FERTL Lab
MEAD Lab
Greenhouse

Laboratory facilities
Graduate students in Ecology and Evolution have access to modern laboratory facilities within the Life Sciences Laboratory. Individual faculty members have well-equipped labs with facilities for molecular analyses (cloning, sequencing, PCR, etc.), microscopy, physiological ecology (IRGA, spectrophotometry, chromatography, etc.), morphometrics, biomechanics and motion analysis, field work, and general computation. Shared equipment includes facilities for electrophoresis and darkroom work, as well as centrifuges, scintillation counter, and autoclaves. Computational facilities are described below.

Departmental growth and culture facilities include a 14,000 sq ft greenhouse attached to the Life Science Laboratory, a Drosophila rearing facility, and various growth chambers. Individual faculty members have facilities for housing or rearing a diversity of research organisms, including bacteria, freshwater invertebrates and fishes, marine invertebrates, and insects. Facilities for housing mammals are available in nearby buildings on campus.

Field research facilities and opportunities
Graduate students enrolled in the Program have access to a number of field sites and programs. The Department operates a field station, the Swan Pond Biological Station, located about 40 minutes from campus. This facility includes a residence and laboratory located on ~2500 acre preserve of mixed woodlands, ponds, bogs, and river habitats. During the summer, the Department offers field courses at Swan Pond. The University operates the Flax Pond Salt Marsh Preserve and Laboratory, located a few miles from campus. This is an 800 acre salt marsh that had been studied extensively and is protected from human disturbance. Several faculty and students utilize field sites at the David Weld Preserve, located 20 minutes from campus. This is a ~90 acre site of mixed woodland, marsh, and ocean beach. The site is owned and operated by the Nature Conservancy, and the Department has a contract to carry out field research there. Additional field sites are used by faculty and students at Brookhaven Laboratory (abo ut 20 minutes from campus).

For a fuller description of the surprisingly diverse natural habitats on Long Island that are available for field study, see living. Extensive marine research facilities are maintained by the Marine Sciences Research Center, located on campus a few minute's walk south of the Life Sciences Laboratory. The MRSC operates several vessels, from small outboards through a 55-foot oceangoing research vessel, the R.V. Onrust. The extensive research collections of The American Museum of Natural History and of the New York Botanical Gardens are located nearby, and are frequently used by students and faculty members in their research.

In addition, The State University of New York at Stony Brook belongs to the Organization for Tropical Studies. Many graduate students in the Program take the tropical ecology course taught in Costa Rica, and several have done field work at the field station at La Selva. Graduate students have also taken courses and carried out research at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado and at the Friday Harbor Laboratories in Washington, as well as other field stations. In recent years, graduate students have conducted field work at sites throughout North America, as well as in Africa, South America, the Pacific, and Europe.

Computational facilities
The Department owns and maintains its own computing center, the Biological Sciences Computing Facility (BSCF), which provides computer services throughout the Life Sciences Building. The facility houses central computing and graphical capabilities, including two Dell servers running Solaris, a Sun SPARCserver 1000, and a Silicon Graphics Indigo Elan, as well as a cluster of Macintosh and PC microcomputers. Peripherals include several laser printers, inkjet and dye-sublimation color printer, flatbed scanners, and other hardware. A full time Systems Manager oversees the daily operation of the BSCF. For more information see BSCF and Sun user guide.

Extensive software is available for the general use of graduate students. State of the art software is installed on the central computers, including packages for statistics (SAS), morphometrics (VolVis), molecular data analysis (GCG, Clustal), mathematical manipulations (Maple), phylogenetic analysis (PAUP, Phylip), programming (C, C++, Pascal, FORTRAN), and graphics (SASGraph, SoftImage). TeX and LaTeX typesetting software is also available.

Several popular software packages are installed on the microcomputers in the BSCF, including word processing (Word, WordPerfect), spreadsheets (Excel, 1-2-3), optical character recognition (OmniPage), desktop publishing, phylogenetic analysis (PAUP, Phylip, MacClade, ClaDOS, NTSYSpc, etc.), mapping, programming, statistics (Systat, JMP, etc.), morphometrics (various programs, many written by E & E faculty and graduate students), digital image manipulation and analysis (NIH Image, Photoshop), and graphics (Canvas, Draw, PowerPoint, DeltaGraph, etc.).

Ethernet connections link equipment in the BSCF to all labs and offices. E-mail, FTP, web sites, terminal emulation, and other network facilities are available from most computers in the Department, including the microcomputers in the BSCF cluster. High-speed connections across campus allow users to access computers located in other departments, and off campus (the university is a member of the Internet II consortium).

Faculty members have computers located in their labs, with software and hardware tailored to their individual research programs. Additional microcomputers and workstations for general use are located in clusters elsewhere on campus.