NASA

Dozens of scientists, as well as underwater drones and other high-tech ocean instruments, will set sail from Seattle in mid-August. Funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation, the team will study the life and death of the small organisms that play a critical role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and in the ocean’s carbon cycle.

More than 100 scientists and crew from more than 20 U.S. research institutions will embark for NASA’s month-long Export Processes in the Ocean from Remote Sensing, or EXPORTS, oceanographic campaign. The University of Washington is leading one of the expedition’s projects, with several others led by UW School of Oceanography alumni who are now faculty members at other institutions.

“Understanding, and eventually predicting, the oceans’ role in fixing and exporting carbon to depth will require sustained, long-term measurements,” Craig Lee, an oceanographer at UW Applied Physics Laboratory and faculty member at the School of Oceanography, said. “EXPORTS takes us a step farther down that path, by advancing the use of long-endurance robotic vehicles — profiling floats and underwater gliders — for collecting biological and biogeochemical observations.”

A NASA event Aug. 9 in Seattle will kick off the expedition.

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A new analysis by scientists from Auburn University, the University of Washington and three other collaborating institutions suggests the value of structured research programs for undergraduates extends to society as a whole by encouraging participants to seek advanced degrees in scientific and technological fields — often referred to as STEM, an acronym for science, technology, engineering and math.

In an article published this week in the journal BioScience, the researchers reported that college undergraduates who take part in summer research training programs — specifically, in this study, the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates Sites initiative — are 48 percent more likely to pursue STEM-related doctoral degrees than demographically matched students who apply but are not selected.

“This program is one of NSF’s most visible efforts to increase STEM research and literacy, and it involves an early exposure to paid research for undergraduates,” said paper co-author Adam Summers, a UW professor of aquatic and fishery sciences and biology at Friday Harbor Laboratories. “An outstanding question is whether these programs actually boost people up or just stir the pot. This paper provides really nice evidence that participation in this program leads to greater STEM success as measured by awards, grad school enrollment and papers published.”

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UW News

As seafood consumption outpaces the growth of other food sectors and continues to grow worldwide, farmed seafood — also called aquaculture — has increased rapidly to meet consumer demand. That means aquatic farming now puts the most pressure on the smaller forage fish harvested to feed their larger farmed counterparts such as salmon, carp and tilapia.

A new study appearing online June 14 in Nature Sustainability shows that if current aquaculture and agriculture practices remain unchanged into the future, wild forage fish populations likely will be overextended by the year 2050, and possibly sooner — even if all stocks were fished sustainably. But the team, which includes researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Washington, found that making sensible changes in aquaculture and agriculture production would avoid reaching that threshold.

“Aquaculture has a lot of potential to keep feeding the future planet, but we do probably need to make some changes for sustainability,” said co-author Tim Essington, a UW professor of aquatic and fishery sciences. “We are in a position to start thinking about different scenarios and how we want to invest in technological advances to shape how the aquaculture field is run.”

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Pixabay

New research led by the University of Washington looks at what climate change will mean for global yields of corn, or maize — the most widely grown crop in the world. Used in food, cooking oil, industrialized foods, livestock feed and even automobile fuel, the crop is one that all people, rich and poor, reply upon.

Published June 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the results show that warmer temperatures by the end of this century will reduce yields throughout the world, confirming previous research. But the study also shows dramatic increases in the variability of corn yields from one year to the next and the likelihood of simultaneous low yields across multiple high-producing regions, which could lead to price hikes and global shortages.

“Previous studies have often focused on just climate and plants, but here we look at climate, food and international markets,” said lead author Michelle Tigchelaar, a UW postdoctoral researcher in atmospheric sciences. “We find that as the planet warms, it becomes more likely for different countries to simultaneously experience major crop losses, which has big implications for food prices and food security.”

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Dorothea Derickson/COASST

In the fall of 2014, West Coast residents witnessed a strange, unprecedented ecological event. Tens of thousands of small seabird carcasses washed ashore on beaches from California to British Columbia, in what would become one of the largest bird die-offs ever recorded.

A network of more than 800 citizen scientists responded as the birds, called Cassin’s auklets, turned up dead in droves along the coast. Beach walkers and local residents recorded the location and date of carcasses as they found them, entering the information into a real-time database that helped state, tribal and federal wildlife experts track the mass mortality event as it unfolded.

The efforts of these place-based data collectors — along with data on temperature, ocean circulation and the abundance of prey — have provided the first definitive answer to what killed the seabirds: starvation brought on by shifts in ocean conditions linked to a changing climate. An international team of about 20 researchers from federal, state and provincial agencies, universities and wildlife organizations published their conclusions in the April 16 edition of Geophysical Research Letters.

“This paper is super important for the scientific community because it nails the causality of a major die-off, which is rare,” said senior author Julia Parrish, professor in the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and executive director of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), one of the citizen science groups that counted the carcasses.

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Tiina Itkonen

Few people have spent as much time studying mammals in the Arctic as Kristin Laidre, a University of Washington polar scientist and expert on marine mammals.

One exception would be Inuit subsistence hunters, who for generations have relied on these mammals for nutritional, economic and cultural reasons. A new study documents the experience of these hunters and what it might show about changing conditions for polar bears on Greenland’s east coast.

“Our research was motivated by the importance of obtaining local perspectives from subsistence hunters in East Greenland about the subpopulation of polar bears,” said Laidre, who is the corresponding author on the paper. “There had not been an interview study for several decades, so a new interview survey was important to conduct, especially before starting an assessment of the subpopulation.”

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