Ashley Schiff Preserve Provides a Special Sanctuary on Campus

While the Stony Brook community participates in the university's annual Earthstock celebration, there is a place on campus where visitors can appreciate nature every day of the year - the Ashley Schiff Nature Preserve.

Located on South Campus just north of Nassau Hall and south of Circle Road, the preserve is a temperate, deciduous forest lined with oak and maple trees that features 75 species of plants, including trailing arbutus, mountain laurel, winterberry and spotted wintergreen. Cooper's hawks, great horned owls, red fox, possums, raccoons and white-tailed deer are among the fauna that make the preserve their home.

The preserve's educational value rivals its beauty. It is part of the curriculum for several areas including biology, geology and sustainability studies, and has been described as an opportunity to escape the classroom walls, providing an inspiring place to study the environment.

In 2023, two Environmental Club students - Sowad Ocean Karim and Kellianne Ticcony - curated Forever Wild, a 135-page collection of poems, drawings, art and other forms of activism that celebrates the importance of nature, the environment and the preserve.

The Ashley Schiff Preserve was named in honor of Ashley Schiff, a popular political science professor and environmental activist at Stony Brook who died unexpectedly in 1969 at the age of 37. Schiff was known for his dedication to teaching and his legendary conservation efforts, and was voted among the five best-liked professors on campus the year before his passing.

Students resisted administration offers to name a building after Schiff and organized to formulate a more appropriate memorial. Support for a wild nature preserve grew rapidly and within a week's time, Stony Brook President John Toll, on October 9, 1969, committed the university to creation of the preserve in an area that Schiff often walked with his students.

In 1970, the Ashley Schiff Nature Preserve was dedicated at a public ceremony by the former United States Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall. Identifying signs were placed that asked visitors to "Take Only Photos, Leave Only Footprints."

"Today we dedicate a wilderness preserve to the memory of Ashley Schiff, where future generations at Stony Brook can learn to share his appreciation of nature," Toll said at the time. "Of all the tributes we might pay him, I believe this is the one that would have touched him most, and best carries forward his special contributions to Stony Brook."

The Stony Brook Council issued two resolutions in 2024 that the land "will forever be known as the Ashley Schiff Nature Preserve and will continue to be maintained as a preserve," including an area that more accurately reflected the preserve's historical boundaries.

Friends of the Ashley Schiff Preserve, an organization led by Stony Brook faculty and staff, serves to manage the preserve as a "living laboratory" and an academic research site while promoting its educational and research value with students, faculty, staff and the greater community.

To learn more about the preserve, visit the Friends of the Ashley Schiff Preserve website.