Research

This sandy slope was once part of the vast Central Dunes near the historic Dune Park station. This grove of sand-blasted, sun-bleached white pines was uncovered by shifting winds, after being originally smothered by sands years before.

Ira Benton Meyers, 1906, University of Chicago Photographic Archive, aep-inn018, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

While the Indiana Dunes maintain a legacy of modern scientific inquiry that began towards then end of the 19th century, this landscape had already been being studied by Native Americans for thousands of years. Their vast knowledge of the region reveals an intimate past of research.

Beginning as early as the 1870s, scientists visited the shifting sands along Lake Michigan's south shore. One of the most prominent was Dr. Henry Chandler Cowles, first a student and then professor at University of Chicago. His dissertation in 1899 and subsequent research enabled the new science of ecology to flourish in North America while simultaneously focusing the attention of other scientists as well as early progressives, conservtionalists, and artists on the Indiana Dunes.

 

Monitoring at Mount Baldy

Jeff Manuszak NPS Collection

Indiana Dunes National Park is one of nine parks that are within the federal government's Great Lakes Inventory and Monitoring Network. National parks within the boundaries of Lake Michigan and Lake Superior are monitored and studied for wildlife and plant populations, changes in the landscape, and effects of pollution on the environment. Great Lakes Network scientists use the parks for science and use the science to make managment decisions to help the parks.

Click here for resource briefs and reports conducted at Indiana Dunes National Park by the Great Lake Inventory & Montoring Network.

 

Dr. Erin Argyilan of Indiana University Northwest discusses geologic processes with iSWOOP and park staff on Mt. Baldy's summit.

In addition to research and monitoring conducted by federal agencies, professors and scientists from universities and colleges visit the Indiana Dunes to teach, examine and study.

iSWOOP, or Interpreters and Scientists Working On Our Parks, was funded by the National Science Foundation as a model program to build visitors’ understanding of science at National Parks.

Please visit their page for more information.