SIX EASTERN GRAY squirrels — four of them actually gray in color, the other two black — scamper under an oak in search of acorns on the quad of Albion College, a small liberal arts school in southern Michigan which boasts 103 tree species — some native, some not. In view, the chimney of an 1844 astronomical observatory is wreathed by swifts on their fall migration, and a short walk away, beds of native prairie plants — and a few uninvited nonnatives — wrap around the Silver LEED-certified Science Complex. “It’s nice to have these native species here,” says biology professor Sheila Lyons-Sobaski, a prairie ecologist who is giving me a tour of the campus.

As we walk, she points out stiff goldenrod and Canada goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace and gray-headed coneflower, monarch-nourishing milkweed, prairie dock and compass plant, Canada wild rye, switch grass, little blue stem, big blue stem, rosinweed and, yes, the ragweed that causes allergic discomfort for so many people. We hear goldfinches tweeting as they flit about in search of the seeds of cup plants, which are on Michigan’s list of state-endangered species, and watch ants scuttle across a dogwood leaf. We spot a blue jay, not as surprising as the snowy owl, the coyote, or the bald eagle that have been seen on this campus that’s two-thirds the size of New York’s Central Park.

Albion’s prairie-adapted plants, in particular, stand out. Most of the Midwest’s native prairies are long gone. Only one tenth of 1 percent of the original Illinois prairies, which once supported black bears, elk, and bison, along with hundreds of species of birds, remains, Lyons-Sobaski notes. The ground floor of the Science Complex contains a sobering reminder of what’s at stake if they are lost completely: a display case with the 50-million-year-old fossils of turtles from the Eocene — now extinct.

In its own small way, this campus is helping to stave off future extinctions, its gardens and other plantings of native species providing patches of refuge for wildlife within the small city of Albion. It is by no means the only campus whose grounds protect and advance biodiversity, but it illustrates how, even on a small scale, campuses can do more than teach us about diversity: They can protect a wide array of plant and animal life — and show us what more needs to be done to preserve them for the future.

THINK OF A campus as an ark, a haven for plants and animals amid a sea of urban and agricultural development. Among their beneficiaries are migratory species, for which campus habitat can offer safe stops along an arduous route. Others are endemic species isolated by fragmented habitat and with limited travel ranges. With up to 40 percent of US ecosystems at risk of collapse, and a global biodiversity crisis underway, Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, told me that “every safe space matters.”

Campuses in urban and suburban areas are often larger than local parks and cemeteries — both of which can serve as arks that are generally off-limits to major development. On one hand, that means they may have space to create and protect biodiversity-friendly habitats. On the other hand, however, campus administrators are more susceptible to the lure of build, build, build. That means they must be especially mindful of adverse impacts on biodiversity when planning construction or expansion of buildings, athletic and cultural facilities, parking lots, and roadways.

Birds offer a particularly visible and audible indicator of the significance of small habitat patches, including those on campuses. They are among the most widely tracked animals, not only by trained scientists but also by citizen-scientists through apps, and at universities through events such as campus bird counts. Researchers at the Wildlife Institute of India, for example, found that more than half the country’s bird species could be found on campuses. Looking at data from 355 universities, Venkanna Babu Guthula and colleagues counted 779 avian species, an average of 88 per campus. Among them were five critically endangered, seven endangered, 17 vulnerable, and 33 near-threatened species.

“Academic campuses globally could prove highly beneficial in securing a wide variety of species in relatively small land areas,” they wrote. “The campuses could also serve as living repositories and evolutionary labs for plant and small animal species that remain isolated due to fragmentation. Resilient habitats in the campuses could serve as living repositories of such species and labs of nature.”

It’s not just birds that benefit from these “labs of nature.” At Brazil’s Federal Institute of Southeast Minas Gerais, researchers identified 16 species of medium and large-sized mammals, some of them endangered, vulnerable, or threatened, including the Brazilian cottontail, meadow fox, otter, and black-fronted titi monkeys, in campus fragments of the Atlantic Forest near both native and urban vegetation areas. “The similarities identified between the fragments indicate the need for higher connectivity among them through the creation of ecological corridors to allow the movement and, consequently, gene flux among the populations, favoring the maintenance of important ecosystem services in the region,” the researchers concluded.

In Indonesia, researchers led by Ridahati Rambey inventoried 20 types of ferns on the 300-acre campus of the Universitas Sumatera Utara in Medan, some of them medicinal or edible. And in southern China, Sheng-Quan Fang and colleagues worked with citizen-scientist volunteers to explore butterfly diversity, identifying 50 species on the 764-acre campus of Yunnan University. Among them were two near-threatened species and one vulnerable species that appear on China’s Biodiversity Red List. Green space accounts for more than 40 percent of the 764-acre urban campus, “with a wide spectrum of garden plants providing various habitats for certain butterflies” and other insects, they wrote. The survey covered both “road habitat,” where roadside shrubs and trees are the predominant plant life, and “scenic habitat” like rose gardens, pear orchards, artificial water bodies, and lavender gardens. The researchers cautioned, however, that construction and maintenance “have been continuously disturbing the green spaces and secondary vegetation on the campus,” activities that disrupt and threaten the survival of the butterflies and other “urban-dwelling organisms in this ecosystem.”

Despite the many benefits, an institutional commitment to
biodiversity is not a given.

Aside from their conservation value, campus habitats offer another clear benefit: the opportunity to expand our collective knowledge about the natural world. Populated by a high concentration of ecologists, conservationists, botanists, and other researchers, campuses can be arenas for ecological exploration, as reflected in the discovery of four new species of fungi on the State University of Feira de Santana campus in Brazil’s Bahia state in 2018-2019.

Here in the US, I spoke with William Sanders, a plant biologist who has found five new-to-science species of lichen on the 800-acre campus of Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers. His findings arose unexpectedly during a project that studies the growth of tropical lichens, and were possible because the university has preserved some natural areas — “little islands,” Sanders calls them — mainly cypress swamps and pine flatlands.

The university campus also provides an on-the-ground venue for teaching when he takes botany students to look at plants and fungi in their natural habitat. Students, faculty, and others who use campuses receive other benefits from their habitats as well. As Curry notes, many studies have shown that green spaces are valuable to our well-being because they make people feel less stressed.

Despite the many benefits, an institutional commitment to biodiversity is not a given. It requires recognition of the value of pro-biodiversity policies, the will of top campus decisionmakers to act, an openness to doing things differently with campus infrastructure and landscape management, and often the investment of financial resources with no tangible economic return on that investment on the horizon.

HOW MIGHT CAMPUSES factor biodiversity into their planning? One way is to rethink the iconic college lawn. The nonprofit Re:wild Your Campus is pushing universities to eliminate toxic herbicides — which kill insects, fungi, and “weeds” — from their lawn-care regimes. In some cases, they are going a step further, rewilding nonnative grasses with native plants. At Iowa’s Grinnell College, for example, students led an project to replant a central campus lawn with the native prairie grasses that once thrived there.

Baylor University researchers approached the question from a different angle, exploring how to support aquatic diversity amid campus growth. They created a database of 2,558 US campuses located within critical aquatic-species watersheds or buffering critical habitat. They tagged Concordia University in Austin, Texas, as the nation’s highest-risk campus, based on the amount of biodiversity and the most potential for urban development, lead author Mikaela Sako, an environmental science doctoral student, told me. About 250 of Concordia University’s 389 acres are part of an urban preserve providing critical habitat for the threatened Jollyville Plateau salamander and the endangered golden-cheeked warbler.

The team contrasted Concordia’s 30-year master plan, adopted in 2017, with an alternative “species-conscious design” that would mitigate stormwater runoff, which poses a risk to the salamander. Both plans envisioned construction of six residence halls, seven academic buildings, a nature center, and 16 parking lots with connecting roads, plus an expansion of its gym and athletic fields. However, the alternative plan also included nine rain gardens promoting the absorption of rainwater into the ground, 18 vegetated “living roofs” with habitat for wildlife, and permeable pavement for the new parking lots and roads that allow stormwater to flow through them. With such modifications, the alternative would support the salamanders by reducing water-impermeable surfaces on the campus to 0.12 acres — far less than the 1.84 acres in the original plan.

“Increasing enrollment requires new infrastructure to accommodate more students, specifically building and facility expansion,” the study observed. “Sustainable campus development plans have the potential to mitigate ecological disruption within watersheds, and campus management and policies are critical for preserving biodiversity in the future.”

“You don’t have to be a big campus to make a difference,” Sako told me. Her team’s case study wasn’t an action plan, she noted, and “at the end of the day,” it’s up to administrators to decide whether to implement such plans. They’re the ones with the power to say, “Hey, we want to do this,” Sako said. “It’s a super-cool opportunity.” The project was submitted to administrators, but was ignored.

In the experience of Sanders at Florida Gulf Coast University, administrators don’t always embrace such opportunities. He pointed to the threats posed by development, citing as an example construction of two boardwalks through an ecologically important area with an oak hammock and cypress swamp on his campus. The boardwalks slightly shortened the distance between a dorm and an academic area, but “there was no real practical reason why they did it,” he said. Meanwhile, a pine flatland area was “cut down mercilessly” to build a dorm. “The university administration doesn’t really care what our ecologists might think of that,” he said. “At this point I’m quite cynical. There’s a lot of lip service, but they don’t listen to alternative options.”

“So much is determined by charismatic leaders who want to advance this agenda.”

Sanders is by no means the only expert who bemoans administrative roadblocks to creating, maintaining, and expanding campus arks. Another is Daniel Orenstein, an associate professor of urban and regional planning at the Israel Institute of Technology, or Technion, in Haifa where he formerly served as its sustainability officer. He was the lead author of a case study on how to integrate ecological considerations into campus strategic planning. In 2015, Technion took a step forward, adopting a master plan that emphasized sustainability, in contrast to the traditional master plans that focused more narrowly on environmental parameters, such as water, waste, and energy. But it didn’t go as far as Orenstein had hoped, because the university’s then-director general “had no interest in advancing ecological or climate priorities,” Orenstein told me, ignoring suggestions like managing campus gardens to make more habitat available for butterflies, bats, bees, and birds, among other ideas.

There was a dramatic change, however, when a new director general, a birder with “very strong ecological sympathies,” took over and, among other steps, convened a committee to “embellish” biodiversity on campus. New steps included establishing a network of trails on campus to promote sustainability, commissioning a bird diversity survey and expanding bird habitat in the gardens, a formal call to establish community gardens on campus, and adding a page dedicated to campus nature on Technion’s website. “So much is determined by charismatic leaders who want to advance this agenda,” Orenstein said. “It’s amazing when someone opens the door to you.”

Challenges remain, of course, such as the continued use of impermeable pavement for roads and parking lots, and a general lack of awareness of the need to plant for biodiversity instead of pretty landscaping.

Finally, Orenstein pointed out that not all components of biodiversity are welcome. They can bring undesired guests, like mosquitoes and, at Technion, wild boars. “Biodiversity has its dark sides,” he said. It can also raise tricky questions, like those around fire ant control on a campus trying to otherwise eliminate pesticide use.

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT AND support are critical to the success of campus arks. Fortunately, there are ways to build constituencies of advocates for such biodiversity initiatives. Portugal’s Universidade de Lisboa, for example, launched a sustainability promotion project that engaged students, faculty, and community residents in 2021 and 2022 to survey and monitor flora and fauna on its urban campus and in the surrounding area, which has a sports facility, schools, a residential neighborhood, and an urban garden. The university’s “BioBlitz,” an event in which volunteers document as many species as possible during a short time period, along with undergraduate class assignments and traditional observation methods, discovered a record number of species: 1,019. Of these, 716 had not been identified on-site before. “The combination of green spaces, citizen science projects using species identification apps, and community-building involving citizen groups makes university campuses areas with significant potential for monitoring urban biodiversity,” the researchers wrote. From a global conservation perspective, they wrote, paying sufficient attention to campuses and other fragmented green spaces “would prove hugely beneficial in securing a wide variety of species in relatively small land areas.”

In addition, grassroots engagement in such projects can strengthen relationships between scientists working in the field with the rest of the academic community, as well as with residents in areas surrounding campus, according to the Portuguese researchers, who say, “The benefits of a society with greater scientific literacy are the most effective way to combat major issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss.”

We should think of campus arks as multi-use sites for a combination of research, conservation, and education, as well as small refuges that allow a range of flora and fauna to survive or even flourish amid the biodiversity crisis. Instructors can empower their campuses as outdoor classrooms and research labs for their students. Curry, of the Center for Biological Diversity, speaks of making biodiversity “part of the campus vision and the curriculum” by integrating sustainability into a wide range of courses, from science to literature. Nature and human civilization, she said, should not be siloed.

I feel fortunate because my university, Michigan State, has 25 designated natural areas covering more than 700 acres of woodlands and wetlands, and about 22,522 trees in 973 taxa. On a clear fall day last September, my wife and I drove by white-tailed deer grazing in a grassy area on campus. It was close to dusk — prime feeding time — and they paid little discernible attention to the passing traffic as we headed to the university’s performing arts center to see a musical. In fact, our campus deer often appear fearless; I recently spotted one stand quietly by the roadside, ignoring homeward-bound cars streaming out of a parking garage. And when I bicycle to campus, I can see our own eastern gray squirrels — both gray and black — scamper between a 34-acre natural area of floodplain and sugar maple-beech forest and the adjacent paved pathway. A deer, a tree, a native wildflower, a trail — individually they may seem unlikely to have much impact on a global scale, but in this era of disappearing species I appreciate what they signal: resilience, a safe place to survive, an ark.