ANNOUNCEMENTS & KUDOS

Professor Fernando Resende passed along some excellent kudos for Kayla Vanous, who won first place in a nationwide poster competition—against hundreds of competitors—at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Conference in San Francisco, Nov. 3-8. Resende co-advises Vanous, a graduate student in chemical engineering, and she is housed in Bloedel Hall and works with our biofuels research. Nice work, Kayla!

We also have kudos for Professor Sharon Doty and her team that participated in the College of the Environment’s "Science Inside Out" event at Husky Stadium on Thursday, Nov. 7. Their group consisted of three undergrads, two grad students and a research scientist, and Doty says it was a great outreach event—and a terrific opportunity to teach the public about the wondrous things microbes can do! Thanks, as well, got to Kristin Buckley for helping arrange the event, and the rest of SEFS presenters, including Professors Kern Ewing and Aaron Wirsing.

On a fun personal note, we'd like to send a big congratulations to Shannon Ewanick, who welcomed her new baby boy, Russell James Warner, weighing 8 pounds, 9 ounces, on October 31! She reports that everything went well with the Halloween delivery, and that she and her husband are slowly adjusting to life with no sleep and no time!

Coming up on Thursday, Dec. 12, is the fourth installment of the monthly "Evening Talks at ONRC" series, held out at the Olympic Natural Resources Center in Forks. ONRC staff member Rich Osborne will be talking about salmon and resident orcas, and the public is welcome and encouraged to attend! For more information, contact Ellen Matheny.

PUBLICATIONS

Professor Josh Lawler is a co-author on two new papers that just came out (November 2013) in a special issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment: “Preparing for and managing change: climate adaptation for biodiversity and ecosystems,” and “Biodiversity in a changing climate: a synthesis of current and projected trends in the U.S.”

More important, says Lawler, is a recent paper published in the Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management that was led by one of his former students, Chad Wilsey, who is now a postdoc. The paper, “Tools for Assessing Climate Impacts on Fish and Wildlife,” came out of a graduate seminar Lawler taught several years ago, and it has several SEFS grad student authors—including Keala Hagmann, James Freund and Karen Sutton (a doctoral student with Professor Christian Torgersen)!

Professor Stevan Harrell passed along word of a couple new publications involving SEFS professors and students, including “Influence of Human Pressure on Forest Resources and Productivity at Stand and Tree Scales: The Case Study of Yunnan Pine in SW China,” published in the Journal of Mountain Science (co-authors include Harrell, Professor Emeritus Tom Hinckley and SEFS grad student Keala Hagmann). A second paper, “Is the Returning Farmland to Forest Program a Success? Three Case Studies from Sichuan,” was published in Environmental Practice and also includes Hinckley and Harrell among the co-authors.

SEFS IN THE PRESS

Sandra Hines of UW News and Information put together a nice story about some of SEFS Director Tom DeLuca’s research, “Floods didn’t provide nitrogen ‘fix’ for earliest crops in frigid north.” As Hines writes, floods didn't make floodplains fertile during the dawn of human agriculture in the Earth's far north. Turns out early human inhabitants can mainly thank cyanobacteria. It raises the question of whether modern farmers might reduce fertilizer use by taking advantage of cyanobacteria that occur, not just in the floodplains studied, but in soils around the world.

Andrea Watts, who recently earned her master’s from SEFS, published an article in Acres U.S.A., “Restoring Riparian Areas,” that features Matt Maria, one of her classmates and another 2013 graduate of SEFS. After hearing his thesis defense on insect diversity in farmland riparian areas, Watts thought his research would be great information to include in a larger article devoted to the importance of riparian areas on farmland. (The article is not yet available online.) Nice work, Andrea!

In other news, Professor Sally Brown was featured in a story published in the CSA News on October 30, “Urban Agriculture: What are some of the obstacles to growing food in cities?” (The story is available online, though you have to be a subscriber to access the full text.)

Also, in case you missed it, the UW homepage picked up one of our stories about Professor Jerry Franklin’s field course in Oregon this past September. The story itself is fairly short, but the publicity for our programs is fantastic—especially for SEFS grad student Dave Herman, whose great photos are featured in the gallery! (As of this sending, the story, “Forest Fires and Fireside Chats,” is still one of the top headlines across the banner).

ALUMNI UPDATES

Dave Bok, SEFS alumnus (2003, B.S. Forest Management) and former president of the UW Forest Club, stopped by Anderson Hall recently and updated us on his whereabouts. He had been working for Longview Timber, which Weyerhaeuser purchased this past June, and the transition is still taking place. Longview will be run as a separate division, and currently Bok is the Log Quality Manager for Weyerhaeuser Columbia Timberlands, and he will be transitioning to Log Quality Coordinator in January.