Contributing to FLBS

Contributions to the Flathead Lake Biological Station are gladly accepted in any amount.

We encourage you to choose the cause your contributions should support. Our capital campaign funds a variety of major projects around Flathead Lake. We are a not-for-profit organization, and within IRS regulations, donations are tax-deductible.

More Information
Donating to FLBS

Endowment funding is vital to the support of the station. While we are poised to become the leading biological field station in the world as an environmental observatory of natural and social processes in a virtually pristine setting, we cannot realize this potential within our current financial framework, which is substantially constrained by State-based funding. We must provide the human capital, facilities and advanced technologies required to sustain and evolve the Station's mission. We are currently continuing a capital campaign that seeks the tactical financial support needed for FLBS to respond to the complex environmental threats and social interactions facing Flathead Lake, the Crown of the Continent, and beyond.

The Bio Station is currently seeking long-term, permanent endowment for the following five projects. An endowment is a form of charitable giving that provides funding for a given cause, in perpetuity. Naming rights are available on new endowments.

The Visualization Center will provide the critical link we need to correlate space shuttle and satellite imagery with our on-the-ground findings. Through our research, we will see the day when satellite images will have the precision and accuracy we now enjoy only through groundtruth data acquisition. "Remote sensing" on regional and global scales will take the place of costly, time-consuming surface sampling. But, we require the high-speed electronic pipeline necessary to acquire the vast streams of electronic data needed to identify climatic change. Building our electronic infrastructure to take advantage of the new high-speed Internet is among our top priorities. In addition, as the Flathead Lake Biological Station's influence and impact grows more global, we are finding a greater need for real-time video conferencing with scientific colleagues and decisionmakers around the world. Through high-speed broadband connections and display equipment, we will communicate with people around the world as if we were in the same room. Through our "Window to the World" initiative (ongoing endowment campaign), the Center will play a vital role in enhancing academic instruction by turning digital satellite data into images that can be visualized by students. This "scientific visualization" will help our leaders of tomorrow better understand the impact of global environmental change and will help us provide better outreach to the public. A lecture hall, designed to accommodate up to 200, will be linked directly to the highspeed Internet for real-time video transmission, as well as distance-lecturing and research collaborations. The lecture hall will also provide more convenience for our friends, neighbors, visiting scientists and students while attending lectures, community meetings and forums about our scientific research and education. We seek private funding to underwrite construction and operations of the Center. The cost is $5 million and naming opportunities are offered.

The Crown of the Continent Ecosystem Interpretive Center and Interpretive Nature Trail - We plan to modify the existing Yellow Bay State Park, which is Station (University) property, to emphasize the dissemination of public information about the natural attributes of the Flathead Valley and the Crown of the Continent ecoregion. An interpretive center will be the centerpiece. The global influence of the research and educational programs of the Flathead Lake Biological Station will be featured in natural and virtual (Internet-based) displays, along with information on the activities of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and other Federal and Tribal resource agencies in the region. The center will be staffed to involve Station personnel, University graduate students, and Community volunteers. It will be linked to the Scientific Visualization Center to allow computer-generated visualizations of biophysical processes, such as glaciation, animal movements, forest fires, and cultural uses of natural resources in the Crown of the Continent ecosystem. We believe the center will become the focus for public environmental education in natural resources for the Flathead Region. The Nature Trail is envisioned as a major attraction for people who visit the Flathead Lake Biological Station and who wish to learn more about the unique features associated with the Mission Mountains overlooking Flathead Lake. The trail will meander through the Station grounds and adjacent public and private properties highlighting tree species, creek and shoreline features, the small mammal sampling plot and the bald eagle nesting site. The Nature Trail is envisioned to connect to a new trail system on the east shore mountain front. Old CCC trails currently exist and can be upgraded through a partnership with the US Forest Service and Tribes. This re-vitalized trail system would connect FLBS north to Bigfork, east to Swan Lake and the trail systems into the Bob Marshall Wilderness and south to the Mission Mountain Wilderness and the Reservation. A separate proposal for this mountain trail system is being developed cooperatively with the agencies. The cost of the Interpretive Center is $3.7 million and naming opportunities are offered.

New Housing for Graduate Students - We expect to have 10 - 15 graduate students in residence within 2 years. We currently have 4 apartments and two old houses that our graduate students may rent at a rate commensurate with the research assistantships that we provide to each student. However, these facilities also must serve visiting scientists. Hence we have a substantial housing shortage. Some rental units are available near the station but owing to exceedingly high land values on the East Shore, these properties are mostly unaffordable for graduate students. Therefore, we plan to build a 4-plex unit (4, 2-person apartments) on the Station grounds. Location has not yet been finalized but one potential location is in the existing state park area in association with the Interpretive Center described above. As noted above we are working to change the use of this park and return the operation to FLBS. The area is already connected to the FLBS sewage treatment facility and we can use our existing potable water source, which makes this area the preferred location. Cost of the new graduate student housing is estimated at $250,000.

For the past 30 years, the staff at the Flathead Lake Biological Station had been monitoring nutrient levels, amoung other variables, in an attempt to map the state of water quality within the Flathead Basin. It is this vigilance that contributed to the upgrade of waste treatment facilities in Kalispell, Columbia Falls, Whitefish and Bigfork in the 1980s. Only by ensuring a long and uninterrupted string of data can residents and policy makers hope to stay abreast of water quality trends in the Valley and therefore head off future degradation.

The Research and Monitoring Fund for which we seek support has been established to provide uninterrupted acquisition of water quality data using state-of-the-science protocols. Priority for the program will be given to Flathead Lake, Whitefish Lake, and Swan Lake. Through this program, our researchers will collect data on a group of water quality variables on target lakes and their tributaries. The fund also will help answer questions that arrive with the data we collect. These include the mechanisms controlling excessive growth of algae associated with human-derived nutrient loading (which can significantly degrade water quality, particularly its clarity) and food web interactions caused by the introduction of invasive, non-native organisms like the mysid shrimp. Observing changes in the quality of Flathead Lake over time assists local decision makers in determining how best to stem potential negative effects of human impacts on Flathead Lake.

An endowment principal of $2,000,000 will, in the first year, provide $100,000 to the Research and Monitoring Fund. This money will be used to leverage funding from the National Science Foundation, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality and other entities that routinely provide water quality funding to accomplish full-scale scientific analysis and monitoring by the Flathead Lake Biological Station on all three lakes.

Traditionally, the Flathead Lake Biological Station's research productivity and international reputation have been derived from "soft" money, mainly in the form of NSF and other competitive federal grants. But now, to provide our core, world-class faculty the opportunity to work together on strategic, multi-disciplinary research and educational objectives, stable resources are needed to preclude the ongoing need for our faculty to chase short-term, discrete contract projects to the exclusion of long-term global priorities.

By even partially fulfilling the endowment goals for the five professorships we seek, we can transfer the responsibility of grantsmanship to our young investigators and focus our programs on strategic research into environmental change. As a measure of productivity, our track record is the generation of $3-5 in soft money for every $1 of hard money invested.

The McKnight Foundation of Minneapolis has committed $1.5 million to endow a professorsip in limnology to facilitate expanded work in river and wetland ecology research. However, $500,000 of that grant has been issued as a challenge. We must raise $1,000,000 to earn the challenge grant. In addition, we seek four other endowed professorships that will truly transform the way scientists evaluate climatic change leading to new and dramatic modifications to local, regional, national, and global environmental policy.

An endowed professorship is $2.5 million and naming opportunities are available.

Additionally, the Bio Station continues to seek donations for permanent student scholarships:

The key to sustainability of the Flathead Lake Biological Station's educational program is support through endowed scholarships and fellowships. The income generated by these endowments may make the difference between someone being able to spend the summer at the Station or having to stay home. For others with some means, a scholarship may allow a student to take a greater course load and, therefore, enjoy a fuller educational, research and field experience at the Station. Scholarships help facilitate the summer enrollment of, and a richer experience for, some of our best applicants; fellowships provide similar opportunities for our graduate students. The Flathead Lake Biological Station, in accepting applications for the summer program, looks first to a student's academic credentials and second to a student's financial need. We anticipate the day when we will have a "need blind" acceptance policy.

Endowed scholarships range from $10,000 through our Presidential Scholarships of $125,000, with naming opportunities offered.

Several of the capital campaign goals lists above have received partial funding: