Allegheny College’s Watershed Conservation Research Center (WCRC) will be able to expand and enhance programs that benefit students, faculty, and the College’s community partners in the French Creek corridor, thanks to a $934,877 grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation.
“The grant, awarded earlier this year, will provide funding for staff, equipment and supplies to increase capacity for undergraduate student research, and help support collaborative research with conservation organizations throughout Western Pennsylvania,” says Dr. Kelly Pearce, assistant professor of Environmental Science & Sustainability.
“In four years since the establishment of the research center, we have worked directly with more than 155 Allegheny undergraduates, achieving our mission of carrying out research and training future watershed stewards,” says Pearce, who is co-director of the research center with Dr. Casey Bradshaw-Wilson, associate professor of Environmental Science & Sustainability.
Independent student research projects conducted in 2024-25 range from studying relationships between amphibian abundance and forest habitat quality to evaluating the impacts of recent climate change on spotted salamander body size and phenology. Senior comprehensive projects have included investigating how invasive plant species influence the behavior of river otters and studying the effects of the invasive round goby on native fishes.
Allegheny students conduct extensive research earning the College spots in U.S. News & World Report for programs for enhancing student experience, ranked #9 for Best Senior Capstone and #23 for Best Undergraduate Research/Creative Projects.
“It was special working through the Watershed Conservation Research Center because of the support I had while doing my research,” says Anthony DeMarco ‘25, a senior from Olmsted Falls, Ohio, and an Environmental Sciences major and Education minor. “I had help from extremely knowledgeable professors. It was also an awesome experience to feel like a part of a team that was doing research that will make a difference in the future.”
Field work and research has also provided support to numerous courses at Allegheny in the Environmental Science and Sustainability and Biology curricula. In addition, staff and students have delivered more than 30 research presentations at prestigious local, regional and international conferences in recent years.
Located on the campus of Allegheny College, the research center engages in strategic conservation activities and trains future watershed stewards to protect, restore, and enhance water resources for future generations in the upper Allegheny River basin, focusing on the French Creek Watershed.
Faculty and staff from the WCRC also work closely with community groups, such as the Crawford County Conservation District to preserve and protect the region’s waterways.
“We have completed three in-stream habitat improvement projects,” Bradshaw-Wilson says. “These types of restoration projects increase diversity in streams from the bottom up, fostering a healthy base in the food web, which, in turn, have positive and cascading effects on the rest of the ecosystem. Increasing a stream’s biotic integrity through restoration efforts will not only help that particular stream section, but, more importantly, it will also increase ecosystem function, which is tightly connected with human well-being through ecosystem services.”
Over the past four years, the Watershed Conservation Research Center has worked with more than 450 K-12 students through eighteen different outreach and education events in partnership with Creek Connections and the French Creek Valley Conservancy. Students participating come from various schools and organizations, including Meadville Area Senior High School Environmental Club, Conneaut Lake Middle School, Oakview Elementary School, Commodore Perry School District, Saegertown Elementary School, and Reynolds Elementary School.
The research center has quickly developed into a signature program at Allegheny College, one of the nation’s leading schools for environmental science, established over fifty years ago.
The Richard King Mellon Foundation is based in Pittsburgh and has funded visionaries with bold ideas to advance prosperity in Pennsylvania and environmental conservation across the United States.
