The Iowa Lakeside Laboratory: A Century of Discovering the Nature of Nature (Bur Oak Book)

Today’s huge array of environmental problems can best be solved by people who have learned about nature within nature at a place with a long history of research and observation, people who thoroughly understand and appreciate nature’s cogs and wheels. Lakeside Lab and biological research stations like it have never been more relevant to science and to society at large than they are today. Michael Lannoo convinces us that while Lakeside’s past is commendable, its future, grounded in ecological principles, will help shape a more sustainable society. 

In this remarkable and insightful book, Michael Lannoo sets the story of Lakeside Laboratory, founded on the shore of Lake Okoboji in northwestern Iowa in 1909, within the larger story of the primacy of fieldwork, the emergence of conservation biology, and the ability of field stations to address such growing problems as pollution, disease, habitat loss, invasive species, and climate change. 

Michael J. Lannoo is professor of anatomy and cell biology at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He is the author of Okoboji Wetlands: A Lesson in Natural History (Iowa, 1996), Malformed Frogs: The Collapse of Aquatic Ecosystems, and Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab: The Emergence of Environmentalism and the editor of Status and Conservation of Midwestern Amphibians (Iowa, 1998) and Amphibian Declines: The Conservation Status of United States Species.