School ofEnvironmental and Forest Sciences

Congratulations to the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences assistant professor Brian Harvey who was awarded funds from the UW’s Royalty Research Fund (RRF) to study post-fire recovery in an area recently burned near Mount Rainier.

With this grant, Harvey and his team will install a series of long-term, post-fire monitoring plots at which they will be able to study how post-fire dynamics are affected by fire severity, the interval since the last fire and local climate conditions.

There are relatively few fires west of the Cascades in Washington since the early 1900s, which makes the Norse Peak Fire uncommon. The fire burned more than 24,000 acres of land near Mount Rainier National Park in 2017. This grant will provide Harvey and other researchers a key opportunity to gain real-time insight into post-fire recovery in a way that has been impossible until now.

The Seattle Times wrote about the effects of this fire in September 2018 after a reporter traveled with Harvey to the field. Read that story here.

Technology is a big part of our lives today, but that means kids spend less time outside. But what if we combine the two?

That’s the aim of an app developed by School of Environmental and Forest Sciences professor Josh Lawler and the University of Washington Information School.

Nature Collections provides a platform for children to build photo collections from what they see and encounter outdoors. Similar to popular apps like Pokemon Go and other games, it allows them to collect items and compete in scavenger hunts.

Lawler and iSchool professor Katie Davis first introduced their idea in 2016, when they won $400,000 in funding for the app from the UW Innovation Awards. After developing the app, testing with kids began, and the early results are promising.

Read the full story of the app and its reception published in Washington Trails magazine and posted on the iSchool’s website.

Dr. Richard Gustafson, professor at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, and Hisham El-Husseini, a graduate student in bioresource science and engineering, represented Washington at the Advanced Bioeconomy Leadership Conference (ABLC Global), a conference dedicated to the most important issues in the bioeconomy. The conference was held in San Francisco.

Attending ABLC Global provides an opportunity for students to learn from and network with industry professionals, as well as participate in leadership training sessions. Students took part in information sessions and industry panels that featured representatives from Aemetis, LanzaTech, Sierra Energy, POET, Impossible Foods, and many others.

Growing up, SEFS affiliate professor Dr. Morris Johnson thought he might join the military or be a powerlifter.

“No one really talked about going to college,” he said. “The big push for us upon high school graduation, unless you were the one best basketball player who got a scholarship, was Army, Air Force, or Marines.”

Today, he is a fire ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service‘s Pacific Northwest Research Station and was profiled in a new article in the U.S. Forest Service’s Science Update Issue 25. The article looks at how fuel treatments change fire behavior and highlights Dr. Johnson’s work studying trees after large wildfires move through forests.

Read the full story here.

Earlier this month, Ecotrust, in partnership with the University of Washington, published “Tradeoffs in Timber, Carbon and Cash Flow under Alternative Management Systems for Douglas-Fir in the Pacific Northwest,” a peer-reviewed study that looks at the carbon storage in Washington and Oregon forests.

Among the researchers who authored this study is David Diaz, one of the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences’ doctoral students. In addition, Diaz is the director of forestry analytics and technology at Ecotrust.

The study analyzed the forests in Washington and Oregon because of their ability to store large quantities of carbon, an important part of fighting climate change. The results showed that having larger buffers along streams, keeping more live trees after a harvest and other actions involving carbon rotation can aid carbon storage.

Read more about the study and its results.

A School of Environmental and Forest Sciences alumnus Alexander Friend, PhD, was recently named deputy chief of research and development at the U.S. Forest Service (USFS).

He joins current U.S. Forest Service chief and SEFS alumna Vicki Christiansen on the USFS leadership team.

In this position, Friend will provide technical leadership in all phases of USFS research. His role includes formulating and executing policies and programs that advance the management and protection of forest resources. Research fields that USFS oversees involves forest soil and water, wildlife and fish habitat, forest recreation and management, insects and disease, timber management, forest economics and products, as well as marketing.

Friend received his doctorate from SEFS in 1988. He studied nitrogen stress and fine root growth of the Douglas fir.

The University of Washington Botanic Gardens is pleased to announce the 2019 Urban Natural Areas Seminar.

The seminar, “Stewardship Required: The Power of Interdisciplinary Collaboration for Long-Term Function of Urban Areas,” will be held 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., Jan. 30-31 2019 at the Center for Urban Horticulture, NHS Hall, 3501 NE 41st St., Seattle, WA 98105.

The seminar is $95 for one day or $175 for the full event. Discounts available for students and corps members. See website for details.

Program information and registration available here.

Most people expect established natural area landscapes to be low maintenance. That concept comes back to haunt us when the realities of invasive weeds, aggressive native species, and plant encroachments demand immediate attention. As the fox said in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, “You become responsible forever for what you have tamed.” And so, for all the urban natural area plantings we create: stewardship is required.

Taken out of the context of wilderness areas, urban natural areas demand attention to the details of plant selection, site design, and maintenance standards to keep them functioning well. The significant costs of deferred maintenance that have been documented for urban trees and landscapes apply equally to urban natural areas. With proactive and timely collaboration between researchers, city planners, site managers, landscape designers and engineers, field crews, volunteer stewards, and others, we have the power to improve and protect this valuable environmental resource in our communities. Join us for this rare opportunity to exchange information across the mix of professions responsible for creating and maintaining urban natural areas.

Professional credits pending: APLD, CPH, ecoPRO, ISA, LA CES, NALP/WALP.

Two researchers at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences contributed to a chapter in the new volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, an assessment of climate change across the nation produced every four years by the federal government.

Professor David Peterson was one of two coordinating lead authors, and research scientist Jessica Halofsky was a technical contributor. Both contributed to a chapter in the assessment on forests. The chapter looked at how extreme weather, including droughts, will make wildfires more frequent and intense nationally and in specific regions of the U.S. It also describes how climate change will affect other ecological disturbances, such as insects. The authors find that many options exist to reduce the largely negative effects of climate change, and list how federal agencies and other entities are already implementing adaptation measures across the United States.

In addition, former SEFS student, Gabrielle Roesch-McNally, who now works for the U.S. Forest Service, also contributed to the assessment.

Read more about the assessment and the other UW researchers who were involved in its creation.

New research from the University of Washington and the University of Massachusetts – Amherst looks at how the most common cause of sneezing and sniffling in North America is likely to shift under climate change.

A recent study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE finds that common ragweed will expand its range northward as the climate warms, reaching places including New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, while retreating from some current hot spots.

“It was surprising that nobody had looked at ragweed distributions in the U.S.: As climate conditions are changing, where will it spread to in the future?” said corresponding author Michael Case, who did the work as a postdoctoral researcher in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

Ragweed is a native North American plant that thrives in open areas, moving quickly into disturbed areas. It produces copious fine-powder pollen from August to November, causing sneezing, runny noses, irritated eyes, itchy throats and headaches for people with hay fever.

Several studies of ragweed’s future geographic distribution have been done in Europe, where people are concerned because this invasive species is expanding its range. This is the first study to consider future ragweed distribution in the United States.

Case’s previous research looks at how climate change may influence the distribution of various species, mainly native trees in the Pacific Northwest. Co-lead author Kristina Stinson, an assistant professor of plant ecology at UMass Amherst, is an expert on ragweed, including mapping allergy hot spots in New England.

“One reason we chose to study ragweed is because of its human health implications. Ragweed pollen is the primary allergen culprit for hay fever symptoms in summer and fall in North America, so it affects a lot of people,” Stinson said.

For the new study, the two authors built a machine learning model using Maxent software that takes some 726 observations of common ragweed in the eastern U.S., drawn from an international biodiversity database, then combines those with climate information to identify conditions that allow the plant to thrive. Researchers next ran the model into the future using temperature and precipitation output from 13 global climate models under two different pathways for future greenhouse gas emissions.

Read the rest of the story at UW News.

Environmental disasters in the U.S. often hit minority groups the hardest.

When Hurricane Katrina slammed New Orleans in 2005, the city’s black residents were disproportionately affected. Their neighborhoods were located in the low-lying, less-protected areas of the city, and many people lacked the resources to evacuate safely. Similar patterns have played out during hurricanes and tropical storms ever since.

Massive wildfires, which may be getting more intense due to climate change and a long history of fire-suppression policies, also have strikingly unequal effects on minority communities, a new study shows.

Researchers at the University of Washington and The Nature Conservancy used census data to develop a “vulnerability index” to assess wildfire risk in communities across the U.S. Their results, appearing Nov. 2 in the journal PLOS ONE, show that racial and ethnic minorities face greater vulnerability to wildfires compared with primarily white communities. In particular, Native Americans are six times more likely than other groups to live in areas most prone to wildfires.

“A general perception is that communities most affected by wildfires are affluent people living in rural and suburban communities near forested areas,” said lead author Ian Davies, a graduate student in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. “But there are actually millions of people who live in areas that have a high wildfire potential and are very poor, or don’t have access to vehicles or other resources, which makes it difficult to adapt or recover from a wildfire disaster.”

This study is one of the first to integrate both the physical risk of wildfire with the social and economic resilience of communities to see which areas across the country are most vulnerable to large wildfires. The approach takes 13 socioeconomic measures from the U.S. census — including income, housing type, English fluency and health — for more than 71,000 census tracts across the country and overlays them with wildfire potential based on weather, historical fire activity and burnable fuels on the landscape.

Read the rest of the story at the UW News.