Skip to main content Skip to footer unit links
  • UW Home
  • Directories
  • Maps
  • Intranet
  • News
  • Make a Gift

College of the Environment UW College of the Environment Logo

  • About
    • Dean’s Office
      • Dean Maya Tolstoy
      • Executive Committee
      • Dean’s Office Staff
    • Strategic Planning
      • Autumn 2022 Town Hall and draft framework
      • Timeline and process
    • Quick Facts
    • Core Units
    • Our Facilities
      • Reimagining Anderson Hall
    • Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
      • Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force
      • Bias Incident, Non-Discrimination and Sexual Harassment Resources
      • Climate Justice and Sustainability
      • Knowledge, Community & Action
      • Tools and Additional Resources
      • Data and Reports
    • Awards and Honors
    • Jobs
      • UW College of the Environment Science Communications Fellowship
    • Contact Us
  • Research
    • Major Initiatives
      • Ocean Health
      • EarthLab
      • Climate Change
      • Polar Regions
      • Freshwater
      • Natural Hazards
      • Conservation
    • Research Units
    • Field Stations
    • Fleet
    • Postdoctoral Scholars
      • Meet Our Postdocs
      • Postdoc Career Resources
      • Postdoc Discipline and Demographic Data
      • Postdoc Resources
      • Open Postdoc Positions
    • Science Communication and Outreach
      • Amplify
      • Resources
      • Training, Fellowships, Coaching and Courses
    • Get Involved
  • Students
    • Meet Our Students
      • Undergraduate Ambassadors
      • Graduate Student Profiles
      • Student Advisory Council
    • Future Undergrads
      • Connect
      • Prepare
      • Visit
      • Apply
    • Future Graduate Students
      • Prepare and Apply
      • Graduate Student Discipline and Demographic Data
    • Current Students
      • Scholarships and Funding
      • Student Support
      • Diversity Resources
      • Graduate Student Professional Development
      • Identity, Belonging and Inquiry in Science (IBIS) Program
      • Get Involved
      • Research University Alliance (RUA)
    • Degrees and Courses
      • Undergraduate Degrees and Minors
      • Undergraduate Courses
      • Graduate Degrees
      • Science Communication Courses
    • Environmental Jobs
      • For Employers
      • UW Environmental Career Fair
      • Tips for Job/Internship Seekers
  • Alumni and Community
    • Giving to the College
      • Give Now
      • How to Give
      • Support a Cause
      • The President’s Circle
      • Our Advancement Team
    • Calendar and Events
      • The Doug Walker Lecture Series
    • Visit and Explore
    • Alumni
    • Volunteer
    • Headlines Newsletter
  • Faculty
  • News

    January 2018

    Feature Story

    Share
    Jan 6, 2018
    • Conservation

    A week in the wild at Yellowstone National Park

    A photo of a University of Washington undergrad stands on a tall boulder. She watches other students hike through patchy snow in Yellowstone National Park.
    A University of Washington undergrad watches classmates hike through patchy snow in Yellowstone National Park.

    Each spring for the past 20 years, students and professors from the College of the Environment make a classroom out of one of the world’s most closely monitored ecosystems: Yellowstone National Park.

    A week of intensive fieldwork followed by a research project and presentation, the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences’ course “Wildlife Conservation in Northwest Ecosystems” teaches UW students about the intertwined ecosystem of America’s oldest national park.

    Leading students in the field are professors John Marzluff, a bird expert with a focus on ravens, crows and jays; Aaron Wirsing, who studies how large carnivores shape the behavior of their prey; and Beth Gardner, who uses mathematical models to monitor and manage wildlife, plant and fisheries populations. Together, they teach their students about the rigors of science, life in the field — and what their futures might look like.

    Students gain experience they’ll bring back to their classrooms and to their future careers. See what the students see as you explore the park with them, then take a deeper dive into how scientific research helps people manage Yellowstone’s complex ecosystems for both humans and wildlife.

    Read A Week in the Wild: Field Lessons

    Experience the sights and sounds of ESS Field Camp

    Read More

    More News

    Share
    Jan 17, 2018
    • Marine Science

    Scale-eating fish adopt clever parasitic methods to survive

    A CT-scanned image of the piranha Catoprion mento. The blue-dyed segments inside the skeleton are fish scales eaten by the piranha (also shown enlarged next to the fish).
    University of Washington
    A CT-scanned image of the piranha Catoprion mento. The blue-dyed segments inside the skeleton are fish scales eaten by the piranha (also shown enlarged next to the fish).

    A small group of fishes — possibly the world’s cleverest carnivorous grazers — feeds on the scales of other fish in the tropics. The different species’ approach differs: some ram their blunt noses into the sides of other fish to prey upon sloughed-off scales, while others open their jaws to gargantuan widths to pry scales off with their teeth.

    A team led by biologists at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories is trying to understand these scale-feeding fish and how this odd diet influences their body evolution and behavior. The researchers published their results Jan. 17 in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

    “We were expecting that with this specialized scale-eating niche, you would get specialized morphology. Instead, what you get is a mosaic of strategies for the end goal of scale feeding,” said lead author Matthew Kolmann, a postdoctoral researcher at Friday Harbor Laboratories. “This niche has a hidden complexity to it, and it is yet another story about the incredible diversity of life on Earth.”

    Read more at UW Today »

    Read More

    Share
    Jan 18, 2018
    • Climate
    • Natural Hazards

    Civil War-era U.S. Navy ships’ logs to be explored for climate data, maritime history

    Coaling Admiral Farragut’s fleet at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, circa 1862.
    U.S. Library of Congress/Flickr
    Coaling Admiral Farragut’s fleet at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, circa 1862.

    A new grant will let a University of Washington-based project add a new fleet to its quest to learn more about past climate from the records of long-gone mariners. The UW is among the winners of the 2017 “Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives” awards, announced Jan. 4 by the Washington, D.C.-based Council on Library and Information Resources.

    The new $482,018 grant to the UW, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and the National Archives Foundation will allow the project to digitize the logbooks, muster rolls and related materials from U.S. naval vessels, focusing on the period from 1861 to 1879.

    “Very few of the marine weather observations diligently recorded by Navy officers since the early 1800s have been digitized and made accessible for modern climate and weather research,” said principal investigator Kevin Wood, of the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, a research center operated by the UW and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “The Civil War- and Reconstruction-era logs we are targeting here are particularly useful to fill in and extend our knowledge of past weather conditions around the world, from the mid-19th century to the beginning of the 20th century.”

    Read more at UW Today »

    Read More

    Share
    Jan 18, 2018
    • Ecology
    • Marine Science

    Q&A: Forgotten fish illustrator remembered through first publication

    Illustration of a large fish with yellow and black stripes on its back and red fins.
    Image courtesy of Emmanuelle Choiseau, © Bibliothèque Centrale, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris
    European perch, Perca fluviatilis

    More than three centuries ago, a French monk made thousands of drawings of plants and animals, traveling under the authority of King Louis XIV to the French Antilles to collect and document the natural history of the islands. These drawings were often the first ever recorded for each species and were completed in remarkable detail.

    The illustrations were nearly lost forever during the tumultuous French Revolution, and the volumes compiled by Father Charles Plumier were discovered by chance, found serving as stools for the monks to sit on by the fire in the convent where he lived.

    The illustrations are now safely held in a national library in France, but they have never been published as Plumier intended. Ted Pietsch, a University of Washington professor emeritus of aquatic and fishery sciences, and curator emeritus of fishes at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, has published the first of several volumes showcasing the work of the French naturalist. After many trips to France and a bit of investigative work, Pietsch has compiled Plumier’s fish drawings in a book, “Charles Plumier and His Drawings of French Caribbean Fishes.”

    Read the Q&A at UW Today »

    Read More

    Share
    Jan 22, 2018
    • Marine Science
    • Sustainability

    Temporary 'bathtub drains' in the ocean concentrate marine debris

    The project used hundreds of biodegradable white plastic drifters in several experiments to mimic how flotsam, or floating debris, travels in the ocean.
    CARTHE/Guillaume Novelli
    The project used hundreds of biodegradable white plastic drifters in several experiments to mimic how flotsam, or floating debris, travels in the ocean.

    An experiment featuring the largest flotilla of sensors ever deployed in a single area provides new insights into how marine debris, or flotsam, moves on the surface of the ocean.

    Conducted in the Gulf of Mexico near the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the experiment placed hundreds of drifting sensors to observe how material moves on the ocean’s surface. Rather than spread out, as current calculations would predict, many of them clumped together.

    The results hold promise for the cleanup of marine pollution and have wider implications for ocean science. The open-access paper was published the week of Jan. 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    “To observe floating objects spread out over a region the size of a city concentrate into a region smaller than a football stadium was just amazing,” said first author Eric D’Asaro, a UW professor of oceanography. “We knew there would be some concentration, but the magnitude seen was quite stunning.”

    Read more at UW Today »

    Read More

    Share
    Jan 22, 2018
    • Ecology
    • Engineering
    • Freshwater
    • Resource Management

    Small hydroelectric dams increase globally with little research, regulations

    Small dam with water flowing over its edge into shallow, rocky pond.
    Rylee Murray
    A small hydropower dam on Rutherford Creek in British Columbia, Canada. This dam produces 49 megawatts of power.

    Hydropower dams may conjure images of the massive Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state or the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei, China. But not all dams are the stuff of documentaries. Tens of thousands of smaller hydroelectric dams exist around the world, and all indications suggest that the number could substantially increase in the future.

    These structures are small enough to avoid the numerous regulations large dams face and are built more quickly and in much higher densities. Surprisingly few scientific studies have considered their environmental impact, and policies or regulations are lacking or largely inconsistent when it comes to these smaller dams.

    University of Washington researchers have published the first major assessment of small hydropower dams around the world — including their potential for growth — and highlight the incredible variability in how dams of varying sizes are categorized, regulated and studied. Their paper, the first to provide a global synthesis of the science and policy of small hydropower, appears this month in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

    “As we started exploring this topic of small hydropower development, we realized we’re facing a proliferation of this kind of facility, but we don’t know exactly how their environmental impacts scale up in a watershed,” said lead author Thiago Couto, a UW doctoral student in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences.

    Read more at UW Today »

    Read More

    Events

    Calendar Icon

    January 25, 2018

    Caught in the Middle: Sustaining Fisheries in a Changing Climate

    Calendar Icon

    February 6, 2018

    Society's Role in a Changing Environment: Sustainable Urbanization

    Calendar Icon Check out our calendar for more events

    News From Around the College

    • Mark Richards named as incoming UW Provost and professor of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington Office of the President
    • Socially aware seabirds are more likely to find food successfully, Aquatic and Fishery Sciences
    • Reviving coal mining in King County, Marine and Environmental Affairs
    • A backcountry ranger shares her passion for the wilderness, Program on the Environment
    • Students embark on Grand Challenges Impact Lab to India, Program on the Environment
    • Apply for nine-week JISAO research internship for undergraduates by February 1, Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean
    • January 2018 Plant Profile: Salix fargesii, Botanic Gardens

    Stay Connected

    More news from the
    College of the Environment

    Sign up to receive
    UW Headlines monthly


    • Headlines Newsletter
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Instagram
    • YouTube
    • Newsletter
    • Feed
    College of the Environment Logo

    College of the Environment

    1492 NE Boat St., Seattle, WA 98105

    coenv@uw.edu

    • Intranet
    • News

    Staff Login

    • Aquatic and Fishery Sciences
    • Atmospheric Sciences
    • Center for Quantitative Science
    • Climate Impacts Group
    • Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, & Ecosystem Studies
    • EarthLab
    • Earth and Space Sciences
    • Environmental and Forest Sciences
    • Friday Harbor Laboratories
    • Marine and Environmental Affairs
    • Marine Biology
    • Oceanography
    • Program on Climate Change
    • Program on the Environment
    • Quaternary Research Center
    • UW Botanic Gardens
    • Washington Sea Grant
    University of Washington
    University of Washington - Be Boundless for Washington for the WorldBe Boundless - For Washington For the World

    © 2023 University of Washington

    • Privacy
    • Terms
    • GDPR
    • Link Policy