ANNOUNCEMENTS & KUDOS

We have to start with some herculean kudos to all of our IFSA students, who organized and carried out an amazing international event last week with the Canadian-American Regional Meeting. Seriously, on top of all of their class schedules and other obligations, these dynamos hosted more than 30 students from other universities in the United States and Canada for more than a week of activities—including overnight trips to Pack Forest and the Olympic Natural Resources Center, a faculty dinner, Pecha Kucha night and Forester's Ball. (A few also found time, miraculously, to post hearts and heart-warming messages around the school on Valentine’s Day. From our unscientific survey, we saw scores of appreciative people stopping to read and take pics). Brilliantly done, all of you!

On a related note, kudos to Lisa Nordlund, who proctored a tree physiology exam for one of the visiting CARM students!

We’ll finish with some big-time kudos, as well, for SEFS master's student Cole Gross, who organized another super-successful career fair last Tuesday! Early returns from employers are extremely positive—same from attending students—and we hope the Society of American Foresters - UW Student Chapter keeps buildling on this highly valuable tradition. (No rest for Cole, either, as he is also the lead organizer for this Friday’s Graduate Student Symposium!)

In other news, John Tylczak, who has hosted a photography exhibition in the Forest Club Room the past three Octobers (drawing from his Views from the Northwoods collection), has another show underway at the Polson Museum in Hoquiam, Wash. The Daily World in Aberdeen did a nice write-up about it.

In case you missed the latest PNW CESU Cooperative Ventures February newsletter, they have some great funding opportunities in it that might be of interest to folks. Check it out!

On March 27 and 28, the nonprofit Software Carpentry will be holding a two-day workshop at the eScience Data Science Studio. The workshop will focus on software tools to make researchers more effective, allowing them to automate research tasks, automatically track their research over time, and use programming to accelerate their research, and make it more reproducible. In the workshop, there will be two parallel tracks: one focusing on the programming language R, and the other on Python. Learn more!

Also on March 27, you are invited to attend a workshop in Washington, D.C., “A Century of Wildland Fire Research: How Can We Apply What We’ve Learned,” hosted by the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources. Held from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EST at the National Academy of Sciences, the half-day workshop is also available by webcast, so you can register online or contact Raymond Chappetta for more information.

DIVERSITY TOPICS

SEFS master’s student Jessica Hernandez invites you to register for the “Living Breath Indigenous Foods and Ecological Knowledge Symposium,” coming up May 5 to 6 at the wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ - Intellectual House on campus. The cost for adults is $20 for one day or $35 for two, and all students can attend for free. Register today!

COMMITTEE NOTES

Nothing new to report.

SEMINAR SCHEDULES

Wildlife Seminar: Mondays, 3:30-4:50 p.m., Smith 120

ESRM 429 Seminar: Tuesdays, 8:30-9:20 a.m., AND 223

PUBLICATIONS

SEFS doctoral student Matthew Aghai is a coauthor on a paper in Plant Ecology, “Improving restoration success through research-driven initiatives: case studies targeting Pinus pinea reforestation stock development in Lebanon.”

Professor Steve Harrell is a coauthor on a paper in Geoforum, “Dual-function forests in the returning farmland to forest program and the flexibility of environmental policy in China.”

SEFS IN THE PRESS

On Saturday, February 18, BBC’s CrowdScience radio program ran a cool segment, “Why are Cats Loners?” that features Professor Aaron Wirsing. Aaron chimes in around minute 15 on the costs and benefits of sociality and solitary hunting in large predators, and especially felid predators. Give it a listen (the cat pic alone is worth your click)!

On February 22, Michelle Ma at UW News wrote a great story about new research involving Professor Bernard Bormann and the Olympic Natural Resources Center, “Large-scale experiment on the rural Olympic Peninsula to test innovations in forest management.”

ALUMNI UPDATES

We recently reconnected with Steve Butterworth (’67, B.S; ’71, M.S.), who worked 42 years with the National Park Service and has spent the past six years with the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

That update, and many others, went out in our most recent alumni newsletter, Roots. You’ve probably seen just about everything in there, but it’s a delightful digest of what’s been happening here the past few months if you wanted to take a peek!