Facilities

Faculty and students in the Department are housed mainly in Haworth Hall and in the KU Natural History Museum. Facilities in Haworth Hall include controlled environmental rooms, greenhouses, instrument rooms, laboratories, and offices.

The Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center has some of the finest university natural history collections in the country. The Natural History Museum includes the Divisions of Mammalogy, Ornithology, Ichthyology, Herpetology, Vertebrate Paleontology, Entomology, Invertebrate Zoology, Invertebrate Paleontology, Botany, Paleobotany, and Community Ecology. These divisions support diverse research endeavors in systematics, evolutionary biology, and ecology. Dyche Hall houses the vertebrate and invertebrate zoology collections. A molecular systematics laboratory and the Kansas Environmental Informatics Laboratory (a state-of-the-art facility for high-end storage, processing, analysis and visualization of data related to biodiversity) are housed in Dyche Hall. Invertebrate fossil collections are in Lindley Hall. The Snow Entomological Museum in Snow Hall includes world-class holdings, with special concentration on Hymenoptera and Coleoptera. Paleobotanical collections are housed in Haworth. The R. L. McGregor Herbarium, on West Campus, harbors collections of recent plants and is particularly comprehensive for the Great Plains flora.

The University of Kansas Field Station and Ecological Reserves (KSR) administers over 3,000 acres of woodland, prairie, and old fields within 15 miles of campus and in Anderson County. The Fitch Natural History Reservation and Baldwin Woods are used primarily to study unmanipulated ecological processes in undisturbed habitats. The John H. Nelson Environmental Study Area is a facility for experimental ecological studies and has experimental ponds, a dedicated lake and watershed, a common garden, small-mammal enclosures, and a succession facility. The succession facility was established by a special grant from KU to study population processes during succession in an experimentally fragmented landscape.

The Kansas Biological Survey (KBS) is a research center at the University of Kansas and a non-regulatory research agency of the state of Kansas. KBS is a nationally recognized leader in several fields of environmental research and has maintained a strong tradition of natural history studies. KBS is housed in Takeru Higuchi Hall on West Campus where KBS researchers have access to state-of-the-art laboratories and computer facilities.  Research areas at KBS include aquatic ecology, water quality, biodiversity, ecology and population biology of animals and plants, and conservation and restoration of natural communities.  Scientists at KBS make routine use of technologies such as satellite and airborne remote sensing, aerial photography, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in their research.  Several KBS scientists hold joint faculty appointments within the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology; and a number of EEB graduate students are supported by research assistantships through KBS.

A special area of concentration is the study of Neotropical biodiversity. The KU Center for Neotropical Biological Diversity was established in 1990 in the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center to cooredinate inventories of biological diversity in Latin America. Many faculty members have courtesy appointments in the Latin American Studies program, which fosters multidisciplinary research in Latin America across the campus. KU is a member of the Organization for Tropical Studies, and faculty members and students participate in advanced, field-oriented OTS courses. Many graduate students receive fellowships from OTS to participate in courses on Tropical Ecology taught in Costa Rica or for research projects in that country.

KU has a modern computer center with remote access available from all buildings. Library facilities, especially the Spencer Research Library, are excellent, and department members have access to the Linda Hall Science Library in Kansas City.