The Highlands Center at Cape Cod National Seashore occupies a point of singular beauty in Truro, Massachusetts. Its converging habitat, where land meets the sea, provides a fitting backdrop for learning, reflection, and research.

Formerly the North Truro Air Force Station, in 1994, Cape Cod National Seashore (CCNS) acquired the 110-acre property. Since then, CCNS has adaptively reused six buildings and has made over $1.5 million in infrastructure improvements, and spent over $1.2 million on building demolition. Originally used for common space, housing, offices, and maintenance, buildings provide a broad range of opportunities for future users.

The Highlands Center core is its partners, an interactive community of artists, scientists, and educators pursuing their work in a national park setting. These public and private program partners enrich each other’s work and the center’s mission through their distinctive activities.

Cape Cod is a large peninsula extending 60 miles into the Atlantic Ocean from the coast of Massachusetts. Located on the outer portion of the Cape, Cape Cod National Seashore’s 44,600 acres encompass a rich mosaic of marine, estuarine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems. These systems and their associated habitats reflect the Cape’s glacial origin, dynamic natural processes, and at least 9,000 years of human activity. Geomorphic shoreline change, groundwater fluctuations, tidal dynamics including rising sea level, and atmospheric deposition are among the many physical processes that continue to shape the Seashore’s ecosystems. Marine and estuarine systems include beaches, sand spits, tidal flats, salt marshes, and soft-bottom benthos. Freshwater ecosystems include kettle ponds, vernal pools, sphagnum bogs, and swamps. Terrestrial systems include pitch pine and scrub oak forests, heathlands, dunes, and sandplain grasslands. Many of these habitats are globally uncommon and the species that occupy them are correspondingly rare.