sharp ecological gradients and fine-scale changes in habitat-- ideal conditions for studying ecology and evolution. Visiting scientists conduct research in plant and animal population biology, behavioral ecology, life history evolution, community ecology, ecological genetics, biosystematics, epidemiology, conservation biology, and the physiology of behavior. Biologists interested in field studies are encouraged to consider Mountain Lake as a home for their research. Station use is supported year round. History MLBS was established in 1930 by the University of Virginia’s (UVA) Department of Biology as a summer facility for teaching and research. The prominence of MLBS as a national research station took hold in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s as population based field research was gaining momentum and MLBS became one of a few very active field stations in that area. In the 1930's, Ivey Lewis, co-founder and Director of MLBS, set out to select admirable southern scientists to name the Station cottages after. With a $1,800 budget, an assistant (Charles Young), and connections throughout the south, he took suggestions and compiled a list of scientists who contributed “various and noteworthy” additions to biology. He dedicated at least one cottage to each southern state, and sought to honor scientists that may never have had formal recognition. Lewis and Young posted advertisements in newspapers throughout the south asking for recommendations of each state’s great early biologists, and received many letters in response. Although names have been added after the original list that Lewis and Young made, the majority of Mountain Lake cottages are named after these “pioneers in Southern biology". More recent facilities additions have been named after individuals that have lived at and contributed to Mountain Lake.