Aquatic and Fishery Sciences’ Kristin Laidre and a team from across the globe just published their findings on what the future looks like for Arctic marine mammals, whose fragile habitats are shifting as a result of sea ice loss and warming temperatures. Their recent study, published in Conservation Biology, found that reductions in sea ice cover are “profound” and that the Arctic’s traditionally short, cool summers are growing longer in most regions by five to 10 weeks.
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Each week we share the latest peer-reviewed publications coming from the College of the Environment. Over the past week, nine new articles co-authored by members of the College of the Environment were added to the Web of Science database, including studies of the economic valuation of your backyard birds, how nitrogen is processed in marine sediments, and more. Read on!
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Across western North America you can see them: hills blanketed with swaths of red and gray trees. These dead and dying stands of pine, aspen, and fir, totaling around 42 million acres—roughly the size of the state of Washington—are victims of bark beetles. And the dry, decaying trees that the beetles leave in their wake are not just eyesores; they also fuel hotter and larger wildfires.
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For more than a century, scientists at UW have utilized Friday Harbor Laboratories’ unique location on the shores of the Puget Sound to study a variety of marine species. With the debut of the Ocean Acidification Environmental Laboratory in 2011, research at Friday Harbor Labs expanded into monitoring the water’s pH and dissolved oxygen levels, total alkalinity, effects of ocean acidification, and strategies for adaptation.
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“A New History of Life” by Earth and Space Sciences’ Peter Ward and Joseph L. Kirschvink from the California Institute of Technology draws on their years of experience in paleontology, biology, chemistry, and astrobiology to illuminate recent scientific developments about the evolution of life on Earth. More than 150 years after Darwin published his evolutionary theories, Ward and Kirschvink argue that chaos and catastrophe shaped the evolution of life on Earth; that it was not an elegant, gradual process.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal »
