The Seeley family is building bridges between a pristine, remote atoll in French Polynesia and the University of Washington. James and Marsha Seeley, parents of UW alumni Laine, ’85, David, ’86, and Elizabeth, ’90, and grandparents to a growing number of Huskies, have led their family in supporting UW marine research at a field station on Tetiaroa. There, scientists and students from the College of the Environment can study delicate, healthy marine ecosystems and develop an understanding of conservation’s future in the face of climate change.
Read more in Columns Magazine »Marine and Environmental Affairs' student uses art to communicate science with #SundayFishSketch
If you log into Twitter on a Sunday and search for #SundayFishSketch, you’ll find a plethora of illustrations of fishes and other marine species. They’re submitted by scientists, artists and anyone else inspired to create, from Seattle to Scotland. #SundayFishSketch was created by Rene Martin, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas, in 2016.
Read more »Largest Chinook salmon disappearing from West Coast
The largest and oldest Chinook salmon — fish also known as “kings” and prized for their exceptional size — have mostly disappeared along the West Coast. That’s the main finding of a new University of Washington-led study published Feb. 27 in the journal Fish and Fisheries. The researchers analyzed nearly 40 years of data from hatchery and wild Chinook populations from California to Alaska, looking broadly at patterns that emerged over the course of four decades and across thousands of miles of coastline.
Read more at UW Today »Three UW Innovation Awards given to UW Environment faculty
College of the Environment faculty received all three of the University of Washington’s Innovation Awards for 2018. The awards are designed to stimulate innovation among faculty from a range of disciplines and to reward some of their most novel ideas, and are made possible by generous donors. Knut Christianson and Michelle Koutnik from the Earth and Space Sciences, along with David Shean from Civil and Environmental Engineering, were awarded $300,000 over two years to “build a digital glacier time machine” that will generate a high-resolution, 3-D time series of how glaciers have changed over time to help understand the future of water resources in the western United States.
Read more at the Office of Research »Beluga whales dive deeper, longer to find food in Arctic
The reduction of Arctic sea ice has a clear impact on animals that rely on frozen surfaces for feeding, mating and migrating. But sea ice loss is changing Arctic habitat and affecting other species in more indirect ways, new research finds. Beluga whales that spend summers feeding in the Arctic must dive deeper and longer to find food than in previous years, according to a new analysis led by University of Washington researchers.
Read more at UW Today »