Mar 18, 2016

UW Environment’s Abigail Swann and Alex Gagnon receive NSF Early Career Award

Abigail Swann, assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and Department of Biology and Alex Gagnon, assistant professor with the School of Oceanography, each recently received an Early Faculty Development (CAREER) Program Award from the National Science Foundation. Swann works to understand when, where, and how plants influence the climate, and will receive support for her project titled “Ecosystem-driven Accelerations and Oscillations in the Coupled Earth System.”

UW video on clingfish takes top prize at Ocean 180 competition

Sometimes all it takes is artistic drive, a beneficial collaboration, and one charismatic critter to take home gold. A University of Washington team won first place in a science communication video contest that culminated during the recent Ocean Sciences Meeting. The entries were critiqued and evaluated beforehand by more than 37,000 middle-school student judges hailing from 1,600 classrooms in 17 different countries.

Congrats to Garfield High School, winners of the 2016 Orca Bowl!

Each year at Orca Bowl, high school students from across Washington convene for a little friendly competition to test each others’ knowledge of the world’s oceans. Over the weekend, a team from Seattle’s Garfield High School went toe-to-toe with Newport High School and, in the end, took top honors. They’re now eligible to participate in the National Ocean Sciences Bowl finals held in April, where teams representing 25 regions across the country will meet.

College of the Environment researchers explore the human side of large-scale marine protected areas

Earlier this month in Honolulu at an event co-organized by the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs’ Patrick Christie and Nathan Bennett, more than 100 participants met for the first-ever major discussion of challenges associated with how people interact with large marine protected areas. University of Washington, Big Ocean, NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, and other academic and policy institutions hosted the Think Tank on Human Dimensions of Large-Scale MPAs (LSMPAs) from Feb.

Herring fishery's strength is in the sum of its parts, study finds

A wise investor plays the financial market by maintaining a variety of stocks. In the long run, the whole portfolio will be more stable because of the diversity of the investments it contains. It’s this mindset that resource managers should adopt when considering Pacific herring, one of the most ecologically significant fish in Puget Sound and along the entire West Coast, argue the authors of a recent paper appearing in the journal Oecologia.