ANNOUNCEMENTS & KUDOS

We’ll start with some kudos for Professors Sándor Tóth and Monika Moskal for their work organizing the 17th Symposium on Systems Analysis of Forest Resources, which started yesterday and runs through this Wednesday, August 30. The international symposium has drawn registrants from 23 countries—representing every continent except forest-deprived Antarctica—involved in the remote sensing/geospatial informatics community and operations researchers. Great stuff!

We also have great kudos for a number of graduate students who gave outstanding presentations at the Ecological Society of America meeting in Portland, Ore., including Michael Freeman, Sean Callahan and Riley Metz from Professor Patrick Tobin’s lab. We’ve heard there were loads more of us there—Sean Jeronimo, Amanda Bidwell and Russell Kramer, for starters—and we’d love to give a shout-out to all who participated!

We’ll end with some kudos for Evan Sugden and the student volunteers who assisted with this year’s honey harvest at the UW Farm. The honey sale drew huge campus-wide interest and support, and they ended up making $2,000 on the first afternoon pick-up alone!

On the events front, on Tuesday, October 24, from 2 to 6:15 p.m. at the Center for Urban Horticulture, the Washington Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit will be celebrating its 50th Anniversary. To honor a half-century of work, they have set up an excellent program of speakers, along with a poster display. A full program will be available soon, and you can contact Verna Blackhurst at vernab@uw.edu or 206-221-5424 if you have any questions.

Finally, as you have likely heard, this issue of the Straight Grain will be my last, as this coming Thursday, August 31, will be my final day at SEFS. Producing this newsletter has been one of the great highlights of my time at SEFS, and I will very much miss collecting, writing and sharing news from our community. Yet while the Straight Grain might go on a short hiatus during the transition, it will soon be in the able hands of Sarah Thomas. So you should still send news, kudos and other updates to stgrain@uw.edu in the meantime, and Sarah will get the train rolling again sometime soon in the fall. Thank you, everyone, for reading along and contributing to the vibrant life of our school!

DIVERSITY TOPICS

The 2017 GEM Getting Ready for Advanced Degrees (GRAD) Lab is coming up October 13 and 14 on the Seattle campus. GRAD Lab offers underrepresented students exposure to the benefits of research and technology careers, and the goal is to bring 75 to 100 underrepresented minority (URM) students from the Pacific Northwest region who are prospective graduate students in STEM. The entire program provides a wealth of information, encouraging young people of color to consider graduate engineering or science education and apply for graduate programs and fellowships. The symposium will help each student envision his or her future as a technology leader, successfully apply for fellowships, and gain entry to a graduate program. This is a FREE event for students, and registration will open on August 14. Check it out, and help spread the word!

COMMITTEE NOTES

Crickets on the committee front.

SEMINAR SCHEDULES

Wildlife Seminar: Schedule coming soon.

ESRM 429 Seminar: Schedule coming soon.

SEFS Seminar Series: Folded into the ESRM 429 Seminar this fall.

PUBLICATIONS

Recent SEFS alumna Melissa Pingree (’17, Ph.D.) is the lead author on a new paper published in Biology and Fertility of Soils, “Interactive effects of charcoal and earthworm activity increase bioavailable phosphorus in sub-boreal forest soils.” Former SEFS Director Tom DeLuca is a co-author!

Also, Professor Beth Gardner is a co-author—along with one of her former doctoral students at N.C. State University—on a new paper in Biological Invasions, “Free-ranging domestic cats (Felis catus) on public lands: estimating density, activity, and diet in the Florida Keys.”

SEFS IN THE PRESS

In other publication news, you might have seen the story in UW News last Thursday, “Researchers’ agenda: Measure a healthy ‘dose’ of nature,” which features a new paper in Environmental Health Perspectives, “Nature Contact and Human Health: A Research Agenda.” SEFS co-authors on that paper include incoming faculty member Greg Bratman, along with Professors Peter Kahn, Josh Lawler and Phil Levin, as well as Research Scientist Kathy Wolf (oh, and Spencer Wood from The Natural Capital Project!).

ALUMNI UPDATES

We were very pleased to learn that Rebecca Singer (’12, M.S.), who studied with Professor Sally Brown, has been promoted to Stewardship & Sustainable Resources Section Manager for the King County Loop program! Rebecca had been working as the biosolids supervisor for the county’s Biosolids Program for the past year, and prior to that she was the statewide biosolids coordinator for Washington. Great work, Rebecca!