Shoals Marine Laboratory (SML) is poised to become an even more important site for delivery of marine and field science education. For more than 40 years, SML has delivered excellent summer undergraduate courses in marine science on Appledore Island, Maine. Now, we are repositioning SML so that we can offer such training throughout the year on the mainland at Creek Farm Reservation in New Hampshire. We will be able to develop a more complete curriculum to provide even broader training and help this field become more available to undergraduates from Cornell and other universities.

I was hired in 2005 to serve as director of SML, and I sought to increase SML`s reputation for excellent undergraduate teaching. Integral to this is our facility at Creek Farm Reservation in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which offers the chance to operate courses throughout the year. Our new general biology course, A Marine Approach to Introductory Biology, will be an important feeder course for students interested in marine science; J. B. Heiser and I taught it for the first time in summer 2007. Our new general earth science course, The Sea Around Us, will be taught for the first time in summer 2008 by Warren Allmon. It, too, will feed students into SML`s teaching program at Creek Farm Reservation as SML goes forward.

We have developed and taught new courses and made careful plans for the mainland 12-month facility at Creek Farm in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Programmatic and financial approvals for the project are pending, but we hope that all will be approved and that we will be able to open Creek Farm Cottage as an undergraduate teaching facility for SML by summer 2010.

The Creek Farm Project will benefit the city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, by bringing students and faculty to learn in this residential setting. Creek Farm Reservation itself is already open to the public, because the property is owned by the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests (SPNHF; SML rents the buildings from SPNHF). This facility will help to better integrate SML into the communities of the New Hampshire and Maine seacoasts and encourage more participation in SML`s academic and other programs.

Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests