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Grad Students Galore!

On a most auspicious Thursday—with Mount Rainier beaming in the sunshine and the Olympics crisp against a blue sky—we welcomed the latest class of SEFS graduate students for their orientation last week. Hearing their roll call was a revelation, as they've come to our school from around the country and world, and we can't wait to learn about and share the amazing research projects they'll be taking on in the next few years! (Hats off, as well, to Michelle Trudeau, Amanda Davis and Lisa Nordlund, who put together a seamless day of events!)

BLOG BITS

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Laurel Peelle Kicks Off New Speaker Series at ONRC

This past Saturday, Peelle gave a talk for the Forks community about her graduate research with snowshoe hares and Canada lynx. It was the first presentation as part of a new monthly speaker series hosted out at ONRC.

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SEFS Seminar Series: Fall Schedule Announced!

It’s been a long, quiet summer in Anderson Hall, but the start of Fall Quarter means the return of the SEFS Seminar Series beginning on Tuesday, October 1, from 3:30-4:20 in AND223. Check out the schedule and mark your calendars!

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Job Placement Paradise

Forget sluggish hiring or a tough job market for BSE graduates, who in recent years have enjoyed essentially 100 percent job placement—and with an average salary of roughly $66,000!

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Guest Seminar: Oscar Venter

From 1-2 p.m. in the Forest Room tomorrow (Tuesday), we’re excited to welcome Dr. Oscar Venter, a post-doctoral fellow at James Cook University in Australia, for a visiting talk: “Mapping Conservation and Habitat Degradation at the Planetary Scale.”

UPCOMING EVENTS


Sept. 25, 2013:

Fall Quarter Begins

Oct. 1, 2013:

SEFS Seminar Series, 3:30-4:20 p.m., AND223

Oct. 2, 2013:

Salmon BBQ!

April 27, 2014:

SEFS Spring Gathering

 

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ANNOUNCEMENTS & KUDOS

Major kudos to Professor Stanley Asah, who was just named an alternate for the Advisory Council to the Presidential Task Force on Wildlife Trafficking. On September 9, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell announced the members of the council, which will advise and assist the Presidential Task Force, including as it works to develop a National Strategy for Combating Wildlife Trafficking. Congratulations, Stanley!

Big kudos, as well, to Professor Sándor Tóth and Luke Rogers, whose paper, “Dynamic Reserve Selection: Optimal Land Retention with Land-Price Feedbacks,” has been selected for the 2013 ENRE Best Publication Award in the Environment-Sustainability area. Coauthored by Robert Haight of the U.S. Forest Service, the paper was originally published in Operations Research (2011, 59(5), pp. 10591078). Tóth will be traveling to receive the award on October 6 at the INFORMS 2013 Conference in Minneapolis.

We’ll keep the kudos rolling for recent SEFS graduate student Hillary Burgess, who published a lovely profile piece on legendary ecologist Bob Paine (“Diverse Introspectives: A conservation with Bob Paine”). Her story appeared as the second installment of the “BioDiverse Perspectives” series, which is administered and edited by a steering committee of UW graduate students. Nice work, Hillary!

Also, right on cue after the theme of our annual fall retreat, the call for proposals is now open for the first annual Washington Higher Education Sustainability Conference, which will be held Thursday and Friday, February 6-7, 2014, at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Check it out!

On a much sadder note, though, last week we had to bid farewell to Brad Coston, who has accepted a new position with UW Nursing. It’s a great opportunity and we wish him the absolute best in this next chapter, but we’ll certainly miss his energy, positive spirit and masterful handling of all sorts of IT challenges—including the Great SEFS Blackout of 2013 this past February! Coston’s last day was September 18, so please be aware that his departure leaves a big hole and may delay some IT projects, but rest assured that Marc Morrison and Shane Krause are working their tails off to keep everything at top speed.

PUBLICATIONS

Professor Monika Moskal and her postdoc Jeffrey Richardson have a new paper in press with Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, “Uncertainty in urban forest canopy assessment: Lessons from Seattle, WA, USA.” This paper relates to a previous article Professor Moskal published back in 2011 with Meghan Halabisky and Diane Styers in Remote Sensing (“Monitoring Urban Tree Cover Using Object-Based Image Analysis and Public Domain Remotely Sensed Data”).

SEFS IN THE PRESS

Professor Bruce Bare was quoted in a story this past Friday, September 20, in the Yakima Herald Republic, “House to vote on federal forest management bill,” about a forestry bill under consideration in the U.S. Congress.

The Seattle Times was on hand for the official opening of the New Zealand Forest on Sunday, September 15, and put together a nice story about the event, "New Zealand takes root in Seattle."

In other fun news, the Seattle Times also happened to have a photographer in the Suzzallo Library on Thursday, September 19, right as our latest class of graduate students was getting a tour as part of orientation (“History tour of UW’s Library”). They took this shot only a few moments after we took our own group photo outside on the steps!

ALUMNI UPDATES

There’s been a changing of the guard for the SEFS Alumni Group, as long-time chairs Ara Erickson and Tom Friberg are stepping down from their leadership roles. Their contributions have been enormous, widely felt and widely appreciated, but as they take a step back, they are thrilled to announce that Jessica Farmer and Kate McBurney are taking the reins as the chair and co-chair, respectively. Farmer works as the continuing education coordinator for the University of Washington Botanic Gardens, and McBurney recently completed her graduate work at SEFS. They are both active members of the SEFS community and are excited to continue building the alumni connection. You will be hearing from them later this week, in fact, with more news about upcoming meetings, the Salmon BBQ on October 2, and next year’s Spring Gathering on April 27!

Also, Bill Bauerle, an ecophysiologist at Colorado State University who earned his MS from SEFS in 1997, recently had some of his latest research highlighted, “Study shows trees absorb less carbon than earlier thought; Leaf activity drops during summer.”