There are 154 national forests in the United States, covering nearly 300,000 square miles of forests, woodlands, shrublands, wetlands, meadows and prairies. These lands are increasingly recognized as vital for supporting a broad diversity of plant and animal life; for water and nutrient cycling; and for the human communities that depend on forests and find cultural and spiritual significance within them.
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Alaskan waters are a critical fishery for salmon. Complex marine food webs underlie and sustain this fishery, and scientists want to know how climate change is reshaping them. But finding samples from the past isn’t easy. “We have to really open our minds and get creative about what can act as an ecological data source,” said Natalie Mastick, currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.
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The cherry trees on the UW Quad have reached their prime. A group of students in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences has been monitoring the timing of blossoms across campus since 2018, with the goal of creating a model that will use weather data to predict the timing of peak bloom in future years.
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Natural history museums have entered a new stage of discovery and accessibility — one where scientists around the globe and curious folks at home can access valuable museum specimens to study, learn or just be amazed. This new era follows the completion of openVertebrate, or oVert, a five-year collaborative project among 18 institutions, including the UW, to create 3D reconstructions of vertebrate specimens and make them freely available online.
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When it comes to climate change, an important question is not simply how can humans stop emitting greenhouse gases, but how can we remove the greenhouse gases that we’ve already released? Many of Earth’s natural processes are already taking significant amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and our wetland ecosystems are some of the most effective at this work.
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