Temple Ambler Field Station

What a bittersweet ending to our Spring 2026 semester! 🌳🦉

On Tuesday, the Temple Ambler community came together for the Graduation and Student Awards Reception to celebrate the students leaving the nest and beginning exciting new adventures. We were especially proud to recognize our Temple Ambler Field Station Researchers for their outstanding achievements and dedication throughout the year.

To all of our graduating seniors and award recipients: thank you for everything you’ve done to make this campus so special. Your passion, hard work, leadership, and curiosity have left a lasting impact, and we can’t wait to see where your next chapter takes you.

While we’ll miss seeing you around the Field Station, we couldn’t be prouder of all you’ve accomplished. And no matter where life takes you next, you’ll always have a home here. 💚

You’re invited!

Join us on Friday, April 24th from 2:30–5:00 PM at the Temple Ambler Campus for our end-of-semester Research Symposium.

We’ll kick things off with a talk from our invited speaker, Dr. Clayton Traylor, highlighting his research at the field station, followed by a Q&A session. Afterwards, during the poster session, hear from our undergraduate and graduate students as they share the work they’ve conducted throughout the semester on campus.

Refreshments and light snacks will be provided.

We hope to see you there! 🌱🌳🦋🐛

Save the Date! ✅

Our Spring 2026 interns have been hard at work developing their independent research projects all semester!

Join us on April 24th from 2:00-4:30pm at Temple Ambler (location TBD) to hear about their exciting findings! More information coming soon. 🌳🔬

Welcome back, Owls! We’re excited to kick off the spring semester at the Field Station. Here’s to a season of new research, plenty of fieldwork, and time to reconnect with nature! 🌼🌳🦉

You’re invited! Join us tomorrow from 2:00-4:30 in Bright Lounge for our Field Station Intern Research Symposium. Hear all about what our bright students have been up to this semester in their research posters. Additionally, we are so excited to have a fellow owl, Caroline Merheb as our invited speaker. Caroline is a PhD Candidate from Sujith Ravi’s lab and she will enlighten us about the agrovoltaics project she’s been working on here at the Field Station. This event is open to all, we will have refreshments and snacks available for the poster sessions, so come on by!

If you’re looking for a semester at Ambler, we’ve got you covered with four amazing course this spring! Swipe to read more about our offerings: Disturbance Ecology, Conservation Biology, Ornithology, and Advanced Study in Biology. Take the opportunity to visit our beautiful campus and take a class (or four) during your time here!

With over 53,000 species, and potentially more than 100,000 undiscovered, the order Araneae comprises what we more commonly call spiders. These air-breathing arthropods are incredibly diverse and adaptable, living on all continents besides Antarctica and found in nearly every land habitat. One of their most fascinating abilities is web-weaving, where spiders use a variety of chemicals to compose these complex structures that vary even within species. They have also long been used in cultures around the world, representing both patience in some and malice in others.

For the next week and a half, we will be highlighting some spooky species and eerie ecology in the spirit of Halloween. Today, a classic symbol of the night and a beloved study taxa of the Sewall lab, bats! Over the summer of 2024, Rachel Linhart worked on a project as a part of the Sewall Lab at the Field Station focusing on how bat populations responded to the EF2 tornado that hit TFO in 2021. To do this, acoustic bat calls were recorded in TFO and Robbins Park using bat acoustic detectors. So far, she has found calls from Big Brown Bats, Eastern Red Bats, Silver-haired Bats, Hoary Bats, and Tricolored Bats in TFO and Robbins!

With lots of sunlight hitting the forest floor after the tornado, the understory has been eating really well, and we can tell. Thorny plants, like brambles and the rose bush, are actually a sign of ecological recovery in these forests. They are the first to colonize open land and provide habitat for mammals and birds. We are even studying their effect on saplings and whether or not they can protect young trees from herbivory. Thorns are a perfect natural defense, because many of these plants also produce delicious berries!

This just in: the Malaise trap, a new field station gadget to examine the diversity of flying insects we have here. The Malaise trap will capture flying insects which then crawl
upwards into a collection chamber. By setting this trap up, we have become part of an international network – NAIN (North American Insect Abundance Network) - that uses standardized protocols to look at patterns of insect abundance across Canada and the United States. Many groups of insects are in decline, and this network is one way to gain information about these trends across a broad geographic range.

It’s wild what we can see around us if we pay attention to the finer details! It’s never too late to celebrate our local wildlife, and last week on September 4th it was national wildlife day. Let’s take some time to celebrate the beauty of our ecosystems and the wild animals that live within them. This day aims to bring awareness to endangered species and conservation efforts for those living under natural or human threats. To celebrate this day, you should consider supporting local wildlife organizations in any way you can. Another option is to pop some corn, kick back, and throw on a wildlife documentary to appreciate the living world all around us!