ANNOUNCEMENTS & KUDOS

We are very pleased to start with some big-time kudos for Professor Stanley Asah, who was recently promoted to associate professor and awarded tenure! Congratulations, Stanley!

Teresa Bresee, administrative specialist for the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Study Unit (PNW CESU), recently sent out their January 2015 newsletter. It’s loaded with news and updates and fellowship opportunities, so take a look.

Professor Dan Vogt passed along word of an upcoming conference on February 11 and 12 in Olympia, “Washington State Forest Practices Adaptive Management Program: 2015 Science Conference,” hosted by the Cooperative Monitoring, Evaluation and Research Committee (CMER). There is no fee for the conference, but reservations are required, so e-mail patti.shramek@dnr.wa.gov to register or learn more.

Coming up at 7 p.m. this Friday, January 30, is the next installment of the Evening Talks at ONRC speaker series, “Modern Weather Prediction and the History of Forks Weather: Rain, Rain and More Rain!” If you're in the neighborhood, come out and join Dr. Tom Rosmond, Jerry King and the rest of the ONRC gang in Forks!

The Society of Ethnobiology is looking for members from any discipline who might be interested in learning more about ethnobiology past and present, including broad topics such as food sovereignty and biocultural diversity. The group meets twice a month and will hold speaker events and field trips both on and off campus, including an event this Wednesday, January 28, from 3:30 to 5 p.m. at the Burke Museum. MaryJane Ides, who works on the Burke educational staff, will be giving a walk-through of several temporary and permanent exhibitions, including First Peoples of the Pacific Northwest and Here & Now: Native Artists Inspired. Space is limited, so please email Ashley Blazina to RSVP or learn more about the Society of Ethnobiology.

This past October in Estes Park, Colo., SEFS doctoral student Carol Bogezi attended the Pathways 2014 Conference: Integrating Human Dimensions into Fish and Wildlife Management. Speakers presented research about human-wildlife interactions from all over the world, including lions in Africa, tigers in Asia, wolves in Europe, and lots of topics from the Americas. Bogezi’s research aims to understand the nuanced responses that ranchers in eastern Washington have toward wolf recovery, and the use of economic incentives as a mitigation measure. She presented preliminary results from her interviews with ranchers at the conference. Great work, Carol!

COMMITTEE NOTES

This afternoon from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in Anderson 22, the first of four candidates for the new BSE faculty position, Dr. Ian Dallmeyer, will be giving a talk: “Activated carbons as biorefinery co-products: Production, characterization and applications.” Dr. Dallmeyer is an assistant research professor in the Composite Materials and Engineering Center and Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Washington State University, and you are invited to come out for his talk.

We’ll have more details to share about the next three candidates soon, but please mark your calendars for these three days from 3:30-4:30 p.m.: Thursday, January 29; Monday, February 2; and Thursday, February 5.

PUBLICATIONS

We have a couple student-led papers to report, starting with a new publication from SEFS alumna Christie Galitsky and Professor Josh Lawler in Landscape Ecology, “Relative influence of local and landscape factors on bird communities vary by species and functional group.”

A second paper, just published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, “Getting the most connectivity per conservation dollar,” features former visiting SEFS student Sara Torrubia, along with several other SEFS co-authors, including doctoral student Meghan Halabisky, recent master’s student Jesse Langdon, and Michael Case, who earned a Ph.D. from SEFS and is now a postdoc here. The paper came out of a SEFS 541 class two years ago.

Also, from down at Wind River, SEFS Research Scientist Ken Bible passed along word of a new paper he co-authored in Ecosystems, “Radiocarbon-Based Partitioning of Soil Respiration in an Old-Growth Coniferous Forest.”

SEFS IN THE PRESS

Don’t forget to send in any news clips involving you or your students!

ALUMNI UPDATES

In the last issue of Roots, our alumni newsletter, we asked our alumni to tell us about their first jobs after college. Whether you graduated two weeks or 50 years ago, we’d love to hear from you, so send us your stories! You can send submissions, of no more than 250 words, to sefsalum@uw.edu, and we’ll publish at least one response in the next issue of Roots (and also on "Offshoots"). Please spread the word to other alumni who might have a good story to share!