The Westside Nature Preserve is not only a beautiful hiking destination but also an important research site for WCSU.

It is home to one of the WCSU Tick Lab’s monitoring locations, which has been actively sampled since 2011. These long-term monitoring efforts led to the first documented detection of the exotic Asian longhorned tick (Haemaphysalis longicornis) in Connecticut in 2018. It is also used for the Tick Lab’s tick gardens, where Sandra Zapata-Ramirez, a recent WCSU master student of Biological Integrative Diversity, elucidated the effects of mowing on nymphal blacklegged ticks. She was able to use the preserve to mimic the conditions of a backyard and then compare different mowing practices on tick abundance.