Air pollution from wildfires impacts ability to observe birds

As smoky air becomes more common during Washington’s wildfire season, many wildlife enthusiasts wonder: What happens to the birds? Few studies have looked at wildfire smoke impacts on animals, let alone birds. And as Washington and the larger West Coast continue to experience more massive wildfires and smoke-filled air, understanding how birds are affected by smoke — and how air pollution may influence our ability to detect birds — are important factors for bird conservation.

Beth Gardner to serve as Director of the Center for Quantitative Sciences

Associate Professor Beth Gardner has agreed to serve as the director of the Center for Quantitative Sciences (CQS), effective July 1, 2021. In this role she will be responsible for the programmatic and financial health of the Center, which includes the graduate degree program Quantitative Ecology and Resource Management (QERM) and the curricular program Quantitative Science (QSCI), which offers both undergraduate and graduate courses as well as an undergraduate minor.

Sara Gonzalez to serve as the Quaternary Research Center Director

Professor Sara L. Gonzalez has agreed to serve as the Quaternary Research Center (QRC) Director, effective July 1. In this role she will continue building the interdisciplinary intellectual portfolio of the QRC and broadening the involvement and impact of the QRC across the university. Gonzalez is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington and Curator of Archaeology the Burke Museum of Natural History.

UW Ocean Voices program, seeking equity in ocean science, gets key approval from United Nations

Ocean Voices, a program of the University of Washington-based Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Center to advance equity in ocean science, has been named among the first group of actions taken in a United Nations-sponsored, decade-long program of ocean science for sustainable development. “The human relationship with oceans under current political economies is unsustainable, unstable and inequitable,” writes Yoshitaka Ota, director of the center.

VIDEO: Moss tells stories of hot spots for pollution

With the expansion of Seattle comes more cars on the roads. The fact that transportation results in pollution is widely known, but School of Environmental and Forest Sciences‘ Phil Levin, Ian Davies and Mathis Messager, in partnership with Boeing and The Nature Conservancy, pinpointed the exact locations in Puget Sound where pollution has accumulated in a paper published in Science Direct.