Frances Archbold Hufty (1912 to 2010) became Chairman of the Board of Archbold Expeditions in 1976 after her brother, Richard Archbold, bequeathed his assets to the organization shortly before his death. During 35 years of her leadership, Archbold Expeditions grew into a world-renowned research center, and by 2010 the biological collections held over 230,000 plant and animal specimens, forming an irreplaceable record of Florida scrub organisms. While she served as chairman from 1976 to 2010, Archbold Biological Station expanded into the world's foremost source of information on Florida scrub and surrounding Florida ecosystems, and its scientists published nearly 1,500 papers and books. The station's long-term ecological research revealed the complexity of Florida's scrub ecosystem and its responses to fire management, climate, and human development, discoveries that guided protection and management of this rare North American ecosystem. Hufty also strongly supported education: in the 20 years after the K-12 program began in 1989, more than 40,000 children learned about the Florida scrub through field trips or Scrub Day Camp, the station regularly hosted visiting college classes, more than 300 students completed internships from 1976 to 2010, and 135 graduate students earned master's or doctoral degrees based on research there. Notable long-term studies included fire research begun in 1977 that showed fire was essential to scrub life and led to a fire management program with prescribed burns beginning in 1979, Glen Woolfenden's Florida Scrub-Jay study begun in 1969 and continued with an unbroken monthly census since 1971, and plant ecology research on more than 20 rare scrub species that produced one of the world's most detailed long-running datasets on individual plants and plant populations.