School ofEnvironmental and Forest Sciences

Congratulations to John Wott, an emeritus professor with the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, recently received a national award from the American Horticultural Society.

Wott received the organization’s Professional Award for his significant influence on horticulture in the Pacific Northwest over the course of his career. He was appointed the director of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens in 1993, and over the course of his 13-year tenure, he helped plan and create the arboretum’s master plan.

The Professional Award is given to a public garden administrator whose achievements have cultivated widespread interest in horticulture. Wott and the other recipients of the society’s awards will be recognized at the American Gardeners Awards Ceremony and Banquet on June 21 in Virginia.

Clint Robins, a PhD student at the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, was recently featured in Crosscut’s “I Am STEM,” a series that features diverse stories of people who work in STEM and adjacent fields in the Pacific Northwest.

Robins grew up in both Rwanda and Wisconsin. He told Crosscut that his interest in wildlife and the outdoors grew during his days in Africa. “I remember going on some game drives with my family, going to national parks, and playing with lizards in the yard,” he said.

Today, Robins’ fieldwork is focused in managed forests. His master’s degree focused on how urbanization of land affected cougars. Now he’s looking at the relationship between cougars and bears and how bears sometimes rely on cougar kills for food.

“I’m curious as to whether urbanization decouples that relationship and, instead, bears are foraging on Human Resources more,” he told the outlet. R

Read the full interview here.

Earlier this month, The University of Washington Population Health Initiative announced it would be awarding about $280,000 in grant funding to six teams at UW. The School of Environmental and Forest Sciences is proud to congratulate a team of three investigators from the school who were awarded some of this funding.

The team is comprised of Bernard Bormann, director of Olympic Natural Resources Center (ONRC), Marc Miller with Marine and Environmental Affairs, and Courtney Bobsin, a graduate student with SEFS. Their research project is titled, “Ethnoforestry: Applying Traditional Ecological Knowledge for Ecosystem Sustainability on the Olympic Peninsula.” Half of the funding for the group’s award was provided from a partnership with UW’s EarthLab, which works in partnership with others to co-produce and catalyze actionable science.

An excerpt of the project’s abstract reads:

“Across the Olympic Peninsula, widespread changes in forest management policy have altered rural communities over the last several decades. Many rural communities were hit hard by a decrease in available jobs due to a decline in timber supply from over-harvesting and spotted owl protections as well as mill modernization. Tribes have since suffered from a decline of some cultural keystone species adapted to early seral conditions precluded by efficient tree regeneration and late-seral reserves. In the aftermath of this, rural communities are left to rebuild with their primary sources of work and culture degraded.

“Through this grant, we will work will tribal and non-tribal communities on the Washington Coast to determine what plant species they would like to see us bring back in nearby ecosystems. We will develop a research proposal to test the growth and success of these species in permanent plots. This interdisciplinary approach will not only enhance the resilience and health of the local community, it will also benefit the local ecosystem.”

To learn more about the grants, read the full release here.

The 2019 Sustaining Our World Lecture welcomes Dorceta Taylor, the James E. Crowfoot Collegiate Chair and the Director of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion at the University of Michigan‘s School for the Environment and Sustainability (SEAS).

The lecture, hosted by the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences and the College of the Environment, will be held at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 11 at the University of Washington’s Kane Hall. Taylor will present, “Diversity in Environmental Organizations: Lack of Transparency and Inequities in Compensation.”

In addition to her role as director and chair, Taylor is a professor of environmental sociology, teaching courses in environmental history, environmental politics, environmental justice, climate change and sustainable development, sustainable food systems, gender and the environment, and sociological theory.

“I believe each person has the capacity to learn and get excited about environmental issues,” Taylor said, describing her approach to teaching. “I think a thorough understanding of the past informs present thinking and actions.”

Her research focuses on history of mainstream and environmental justice ideology and activism, social movements and framing, green jobs, diversity in the environmental field, urban agriculture and food justice. Taylor has published a number of books and received several national awards.

The lecture is free to attend, but seating is limited. Please RSVP here.

As gray wolves continue to make a strong comeback in Washington state, their presence is impacting other animals, particularly the ones these large carnivores target as prey. So how do targets like deer respond to this increased threat?

That’s what Aaron Wirsing, associate professor with the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, and other researchers from a variety of institutions looked at for a study recently published in Oecologia.

The researchers monitored the behavior and activity of wolves and deer in Washington for three years and found that mule deer exposed to wolves, in particular, are changing their behavior to spend more time away from roads, at higher elevations and in rockier landscapes.

“In any particular ecosystem, if you have a predator returning, prey are unlikely to all respond similarly,” Wirsing told UW News. “We show that wolves don’t have a uniform effect on different deer species.”

Read the full story here!

University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences associate professor Laura R. Prugh is a co-author of a paper that used NASA satellite data to study the movement of wildlife.

The paper, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, looks at the issue of poor snow data in the Arctic and asks government agencies and other scientists to help make improvements so wildlife and its management can be better studied

The data used in the study was collected from NASA satellite tools, which helped the authors determine that Dall sheep prefer areas with low snow cover. But more specific information is needed to help wildlife scientists study animal behavior and how species are adapting to climate change.

Read more about the study on the University of Maryland’s website.

Brian Harvey, assistant professor with the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, is one of three authors of a new article recently published in the Ecological Society of America‘s journal Ecosphere.

The article, titled “Incorporating Biophysical Gradients and Uncertainty into Burn Severity Maps in a Temperate Fire-Prone Forested Region,” discusses how satellite data and regression models can by improved by using biophysical information when tracking the changing patterns of burn severity that causes ecological changes.

The article is accessible to all and can be read here.

“If you haven’t been to see the old trees, then nothing I can write will prepare you for their sheer size,” reads a passage from a recent blog post on the Canopy Watch International blog.

It goes on, “Douglas-fir, Sitka spruce, and redwood trees can be 300 feet tall (100 meters, or as tall as a football field is long) and are in fact the tallest living things on the planet. Despite all being giants among trees, these three species have different strategies for growing so large. That is what makes them unique, and it’s the topic of this blog. Scientists like Russell Kramer, Steve Sillett, and Bob Van Pelt are the ones unlocking the mysteries of the trees, and it’s their work I’ll summarize for you, especially Russell Kramer’s.”

Russell Kramer is a graduate student with the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, who does majority of his research work at the top of the tallest trees in the Pacific Northwest. His work in the canopy and the Franklin Lab at SEFS was featured in the blog post for Canopy Watch International. Read about it here.

In collaboration with the University of Chile’s Institute of Complex System’s Engineering and the SuFoRun Consortium, the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences’ Precision Forestry Coop is co-organizing the 18^th Symposium on Systems Analysis in Forest Resources (SSAFR) for the second time. This year’s Symposium will be held in Chile’s Lake District in Puerto Varas on March 3-7.

“The Symposium has served as a premier international forum for systems analysts, operations researchers and management scientists who study forestry, natural resource management and environmental problems since 1975.” says Sandor Tóth, associate professor at the School and executive director of SSAFR.

This biannual event was last held in Suquamish, Washington in 2017. The Symposium itself will feature discussions and presentations on forest harvest scheduling, optimal reserve site selection, wildfire management, forest transportation and supply chain optimization, bioenergy logistics, invasive species and wildlife management, forest decision support systems, forest economics and other related areas.

Those interested in attending this symposium can learn more at the Symposium website or by emailing Sandor Tóth.

New research conducted by students and an associate professor from the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences has found that Arctic lakes are giving off less carbon than expected.

The study, published online Feb. 11 in the journal Nature Geoscience, from the University of Washington and U.S. Geological Survey suggests many Arctic-region lakes pose little threat to global carbon levels, at least for now. In the Arctic’s flat, arid regions dotted with thousands of lakes, many of these bodies of water are functioning like self-contained units, not releasing much carbon dioxide.

This is an important finding because the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. One consequence of that trend is the thawing of permafrost, a layer of earth that has remained frozen for thousands of years in some areas. This frozen soil and vegetation currently holds more than twice the carbon found in the atmosphere.

As permafrost across northern Alaska, Canada, Siberia and other high-latitude regions thaws, microbes in the soil consume organic materials, releasing carbon dioxide or methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, into lakes and the atmosphere.

Read the full story on UW News!