About CPBS

Who are we?

Why do we matter?

These questions come with hours of conversation over steamy mugs of coffee as twilight settles upon the shores of Lake Ogallala.  We are a facility.  We facilitate the education and training of young natural scientists.  We facilitate the continued research of both giants in the realm of biological sciences and of their emerging interns.  We facilitate the growth and development of the next generation of biologists as they prepare for carrying on the legacy of academic success that the University of Nebraska is famous for achieving.  We are a setting...a place for learning, for teaching, and for doing research...but we are so much more than simply that.

Students finding a juvenile
snake during a dissection.

Cedar Point Biological Station is nestled in the heart of the Great Plains just north of Ogallala, Nebraska.  We are settled in a unique biogeographic region near Lake Ogallala, a body of water created by the Kingsley Dam which is located on the eastern side of Lake McCounaghy.

Kingsley Dam

To the far east of Lake Ogallala lies the Keystone Diversion Dam, which empties water into the Sutherland Canal or into the North Platte River.  The Cedar Point campus lies within the bluffs and canyons that make up the southern edge of the North Platte River Valley.

The redcedar tree-lined canyons cut into a vast wedge of sediment that has been shed by the Rocky Mountains over the last 20 million years.  Stretching to the north is a spectacular view of the Nebraska Sandhills, a vast dune field stabilized by native grasses, that covers almost a quarter of the state of Nebraska.

Sunflower on Arapahoe Prairie

The campus is blended into the surrounding flora and fauna of the Great Plains.  The station is in the ideal location for field trips to the famous sandhills or to areas of untouched native prairie.  It is not uncommon to see rabbits, turkeys, and deer romping through fields of grasses studded with small stands of sunflowers and stippled with a rainbow of wildflowers.  The diversity of life is simply astounding and lends itself to a many types of research.  Over 80% of birds found in Nebraska have been encountered by ornithologists and their classes at Cedar Point over the past three and a half decades.

CPBS has a long history of scientific research conducted in the fields of ornithology, parasitology, entomology, and grasslands ecology.  There is also a long history of students coming to Cedar Point to experience the wonder of nature as can only be experienced in field-based courses.  Since the first classes were taught here in the mid-seventies, numerous students have emerged from Cedar Point with new perceptions about the natural world.  Many of these students went on to conduct a great deal of meaningful research in the biological sciences.  Some became professors at other universities and some even gave their time back to CPBS by teaching courses themselves.  All left Cedar Point with experiences of  biological phenomena that will live with them for the rest of their lives.

We are a place.

We are an experience.

We are Cedar Point.