Where Research and Tourism Collide

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GOTHIC, Colo. — When Michael Soulé researched butterflies in this mountain valley in the early 1960s, the nearby town of Crested Butte was little more than a busted coal-mining settlement. “You couldn’t even buy a mug or a T-shirt,” said Dr. Soulé, now a conservation biologist.

Crested Butte, reborn as a skiing and mountain-biking mecca, today has rows of boutique shops and easy mountain access. At the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, where Dr. Soulé and generations of other researchers have studied remote alpine habitats, growth is changing both the landscape and the data they collect. The lab, like many other long-running ecological research sites, is trying to decide whether to study such changes or fight them.

Founded in 1928 on the site of an abandoned silver-mining town, the independent lab attracts students and scientists from around the world. Working beside a 12,625-foot peak reminiscent of a Gothic cathedral, researchers have gathered decades of data on stream insects, salamanders, marmots and the flowering schedules of alpine plants.

“The whole lab works in one way or another on essentially long-term experiments,” said Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, who has studied butterfly populations in and around the laboratory since 1960. Global warming has sharpened scientific interest in these unusually long data sets, which reveal climate-induced changes that cannot be seen in shorter studies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/science/22lab.html?th&emc=th