​​​​How do we accomplish change that lasts, especially with complex issues such as diversity, equity and inclusion? That question lies at the heart of conversations that have been occurring over the past two years in University of Washington’s Program on the Environment (PoE). PoE is an interdisciplinary undergraduate program where students study and reflect upon intersections of the environment and human societies, and the primary unit in the College of the Environment offering a Bachelor of Arts degree. Their unit’s size (5 core faculty, 2 staff, plus several pre- and post-doctoral instructors) allows everyone in PoE to meet as a whole and to focus regularly on discussions about diversity, equity and inclusion, rather than delegating DEI work to a committee.

“One of the advantages of a small community is that we can all meet to talk about diversity initiatives at least quarterly,” said PoE Director Gary Handwerk. “The common university committee structure and bureaucracy itself can be impediments to real change.”

Some of the changes so far have included major revisions to the curriculum that introduce new course requirements in sustainability and environmental justice, and embedding and threading DEI concepts throughout all courses, deeply weaving it into the fabric of environmental awareness.

PoE also collaborated with Program on Climate Change’s Becky Alexander in creating a workshop for faculty to collaborate on integrating climate justice concepts into an array of courses across the College. These conversations among faculty from seven different units helped extend the “embed and thread” model across the College. Based on positive feedback from participants, this workshop will be offered again in winter 2022 and 2023, with participation expanded to faculty from across the University. Handwerk is “optimistic that this workshop will have long-term effects and create a framework for probing and transformative conversations across the College.” 

In fall of 2021, PoE members launched an annual Autumn Seminar Series focused on Environmental Justice. Students enrolled in an associated one-credit course and participated in live sessions with speakers on Zoom, while UW and community members could tune into a livestream (later archived on the PoE YouTube page). This dual format allowed students and attendees to converse beyond the walls of a classroom and university. Enrolled students also actively participated in an online discussion forum following each presentation. This year’s series, “Indigenous Perspectives on the Environment,” brought in Indigenous voices representing a number of tribes from across the United States and Canada. 

“I liked being able to hear different people’s experiences that I might not otherwise have been able to hear,” said student Tia Vontver. “The opportunity to hear from voices not through research papers or in a textbook, but directly from them was invaluable. Traditional ecological knowledge is passed down through stories, so I’ve been able to hear many different perspectives through these speakers.”

Larger challenges, however, remain. It is one thing to feature marginalized voices weekly at a seminar, and quite another to shift the demographic diversity of the faculty or student body as a whole. Handwerk acknowledges that difficult and crucial goals like these remain ahead, but he is optimistic that efforts like those described above will help to create an infrastructure and climate conducive to recruiting and retaining a robustly diverse group of faculty and students.

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University of Washington

The release of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas responsible for almost a quarter of global warming, is being studied around the world, from Arctic wetlands to livestock feedlots. A University of Washington team has discovered a source much closer to home: 349 plumes of methane gas bubbling up from the seafloor in Puget Sound, which holds more water than any other U.S. estuary.

The columns of bubbles are especially pronounced off Alki Point in West Seattle and near the ferry terminal in Kingston, Washington, according to a study in the January issue of Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems.

“There’s methane plumes all over Puget Sound,” said lead author Paul Johnson, a UW professor of oceanography. “Single plumes are all over the place, but the big clusters of plumes are at Kingston and at Alki Point.”

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Philip Miller

Accidentally trapping sharks, seabirds, marine mammals, sea turtles and other animals in fishing gear is one of the biggest barriers to making fisheries more sustainable around the world. Marine protected areas — sections of the ocean set aside to conserve biodiversity — are used, in part, to reduce the unintentional catch of such animals, among other conservation goals.

Many nations are calling for protection of 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030 from some or all types of exploitation, including fishing. Building off this proposal, a new analysis led by the University of Washington looks at how effective fishing closures are at reducing accidental catch. Researchers found that permanent marine protected areas are a relatively inefficient way to protect marine biodiversity that is accidentally caught in fisheries. Dynamic ocean management — changing the pattern of closures as accidental catch hotspots shift — is much more effective. The results were published Jan. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We hope this study will add to the growing movement away from permanently closed areas to encourage more dynamic ocean management,” said senior author Ray Hilborn, a professor at the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “Also, by showing the relative ineffectiveness of static areas, we hope it will make conservation advocates aware that permanent closed areas are much less effective in reducing accidental catch than changes in fishing methods.”

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In an age of rapidly advancing technology, humans are fascinated with AI, which is shorthand for artificial intelligence. Many movies and TV shows feature this techno-wizardry, whether it’s AI beings starring in our favorite Marvel movies or the creation of deeply imaginative worlds that depict post-apocalyptic robot takeovers. The idea of deep learning machines is one we often think about in fictional contexts, but at the University of Washington researchers are looking at practical, real-world applications.

Dale Durran, a professor of atmospheric sciences, is on the cutting edge of this search. In particular, he’s using AI to develop a model that will revolutionize our ability to forecast the weather. “We really may be on the threshold of another weather forecasting revolution,” says Durran.

Durran and his team believe that AI can improve the speed and accuracy of simulated weather forecasts on longer time scales. Currently, forecasting for the short term involves using information about today’s weather to forecast the next day’s weather, which is information that can be useful for forecasts up to about two weeks. After that, a single forecast becomes too inaccurate, so additional forecasts are made with small changes to the initial atmospheric conditions and then combined to depict a range of possible weather outcomes. AI can very quickly run significantly more of these additional simulations than current models, representing a greater range of possible weather events over longer time periods.

Durran thinks that “a machine learning approach has the most potential to change how we do sub-seasonal and seasonal forecasts,” which could drastically improve how we prepare for future weather. Weather impacts several aspects of our society, including agriculture, hydropower, flood control and emergency supplies distribution. When we can accurately predict a wetter or drier than average pattern several weeks into the future, we can make necessary adjustments. For example, if heavy rain is forecasted, the water in dams might be let out to produce hydropower and to avoid flooding, knowing that it will be replenished. If conditions will be drier than normal and an area might become susceptible to drought or fires, authorities can bring supplies into those locations to be better prepared.

One way that AI has the potential to revolutionize forecasts on seasonal and sub-seasonal time scales (sub-seasonal is defined as two to eight weeks in the future), is by adding new variables to forecast models. Durran and his team are looking to incorporate satellite imagery to train AI models in ways that are not possible with our current equation-based approach, to create a more holistic representation of the Earth-atmosphere system. One example includes directly placing global cloud patterns observed by satellites into an AI-based model and treating them as a forecast variable. Another is potentially using satellites to look at the vegetation cover in various locations and assessing whether plants are healthy or not, giving forecasters information about local conditions which may also strengthen AI-based models.

To better understand how AI models are different than traditional models, it helps to know how we got to where we are today. In the 1920s, Lewis Richardson was the first to propose using mathematical equations to predict the weather. This was a revolutionary idea but it involved hand calculations and used an elementary mathematical approach that limited the potential for Richardson’s success.

When computers were developed in the 1950s, Jule Charney pioneered the second revolution of weather forecasting using an improved mathematical approach. Durran says one of the first applications for computers was to forecast the weather through equations. This process formed the Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model, which underlies current weather predictions today. Now, with the evolution of graphic processor-based computers and using improvements in AI and deep learning, it is possible to replace NWP models.

Using AI to forecast the weather is still in the beginning stages, and Durran and his team continue to test some of its potential applications. He notes that the success they’ve had so far have been astounding, and without many barriers, which gives him confidence in AI’s untapped potential. Durran credits a lot of this success to his former graduate student, Jonathan Weyn, who began looking into this idea. Now, with the help of big players like Nvidia and Microsoft, Durran thinks they will make even bigger strides in using AI to forecast the weather — and this might just be the third wave of the weather revolution.

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Almost all of the world’s 31 largest carnivore species, including gray wolves, grizzly bears, cheetahs and lions, have been impacted by human development and activity. Most of these animals have seen their range and populations decline over the past century, and many are listed as threatened by international conservation groups.

As conservationists and scientists consider if and how to bring back these species in significant numbers across their historical ranges, many potential conflicts arise: Will the animals pose a threat to humans or livestock? Who gets to make the decisions? Who benefits the most from these recovery efforts?

A team of researchers led by the University of Washington is considering these questions through an unconventional lens: justice. The researchers drew upon the field of environmental justice — which primarily has focused on harms to people and public health — and applied its concepts to wildlife management, considering forms of injustice that people, communities and animal groups might experience. Environmental justice, in this context, looks at who is most vulnerable and who could be disproportionally harmed by large carnivore reintroductions.

“We are awakening to the fact that justice matters and is present in a lot of domains, including conservation projects,” said lead author Alex McInturff, an assistant professor in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. “We’re hoping this paper is a really timely intervention that gives those involved in these reintroduction projects a framework to say, ‘We care about justice. We didn’t really know we were overlooking it in past efforts, and now we have something that can help inform us going forward.’”

The team published its framework last month in the journal Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene. UW News spoke with McInturff to find out more about the team’s goals for this work.

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Dror Shitrit/Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology

Though they may be small, microorganisms are the most abundant form of life in the ocean. Marine microbes are responsible for making roughly half of the organic carbon that’s usable by life. Many marine microbes live near the surface, depending on energy from the sun for photosynthesis.

Yet between the low supply of and high competition for some key nutrients, like nitrogen, in the open ocean, scientists have puzzled over the vast diversity of microbial species found there. Researchers from the University of Washington, in collaboration with researchers from 12 other institutions, show that time of day is key, according to a study published Jan. 20 in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The effort began in 2015, when scientists in the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology, a program now co-led by UW oceanography professor Ginger Armbrust, looked at microbes in the surface of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, the Earth’s largest stretch of contiguous ocean.

“[We were interested in] understanding how that fluctuation of photosynthesis during the day and the absence thereof at night propagates through the microbial community [in the ocean],” explained co-first author Angela Boysen, who did the work as a doctoral student at the UW and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. “That influences how the ecosystem overall functions, how much carbon is stored, where the carbon moves around, and how organisms might interact with each other.”

“Realizing that various types of microbes acquire nitrogen at different times of day helps to answer a long-standing question in oceanography: How can there be such an incredible diversity of life, all essentially in the same place at the same time?” said co-author Anitra Ingalls, a UW professor of oceanography. “Being able to explain the underlying reasons for this diversity will help oceanographers better predict how these communities may shift as the ocean changes.”

Sacha Coesel, a UW research scientist in oceanography, is also a co-author. The research was supported by grants from the Simons Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the U.S. Geological Survey.

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