Penn State Beaver’s (PS BR) 105-acre campus is a green oasis in the small town of Monaca in western Pennsylvania, USA. After serving as a farm and a tuberculosis sanatorium, Beaver County Commissioners donated the property to Penn State. Students were first welcomed in 1965. PSB expanded beyond offering just the first two years of bachelor’s degrees in 2014. As of 2026, 10 majors can be completed start to finish at PS BR, including biology.

A pond, stream, wetlands, 4 acres of recently converted turf to meadow and approximately 32 acres of diverse woods with several grand wolf oaks provide excellent opportunities for learning about nature. Beyond the forested land, within PS BR’s approximately 40 acres of lawn and sport fields, staff maintain about 400 trees of 50 different species, with continual additions. Students enjoy these arboretum trees while resting at picnic tables and hammocks, and they study the trees as part of their courses. For example, a new student planting project installed a small forest patch on campus as part of a reforestation curriculum. Biology students learn to use dichotomous keys to identify species, and they design and execute experiments to test which factors control the timing of fall leaf changes. Plant and Forestry general education courses make maple syrup from start to finish using sap from the arboretum trees.

Although campus has only 5 sugar maples (Acer saccharum), maple is the most common tree genus in PS BR’s arboretum, at 23%. Like the composition of many forest under stories in Pennsylvania, red maple (A. rubrum) dominates arboretum plantings. Additional native maples in PS BR’s arboretum include silver maple (A. saccharinum), black maple (A. nigrum) and boxelder (A. negundo). Freeman’s maple (Acer x freemanii) is a hybrid of red and silver maple. There are also non-native Norway maples (A. platanoides). With similarly shaped leaves, the second most common genus on PS BR’s arboretum is Platanus, mostly the London planetree (Platanus x hispanica), a large, disease-resistant hybrid of a non-native Asian tree (P. occidentalis) and our native sycamore (P. occidentalis). Amelanchier is our third most common genus, displaying beautiful spring flowers and edible berries.