For people who make a living by harvesting natural resources, income volatility is a persistent threat. Crops could fail. Fisheries could collapse. Forests could burn. These and other factors — including changing management regulations and practices — can lower harvests and depress incomes. But the ways that these forces interact to impact income, especially at the level of the individual worker, have been difficult to track.
Climate change will force many amphibians, mammals and birds to move to cooler areas outside their normal ranges, provided they can find space and a clear trajectory among our urban developments and growing cities.
But what chance do fish have to survive as climate change warms up waters around the world?
University of Washington researchers are tackling this question in the first analysis of how vulnerable the world’s freshwater and marine fishes are to climate change.
New research from UW atmospheric scientist Joel Thornton and others finds that storms above the world’s busiest shipping lanes are significantly more powerful than storms in areas of the ocean where ships don’t travel.
The National Science Foundation is funding the largest marine seismic-monitoring effort yet along the Alaska Peninsula, a region with frequent and diverse earthquake and volcanic activity. Involving aircraft and ships, the new Alaska Amphibious Community Seismic Experiment will be led by Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, with partners at the University of Washington and seven other research institutions.
“This effort will really change the information we have at our disposal for understanding the seismic properties of subduction zones,” said Emily Roland, a UW assistant professor of oceanography and one of nine principal investigators on the project.
The Northern Rocky Mountain ecosystem includes huge swaths of federal lands, two national parks and some of the most spectacular wild spaces in the country. University of Washington researchers are helping managers of those lands prepare for a shifting climate.
“Climate Change and Rocky Mountain Ecosystems,” a book published in August, was edited by Jessica Halofsky, a UW research ecologist in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, and David Peterson, a senior research biologist with the U.S.
While winter sea ice in the Arctic is declining so dramatically that ships can now navigate those waters without any icebreaker escort, the scene in the Southern Hemisphere is much different. Sea ice around Antarctica has actually increased slightly during winter — until last year.
About a year ago, a dramatic drop in Antarctic sea ice during spring in the Southern Hemisphere brought its maximum area to its lowest level in 40 years of record keeping.
A team of University of Washington scientists is partnering with more than a dozen other institutions — with funding from National Science Foundation — to create a digital encyclopedia of 3-D vertebrate specimens.
The UW Department of Earth and Space Sciences’ Erika Harnett is a geophysicist who studies weather in space. She looks at how solar wind interacts with weakly magnetized planets, like the Moon or Mars. Among other things, Erika is also the is the Associate Director of the Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium.
She’ll be in eastern Oregon for the upcoming Total Solar Eclipse on August 21, and in advance of the once-in-a-lifetime solar event, we caught up with her.
Corals are key to ocean health because they support the densest, most diverse ecosystems and harbor species from turtles and algae to reef fish. UW scientists from the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences are looking at the burgeoning field of coral genetics to better predict, and maybe even prepare for, future threats to coral.
In a new study, Ph.D. student James Dimond and Professor Steven Roberts use modern DNA-sequencing tools to figure out the relatedness of three similar-looking corals.
The College is pleased to announce that Terryl Ross will come aboard as UW Environment’s inaugural Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion effective September 11, 2017.
At UW Environment, Terryl will provide leadership and coordination of diversity, equity and inclusion programs and services. He will represent the College at local, regional and national levels as a leader and innovator in diversity programming.
Trees have the ability to capture and remove pollutants from the soil and degrade them through natural processes in the plant. It’s a feat of nature companies have used to help clean up polluted sites, though only in small-scale projects.
Now, a probiotic bacteria for trees can boost the speed and effectiveness of this natural cycle, providing a microbial partner to help protect trees from the toxic effects of the pollutants and break down the toxins plants bring in from contaminated groundwater.
The University of Washington is the new host for the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Northwest Climate Science Center. Boise State University, the University of Montana, Washington State University and Western Washington University are also new partners in the Northwest CSC university consortium.
These five universities were selected as the CSC host and consortium partners after an open competition and extensive review by scientific experts.