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    January 2017

    Feature Story

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    Jan 24, 2017
    • Climate
    • College of the Environment

    Dean’s letter: Keeping the flame alive

    Dean Lisa Graumlich
    Lisa J. Graumlich

    What does the social contract between higher education and the public look like today? I’ve been contemplating our roles as researchers and educators recently, in light of the challenges facing our world.

    As a young scientist, I was deeply influenced by Jane Lubchenco’s proposal to formulate a new social contract for science, one that committed us not only to discover knowledge but also to communicate what we know about the Earth and its systems for the benefit of society.

    She issued a clarion call that resonated in my own life’s work.

    Years ago, my birthday coincided with a New York Times report on my research using tree-ring data to reconstruct historical temperature variations. It felt like a watershed moment: I’d “made it” as a scientist. Then I learned that a radio talk show host had called the article garbage, implying that I was at best dopey if not hopelessly misguided.

    I was so naïve. I can recall my shock and anger as if it were yesterday. Luckily, my dismay quickly turned to introspection: If journalists and skeptics both responded to the science, something big must be at stake.

    I doubled down on my paleoclimatic research, one of many peers across fields working to untangle the relative importance of human impacts on the climate system so that the whole human community could make informed decisions about our planet’s future.

    In other words, I deeply internalized Lubchenco’s social contract. In exchange for generous public funding for my work, I was determined to provide the best, most reliable and robust science that was relevant to emerging climate change questions.

    Today, it’s tempting to look around and feel that our social contract is broken. But the view from inside the College looks different.

    Here, the social contract persists. The College remains steadfast in its mission to discover the workings of the Earth and to use that understanding to provide reliable, robust and relevant knowledge to society. We cultivate relationships with communities, tribal nations, NGOs, agencies and future scientists — relationships that strengthen our resolve to produce sound science in the service of our world. We encourage our students to cultivate knowledge and experience that will ripple out into the world around them.

    We keep the flame alive.

    What does society expect us to provide? Where are we delivering, and where could we do better? Let’s face the future together with steadiness and resolve. Together, we are exactly what the world needs us to be right now.

     

     
    Lisa J. Graumlich
    Dean, College of the Environment
    Mary Laird Wood Professor

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    Jan 3, 2017
    • Conservation
    • Ecology

    Songbirds divorce, flee, fail to reproduce due to suburban sprawl

    Anna’s hummingbirds have become year-round residents thanks in part to backyard hummingbird feeders.
    Steve Ringman/The Seattle Times
    Anna’s hummingbirds have become year-round residents thanks in part to backyard hummingbird feeders.

    Suburban development is forcing some songbirds to divorce, pack up and leave and miss their best chances for successful reproduction.

    As forested areas increasingly are converted to suburbs, birds that live on the edge of our urban footprint must find new places to build their nests, breed and raise fledglings. New research published Dec. 28 in the journal PLOS ONE finds that for one group of songbirds — called “avoiders” — urban sprawl is kicking them out of their territory, forcing divorce and stunting their ability to find new mates and reproduce successfully, even after relocating.

    “The hidden cost of suburban development for these birds is that we force them to do things that natural selection wouldn’t have them do otherwise,” said lead author John Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science in the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

    “Because development requires that these birds move, we force them to abandon the places they selected and go elsewhere, which often entails finding new mates when they wouldn’t have otherwise.”

    Avoider birds are species that are known to decline in response to urbanization, for example when forested areas are removed for developments. In the Pacific Northwest, two avoiders are the Pacific wren and Swainson’s thrush — birds that are generally shy of humans and rely on groundcover and brush such as fallen trees, root balls, shrubs and ferns for breeding.

    This work was also written about in The Seattle Times on December 28, 2016. Read “Birds in the suburbs: Faced with urbanization, some beloved species thrive, some move out“.

    Read more at UW Today »

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    Jan 12, 2017
    • Climate
    • Extreme Environments
    • Marine Science

    UW oceanographer dropping robotic floats on voyage to Antarctica

    Steve Riser (left) helps deploy a float Jan. 9 that was named after climate scientist Michael Mann.
    Climate Central
    Steve Riser (left) helps deploy a float Jan. 9 that was named after climate scientist Michael Mann.

    A University of Washington oceanographer is chief scientist on a voyage in the waters around Antarctica as part of a major effort to monitor the Southern Ocean.

    Stephen Riser, a UW professor of oceanography, embarked Dec. 24 as part of the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling, or SOCCOM, project to collect better data about the planet’s most remote ocean.

    The expedition is two-thirds of the way through a monthlong voyage from Punta Arenas in southern Chile to McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Along the way, researchers are deploying robotic floats built at the UW as part of the six-year, $21 million National Science Foundation effort. The multi-institutional project, based at Princeton University, will gather detailed observations of the Southern Ocean to understand its role in the global climate.

    Read more at UW Today »

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    Jan 5, 2017
    • Ecology
    • Marine Science

    Eelgrass in Puget Sound is stable overall, but some local beaches suffering

    Eelgrass beds in Puget Sound provide valuable habitat for crabs, young salmon, herring and a plethora of other species.
    (NOAA)
    Eelgrass beds in Puget Sound provide valuable habitat for crabs, young salmon, herring and a plethora of other species.

    Eelgrass, a marine plant crucial to the success of migrating juvenile salmon and spawning Pacific herring, is stable and flourishing in Puget Sound — despite a doubling of the region’s human population and significant shoreline development over the past several decades.

    That finding surprised scientists who study eelgrass, which sprouts in the brackish waters close to shore and provides shelter and breeding habitat for fish and invertebrates. Along many beaches in Puget Sound, eelgrass has disappeared or drastically declined due to factors such as warmer, cloudy water, shoreline armoring and structures like piers and docks that block sunlight.

    The new findings, published online in November in the Journal of Ecology, draw on a unique 41-year dataset to show that the eelgrass population is doing well across the Puget Sound basin. That means eelgrass die-offs at individual beaches are not pervasive enough to affect the overall population across the region.

    “Our human population has exploded; we have all kinds of increasing impacts on Puget Sound, and yet eelgrass is resilient,” said co-author Phil Levin, a University of Washington professor of practice and lead scientist at The Nature Conservancy. “It gives us hope about the ability to restore eelgrass. It tells us that what we do at the neighborhood scale matters, and we can have a positive impact.”

    The study’s authors were able to analyze trends in eelgrass population over 41 years — the longest period ever recorded for this species in Puget Sound — by making use of shelved data that recorded more than 160,000 eelgrass observations dating back to the early 1970s.

    The Seattle Times also wrote about this research on January 3, 2017. Read “A bright spot in Puget Sound: Sealife-nurturing eelgrass beds are holding steady“.

    Read more at UW Today »

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    Jan 10, 2017
    • Climate
    • Extreme Environments
    • Geophysical Sciences

    Rapid Arctic warming has in the past shifted Southern Ocean winds

    A freshly extracted section of the 2-mile-deep West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide core, drilled from 2006 to 2011. Sections are now stored in freezers at a national facility in Denver. Smaller pieces go from there to the UW and other research labs.
    Jay Johnson/University of Wisconsin
    A freshly extracted section of the 2-mile-deep West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide core, drilled from 2006 to 2011. Sections are now stored in freezers at a national facility in Denver. Smaller pieces go from there to the UW and other research labs.

    The global climate is a complex machine in which some pieces are separate, yet others are connected. Scientists try to discover the connections to predict what will happen to our climate, especially in a future with more heat-trapping gases.

    A dramatic pattern in our planet’s climate history involves paroxysms in Arctic temperatures. During the last ice age, tens of thousands of years ago, Greenland repeatedly warmed by about 10 degrees Celsius over just a few decades and then gradually cooled. Meanwhile the Southern Hemisphere climate stayed fairly stable, with only weak and long-delayed echoes of the temperature chaos up north.

    But new University of Washington research shows the fierce winds circling Antarctica — an important lever on the global climate — shifted quickly in response to the Northern Hemisphere temperature spikes.

    “It’s most surprising that we can see these really abrupt changes in the Northern Hemisphere making it very quickly to the Southern Hemisphere,” said first author Bradley Markle, a UW doctoral student in Earth and space sciences. “The atmospheric circulation is tightly connected across the globe during these events.”

    The study is published in the January issue of Nature Geoscience.

    Read more at UW Today »

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    Jan 12, 2017
    • Climate
    • Marine Science
    • Ocean Acidification

    Ocean acidification to hit West Coast Dungeness crab fishery, new assessment shows

    Dungeness crab.
    jkirkhart35/Flickr
    Dungeness crab.

    The ocean acidification expected as seawater absorbs increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will reverberate through the West Coast’s marine food web, but not necessarily in the ways you might expect, new research shows.

    Dungeness crabs, for example, will likely suffer as their food sources decline. Dungeness crab fisheries, valued at about $220 million annually, may face a strong downturn over the next 50 years, according to research published today in the journal Global Change Biology. But pteropods and copepods, tiny marine organisms with shells that are vulnerable to acidification, will likely experience only a slight overall decline because they are prolific enough to offset much of the impact, the study found.

    Marine mammals and seabirds are less likely to be affected by ocean acidification, the study found.

    “This was basically a vulnerability assessment to sharpen our view of where the effects are likely to be the greatest and what we should be most concerned about in terms of how the system will respond,” said Tim Essington, a UW professor of aquatic and fishery sciences and a co-author of the research.

    Read more at UW Today »

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    Jan 17, 2017
    • Geophysical Sciences

    Conditions right for complex life may have come and gone in Earth’s distant past

    This is a 1.9-billion-year-old stromatolite — or mound made by microbes that lived in shallow water — called the Gunflint Formation in northern Minnesota. The environment of the oxygen “overshoot” described in research by Michael Kipp, Eva Stüeken and Roger Buick may have included this sort of oxygen-rich setting that is suitable for complex life.
    Eva Stüeken
    This is a 1.9-billion-year-old stromatolite — or mound made by microbes that lived in shallow water — called the Gunflint Formation in northern Minnesota. The environment of the oxygen “overshoot” described in research by Michael Kipp, Eva Stüeken and Roger Buick may have included this sort of oxygen-rich setting that is suitable for complex life.

    Conditions suitable to support complex life may have developed in Earth’s oceans — and then faded — more than a billion years before life truly took hold, a new University of Washington-led study has found.

    The findings, based on using the element selenium as a tool to measure oxygen in the distant past, may also benefit the search for signs of life beyond Earth.

    In a paper published Jan. 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, lead author Michael Kipp, a UW doctoral student in the UW’s Department of Earth and Space Sciences, analyzed isotopic ratios of the element selenium in sedimentary rocks to measure the presence of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere between 2 and 2.4 billion years ago.

    Kipp’s UW coauthors are former Earth and space sciences postdoctoral researcher Eva Stüeken — now a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland — and professor Roger Buick, who is also a faculty member with the UW Astrobiology Program. Their other coauthor is Andrey Bekker of the University of California, Riverside, whose original hypothesis this work helps confirm, the researchers said.

    Read more at UW Today »

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    Events

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    February 2, 2017

    The Bevan Series: Tangled up in Atlantic Bluefin

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    February 22, 2017

    2017 UW Environmental Career Fair

    Calendar Icon Check out our calendar for more events

    News From Around the College

    • Listen to the Earth smash another global temperature record, Atmospheric Sciences
    • Alumni spotlight: Ellen Lois Hooven (1924-2016), Environmental and Forest Sciences
    • UW Farm CSA: Sign up for summer shares, Environmental and Forest Sciences
    • Congratulations to Shruti Parikh, Mary Gates Research Scholar!, Environmental Studies
    • Defining sustainable seafood: The use of life cycle assessment in eco-labeling, Marine and Environmental Affairs
    • Helping gardens grow: How volunteers nurture new plants to support the Arboretum Foundation, Botanic Gardens
    • UW Environment undergrads receive AGU Outstanding Student Paper Awards, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences

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