Abstract for Proposal #0224092, "Researcher and student housing at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory A grant has been awarded to Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL), under the direction of Dr. Ian Billick, to build researcher and student housing at the RMBL. The RMBL is a biological field station that was established in 1928 to promote research and education in the biological sciences. Unaffiliated with any university, scientists from numerous institutions throughout the United States visit the RMBL to conduct research and teach classes. Because students and researchers come from around the world, the RMBL provides housing in cabins onsite. Many of these cabins were constructed by miners in the 1880s or biologists in the early 1930s. This grant will allow the RMBL to provide safe, clean living facilities in order for scientists to conduct their work and for students to take classes. This grant will pay for the construction of three cabins, one noncooking cabin and two cooking cabins. The noncooking cabin will house six students in a two-story building. Each student will have a private bedroom and there will be a shared living area. The cabin will be of basic wood construction with gas heating. The two cooking cabins will each house either a researcher family or four graduate students. There will be two bedrooms upstairs with a cooking and living area downstairs. The RMBL has been an important center for biological research and training. Scientists at the RMBL have published approximately 1000 papers in peer reviewed journals. In addition to basic research conducted at the Lab on diverse areas such as butterfly physiology, stream ecology, and marmot behavior, science at the RMBL has been used to shape the revision of the Clean Air Act and has documented how climate change will affect montane ecosystems. Scientists who have trained or worked at the Lab have been influential in identifying the problem of human population growth as well as founding the academic disciplines of Conservation and Restoration Biology to provide solutions to real world problems. By providing funding to renovate housing, the National Science Foundation will help ensure that scientists at the RMBL can continue to provide information policy makers need in making decisions concerning the environment.
