When valley residents think about Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL), they often envision scientists holding binoculars, notebooks, and pencils wading through wildflowers to research hummingbirds. Or bumble bees. Or fat fluffy marmots soaking up the sunshine.
In 2025, RMBL started a new chapter, adding lasers, drones, and other advanced technologies to its rich history of research in biology and ecology.
The future of RMBL began with a new executive director, Jeni Blacklock, who served as the dean of Western Colorado University’s Rady Engineering Partnership Program. In 2023, she started the RMBL, Western Colorado University (WCU), and University of Colorado Boulder Engineering Partnership Program, which pairs mechanical engineering and computer science graduates with current students and RMBL scientists. Together, they help bring new tools and technologies to advance how researchers collect and analyze data from the mountainous field sites around RMBL.
“Those projects were so exciting that eventually, I took the position at RMBL to start to tie the north and south valleys together,” Blacklock said. “And to create stronger bridges that fully support the advancement of science from the RMBL side.”
Until recently, RMBL field scientists have focused on evolutionary biology and ecology, like pollinators, marmots, and ground squirrels, and their approach to data gathering was largely old school — outside in the field using nets and notebooks and tracking behavior, migration, and patterns year after year. Several of their projects, like the UCLA marmot project, have recorded some of the longest-running datasets in the world.
The new partnership is an opportunity to use engineering and computer science to design advanced data collection instruments using innovative methods like drones, satellites, and advanced GPS systems.
In 2023, RMBL’s collaboration with WCU and CU Boulder secured $200,000 in funding from the Tourism and Prosperity Partnership (TAPP), and funds two post-baccalaureate positions staffed by WCU graduates in computer science and mechanical engineering to work closely with RMBL research scientist Ian Breckheimer. The project also brings in Western Rady School undergraduate students to design tools that gather more detailed measurements. For example, fourth-year engineering students recently designed portable weather stations that can be packed into a backpack, making them more nimble and dynamic than current static weather stations that are fixed to one specific spot.
“These kinds of partnerships are crucial to advancing environmental science more broadly,” Breckheimer said.
The partnership program has five projects in motion. In addition to bringing in new technologies like the portable weather station, RMBL has expanded its research to integrate atmospheric science, including temperatures, carbon dioxide emissions, and precipitation, along with hydrology — streams, snowpack, and soils — to understand the full scale of what influences ecosystems, like that of the East River Valley and beyond.
“So what’s the future of forests in the Colorado Rockies? What’s the future of rivers in the Upper Colorado River Basin?”
Those are questions you can’t answer unless you have all those different pieces working together, and that’s just a tremendously difficult science problem,” Breckheimer said. By generating richer datasets, these observations will improve predictive models for environmental challenges such as wildfires and drought, helping to inform more effective responses and mitigation strategies.
Jayden Omi, a computer science graduate and current post-baccalaureate with the partnership program, works closely advising engineering students and has helped develop and test several new tools. One project uses drones to understand more about carbon storage and climate changes among tree canopies.
“Field researchers have really good data on the weather on the ground, but to do tree canopy studies, they need to know the exact weather that the leaves are experiencing,” Omi said. “So they mount this weather sensor onto a drone so they can collect weather data up into the sky.”
Using sensors, they’ve also designed a device that measures the snowpack’s load-bearing capacity by detecting animal weight, which is crucial for understanding how wildlife navigates snowy landscapes. This data helps researchers assess how changing snow conditions impact animal movement, migration patterns, and access to food, ultimately influencing species survival and ecosystem dynamics.
In collaboration with Trimble Navigation Systems, a Westminster-based tech company, they have also developed a precision field mapping tool that pinpoints a scientist’s location down to the centimeter. This advancement has revolutionized the documentation of snow coverage by utilizing drones and satellites to capture highly accurate measurements and allow researchers to monitor environmental changes over time, leading to better-informed conservation and land management strategies.
Breckheimer also leads a NASA-funded study, the Colorado Headwaters Ecological Spectroscopy Study (CHESS), which uses high-definition cameras attached to planes that fly over the East River Valley to measure how ecosystems in the Gunnison Basin are adapting to drought and changes in climate.
Breckheimer is excited about the new projects, but in the big picture, he hopes people remember the history of more than 100 years of research that brought RMBL to its next chapter.
“The real kind of special sauce that RMBL has is this combination of long-term data and new technology. This new era, where we’ve got a tremendous number of tools, more than the people that started this work in the mid-20th century ever could have imagined. But I don’t think they could have imagined how important those long-term measurements would be today.”