Cowles Bog: The Birthplace of American Ecology

In the late eighteen nineties, a University of Chicago botanist named Henry Chandler Cowles came to the Indiana Dunes to study something that puzzled him: why did the plants change so dramatically from the lakeshore inward? What he found changed science. Cowles observed that the dune landscape was not static but constantly evolving, that plants colonized bare sand, stabilized it, died back, and were replaced by more complex communities moving toward forest.

His eighteen ninety-eight doctoral thesis on plant succession in the Indiana Dunes became one of the most influential papers in American botany and helped establish the field of ecology. The bog here, an ancient wetland, bears his name. It is preserved as part of Indiana Dunes National Park.