Former Interior Secretary Sally Jewell brings leadership to UW community, new EarthLab initiative
UW
Sally Jewell, U.S. Secretary of the Interior under President Barack Obama and former CEO of REI, has returned to UW — her alma mater — as a distinguished fellow at the College of the Environment.
Sally Jewell, U.S. Secretary of the Interior under President Barack Obama and former CEO of REI, has returned to her alma mater to work as a distinguished fellow with the College of the Environment and to serve in a volunteer capacity as chair of the advisory council for EarthLab, a new university-wide institute that connects scholars with community partners to solve our most difficult environmental problems.
As a fellow with the College of the Environment, she will guest lecture with various units across campus, mentor students and collaborate with faculty and staff. In her capacity as chair of EarthLab’s advisory council, she will develop a team of advisors composed entirely of people outside the university with varied backgrounds and expertise that will provide strategic guidance, support and direction.
“By coming to the university, I’m trying to help students understand how you can create a future that’s both economically successful and environmentally sustainable — one that you are proud to leave to future generations,” said Jewell, who received her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the UW and served on the Board of Regents for 12 years. “EarthLab is addressing that by working outside the university to identify and raise support for solving big challenges, especially those in the environment, then bringing together multidisciplinary teams from across the university to help.”
A dose of nature: New UW initiative to spearhead research on health benefits of time outside
Time spent in nature can reduce anxiety and help you sleep better at night, experts have found. It also offers promising benefits for a range of health issues, including cardiovascular disease, depression and obesity.
But there are still many questions about how time in nature can help with these health conditions, and others. A new University of Washington initiative announced this week seeks to advance research on these questions, connecting academic researchers with pediatricians, childcare providers, mental health practitioners and others who work with various populations on critical health issues.
“The Nature for Health initiative is aimed at accelerating our understanding of the health impacts of time spent in nature,” said Joshua Lawler, the initiative’s lead and a UW professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. “The group is not only about doing this critical research, but also about applying it to create programs and policies that are good for human health.”
High-res data offer most detailed look yet at trawl fishing footprint around the world
Jan Hiddink/Bangor University
A vessel known as a beam trawler sits at the dock in Milford Haven, Wales, United Kingdom.
About a quarter of the world’s seafood caught in the ocean comes from bottom trawling, a method that involves dragging a net along the ocean’s shelves and slopes to scoop up shrimp, cod, rockfish, sole and other kinds of bottom-dwelling fishes and shellfish. The technique impacts these seafloor ecosystems, because other marine life and habitats can be killed or disturbed unintentionally as nets sweep across the seafloor.
Scientists agree that extensive bottom trawling can negatively affect marine ecosystems, but the central question — how much of the seafloor is trawled, or the so-called footprint of trawling — has been hard to nail down. A new analysis that uses high-resolution data for 24 ocean regions in Africa, Europe, North and South America, and Australasia shows that 14 percent of the overall seafloor shallower than 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) is trawled. Most trawl fishing happens in this depth range along continental shelves and slopes in the world’s oceans.
“Trawling has been a very controversial activity, and its footprint has not been quantified for so many regions at a sufficiently high resolution,” said lead author Ricardo Amoroso, who completed the research as a postdoctoral researcher in UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “When you don’t quantify the impacts of trawling at a fine scale, you end up with an overestimation of the trawling footprint.”
Polar bears gorged on whale carcasses to survive past warm periods, but strategy won't suffice as climate warms
Daniel J. Cox/Arctic Documentary Project
Four male polar bears standing on a floating whale carcass shortly after it drifted to shore on the island of Svalbard.
Polar bears likely survived past warm periods in the Arctic, when sea ice cover was low,by scavenging on the carcasses of stranded large whales. This food sourcesustained the bears when they werelargelyrestricted to land, unable to roam the ice in search of seals to hunt.
A new study led by the University of Washington found that although dead whales are still valuable sources of fat and protein for some polar bears, this resource will likely not be enough to sustain most bear populations in the future when the Arctic becomes ice-free in summers, which is likely to occur by 2040 due to climate change. The results were published online Oct. 9 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
“If the rate of sea ice loss and warming continues unmitigated, what is going to happen to polar bear habitat will exceed anything documented over the last million years. The extremely rapid pace of this change makes it almost impossible for us to use history to predict the future,” said lead author Kristin Laidre, a marine biologist at the UW’s Polar Science Center and associate professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences.
Forest fires, narwhals, and more: summer research and fieldwork at UW Environment
For scientists and students at UW College of the Environment, summer doesn’t equate to long days spent lounging in the sun or signify the onset of a slower-paced season filled with less academic rigor. On the contrary, many researchers and scientists-in-training from UW Environment spend their summers in the field, collecting data, monitoring conditions and applying the concepts they teach and learn in the classroom in a real-world setting. Here’s a look at some of the research conducted during the summer 2018 fieldwork season from across the College’s units, schools and departments:
Studying climate change in Greenland and Denmark
Katie Hearther
View from coastal ferry in West Greenland.
From August 15 to September 10, UW Department of Earth and Sciences’ Research Assistant Professor Michelle Koutnik, ESS graduate student John Christian, and University of Bergen’s Hans Christian Steen-Larsen co-led students on a new study abroad course offering (ESS 402/ARCTIC 387). They spent a month in Greenland and Denmark learning about ice and climate up-close, as well as examining how societies are responding to current and projected climate-associated changes.
From lectures at the Danish Arctic Institute to hikes on a Greenlandic ice sheet, students cataloged their experiences in a series of blog posts available on Koutnik’s website.
Fieldwork in the forest with SEFS’ Harvey Lab
Students working with Brian Harvey, an assistant professor at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, got an impressive amount of work done this summer! Four grad students and 11 undergrads helped research bark beetle outbreaks in Colorado and forest fire impacts in California, Oregon, Washington and Montana. In measuring the burn severity and early post-fire conditions of the 2017 Norse Peak fire — a rare fire on the west side of the Cascades Range — the Harvey Lab will be able to track the forest’s response in the long-term.
A class hike across the tundra on their way back to camp.
A group of undergraduate students took a one-of-a-kind summer course through the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. Nearly 2,000 miles from Seattle, they spent a month with the UW’s Alaska Salmon Program field stations on the banks of Lake Aleknagik and Lake Nerka. Along with professors Tom Quinn, Daniel Schindler, and Ray Hilborn — three of the preeminent salmon researchers in the world — the group of undergrads worked closely with graduate students conducting their own research, Alaska Salmon Program staff, and visiting researchers from around the world.
“You can sit and have a lecture anywhere, but you can’t go see salmon spawning in a stream anytime,” Liz Landefeld, a sophomore in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, said. “All of the professors for the program were excited for people to see what they have been lecturing about for months.”
Learn more about this course on the Aquatic and Fishery Sciences website.
Analyzing the human dimensions of marine reserves
Madison Bristol, an undergraduate student in UW Environment’s Environmental Science and Terrestrial Resource Management program, spent the summer working for Oregon Sea Grant. She spent several months helping their team better understand the impacts of marine reserve implementation. During her summer, she drove 1,060 miles and conducted 14 interviews with fishers up and down the Oregon coast. She also analyzed hundreds of written survey responses.
“I can honestly say that my perception of fishers has changed radically since coming to Oregon. They are highly satisfied with their lifestyle and are in-tune with the natural environment that their business depends upon. Many of them wish to collaborate with scientists and managers to create policies that serve the greater good, so long as their input is not used against them,” she says.
Kristin Laidre, an Arctic ecologist and associate professor at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, spent August studying narwhals at glacier fronts in Northwest Greenland. Specifically, Laidre and her team were looking at narwhals’ behavior at glacier fronts in Greenland. This summer was the first of a three-year research effort.
“Our cruise targeted 3 glacier fronts in Northwest Greenland where narwhals spend the summer. It was sobering to see how much these glaciers have receded. In some cases we were ‘sailing on land’ when following our GPS because the area used to be covered in permanent ice,” Laidre says.
Separately, Laidre Lab graduate students Jennifer Stern and Jessica Lindsay went to Alaska this summer to identify and document the diversity of marine mammal species commonly found in the Arctic.
Kristin’s research spans many aspects and species in Arctic ecosystems, and you can learn about all of them on her website.
A European green crab captured on the Makah Reservation on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.
Green crab monitoring on the Olympic Peninsula
Members of the Washington Sea Grant Green Crab Team traveled to the Makah Reservation in July to participate in the tribe’s green crab trapping efforts. Working in the Wa’atch and Tsoo-Yess estuaries over three days, Washington Sea Grant’s Emily Grason and Program on the Environment and the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences’ P. Sean McDonald presented to a group of Makah staff and interns interested in learning more about the history of invasive European green crab, their potential impacts on local ecosystems and the work the Crab Team does through its monitoring program. While there, they pitched, set and retrieved traps, resulting in the capture of 60 green crabs.
This is just a sampling of summer research and fieldwork projects from around the College of the Environment. Have a summer research project or fieldwork experience you’d like for us to highlight here? Drop us an email at coenvcom@uw.edu.
High CO2 levels cause plants to thicken their leaves, which could worsen climate change effects, researchers say
Jake Bryant
Tropical forest canopy in Caxiuanã, Brazil.
Scientists have observed that when carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere increase, plants’ leaves thicken. Since human activity is raising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, thick-leafed plants are likely to be in our future. The consequences of this physiological response go further — two University of Washington scientists have discovered that plants with thicker leaves may exacerbate the effects of climate change because they would be less efficient in sequestering carbon; something climate change models have not taken into consideration.
In a paper published online Oct. 1 by the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, the researchers report that, when they incorporated this information into global climate models under the high atmospheric carbon dioxide levels expected later this century, the global “carbon sink” contributed by plants was less productive — leaving about 5.8 extra petagrams, or 6.39 million tons, of carbon in the atmosphere per year. Those levels are similar to the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere each year due to human-generated fossil fuel emissions — 8 petagrams, or 8.8 million tons.
“Plants are flexible and respond to different environmental conditions,” said senior author Abigail Swann, a UW assistant professor of atmospheric sciences and biology. “But until now, no one had tried to quantify how this type of response to climate change will alter the impact that plants have on our planet.”
They will participate in RELAMPAGO, an international campaign in Argentina to monitor storms that occur east of the Andes near the slopes of another mountain range, the Sierra de Córdoba. The international team hopes to better understand how convective storm systems — the big systems that unleash torrential rains, hail and lightning — initiate and grow as they travel from the mountainous terrain eastward over the plains.
“From looking at the satellites, scientists have noticed that this area of South America had the most extreme storms in the world, in terms of how tall they get, the frequency of lightning and the frequency of hail,” said Rowe, a UW research scientist and the UW’s principal investigator on this project.
