You’re in for a real treat this Wednesday with a SEFS Seminar Series doubleheader!
First, from 3 to 4 p.m.—an hour earlier than usual—we’re welcoming Dr. Anna Schoettle, a research plant ecophysiologist with the U.S. Forest Service. She is traveling all the way from the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Colorado to give her talk, “Managing for resilience: Sustaining mountain-top ecosystems in the presence of white pine blister rust,” so don’t miss this special opportunity!
Then, from 4 to 5 p.m., stay glued to your seats for Professor Jerry Franklin, who will follow with his talk, “Chaos in federal forest policy in the Pacific Northwest: The situation and a proposal.”
It’s an exciting line-up, so come to both if you can—and then join us afterward for a reception in the Forest Room from 5 to 6:30 p.m.!
NOTE: There will be no seminar next week on March 6, but the series will resume the following Wednesday, March 13, with Professor Sándor Toth for his talk, “Modeling green‐up constraints in spatial forest planning.”
To complete the second phase of urgent maintenance, all power will be out in Anderson, Bloedel and Winkenwerder halls for roughly 36 hours this weekend from 5 a.m. on Saturday to 5. p.m. on Sunday. During this time, your Outlook email will still be operable, but all network files and the primary SEFS website will not be accessible.The buildings will be dark and completely without power.
Also, although the official start time is 5 p.m. tomorrow morning, you should expect preliminary work to have systems unavailable as early as 10 p.m. tonight, Feb. 22., and they might not return before Sunday night. So please plan your work schedules accordingly.
Check here or at the SEFS Facebook page—which will not be affected—for any updates or plan changes. All systems and building power should resume in time for normal operating hours on Monday, Feb. 25.
For more than 75 years, students have been putting down roots at Pack Forest, helping to shape it for future generations. This Spring Break, you can leave your own mark by taking part in the annual spring planting, March 24-30!
While staying at Pack Forest, you’ll roll up your sleeves and work on forest establishment, including planting, regeneration surveys and survey reports. Your housing (and some food) will be covered, there’s a kitchen at your disposal, and you’ll even earn a $200 stipend.
Contact Professor Greg Ettl for more details or to sign up. Registration closes on Monday, February 25, so act fast!
“A sustainable way to keep the Emerald City green, even in the summertime…”
“Letting it all seep in…”
“Every flush you make …”
“Engineers and ecologists—working together…”
Professor Sally Brown
No matter how you spin it, the next seminar topic is bound to whet your intellectual appetite! So let your curiosity steer you to Anderson 223 this Wednesday, February 20, when Professor Sally Brown presents in Week 7 of the SEFS Seminar Series, “Reintroducing the water cycle in urban areas.”
Also, next week—February 27—is a seminar doubleheader!
First up, from 3 to 4 p.m., Anna Schoettle will be in town to give her talk, “Managing for resilience: Sustaining mountaintop ecosystems in the presence of white pine blister rust.” (She had originally been scheduled for March 13, but a conflict pushed her up a week).
Then, from 4 to 5 p.m., Professor Jerry Franklin will follow with his talk, “Chaos in federal forest policy in PNW: The situation and a proposal.”
Make sure to mark the change on your calendars, and come to both if you can! The seminars are held in Anderson 223 and are open to all faculty, staff and students. Check out the rest of the seminar schedule for the Winter Quarter, and join us each week for a reception in the Forest Room from 5 to 6:30 p.m.
Peter Gill, in his Carleton t-shirt, during a training session on tree nurseries in rural Senegal.
In Seattle and throughout the Pacific Northwest, it can be easy to think of forestry in terms of towering evergreens, and mountainsides carpeted with conifers. But for Peter Gill, who spent the last two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in a tiny village in Senegal, he worked with trees on a much smaller scale—on the margins of farmland, planted not for lumber but for sustenance, as erosion control or for fencing.
The son of two former Peace Corps volunteers, Gill grew up in Nepal and later attended school at Carleton College in Minnesota. He moved to Seattle and the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS) in 2009 as part of the Peace Corps Masters International (PCMI) Program, which prepares students with three quarters of course work before heading off on their Peace Corps assignment. After two years abroad, PCMI students then return to SEFS to complete their thesis and earn a Master of Forest Resources degree.
Gill just completed his two years in Africa and has returned to Seattle. He’s working with Professor Ivan Eastin, his faculty adviser, to finish his final research paper—which, like his work in Senegal, focused on deforestation and agroforestry.
Gill works with a women’s garden to plant an intensive strip of moringa as erosion control.
Living in his village of 600 people, Gill worked with 24 local farmers and two women’s groups on projects to integrate various tree species with their crops and gardens. His goal was to create a better environment for agriculture in a way that also provided direct, sustainable use of the trees. That work could include growing nitrogen-fixing trees as a windbreak, or addressing erosion control by planting native moringa trees, whose leaves are nutritious and are made into a sauce eaten with millet.
Planting intensive rows of trees or other edible shrubs has another advantage. In the largely open countryside of rural Senegal, fencing is crucial because it allows farmers to grow year-round crops such as cassava—rather than farming only in the rainy season—by protecting their crops from cattle, goats, sheep and other livestock passing through with nomadic herders.
Yet most local farmers can’t afford metal fencing, says Gill, and adding wooden posts would mean cutting down more trees and further contributing to deforestation. A good way to solve both problems cheaply and sustainably is to plant “live fences” of thorny hedges, which can potentially serve double duty as a food source.
Gill often worked side by side with farmers and their families, and he was thoroughly immersed in his village. “I enjoyed it a lot,” he says. “It was a great learning experience and very challenging, but overall I think there’s not a better way to learn than getting your hands dirty—and I certainly got my hands very dirty.”
Gill with his host family in Senegal.
Far from discouraging Gill, the challenges in Senegal helped cement his long-term plans. “I feel like it provided me with more of a sense of what I want to do after school,” he says. “I’m really excited about working in forestry and conservation in developing countries, and specifically agroforestry.”
Now that he’s back at SEFS this quarter to complete his thesis, Gill is also participating in another important aspect of the PCMI program: mentoring the incoming class of PCMI students and helping them prepare for their own experiences.
So far, he’s attended a few Q&A sessions, which cover everything from the process of applying to the Peace Corps to living conditions in developing countries. Every situation is different, of course, and the next class of PCMI students won’t necessarily end up in Senegal. Yet Gill says there are definitely some general lessons and philosophies for Peace Corps volunteers to keep in mind—including being highly adaptable to new situations, and learning as much as possible about a place before trying to change it.
“A good place to start when you’re looking to get involved in your community is to ask people about their strengths,” he says. “You can really get them engaged and build their confidence, which is really what development should be about. That’s a better recipe for successful work.”
ABOUT THE PCMI PROGRAM
Peace Corps Director Carrie Hessler Radelet, front right, with Ivan Eastin and past and current PCMI students at SEFS.
PCMI is a professional degree program designed to allow students to complement a rigorous program of academic study with intense hands-on experience during their overseas Peace Corps assignment. Students generally complete one year of academic coursework prior to beginning their 27-month Peace Corps assignment. Following the conclusion of their Peace Corps duty, PCMI students generally return to their university to complete their degree requirements for graduation.
The SEFS PCMI program is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. So far, 18 students have been admitted into the program, and SEFS students have served in Tanzania, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Senegal and Paraguay.This year, as well, the University of Washington ranked #1 among larger universities for alumni currently serving in the Peace Corps, and Peace Corps Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet visited SEFS on February 5 to recognize PCMI students for their service and contributions.
Lignocellulose, or dry plant matter, is the most abundantly available raw material for the production of biofuels. But how can we improve the production of fuels and chemicals from lignocellulosic biomass? And how do we deal with heterogeneous biomass?
Join Professor Renata Bura this Wednesday, February 13, as she tackles these questions in Week 6 of the SEFS Seminar Series!
The seminars, held in Anderson 223 on Wednesdays from 4 to 5 p.m., are open to all faculty, staff and students. Check out the rest of the seminar schedule for the Winter Quarter, and join us each week for a reception in the Forest Room from 5 to 6:30 p.m.
Additional Background: Professor Bura is part of the Biofuels and Bioproducts Laboratory (BBL), which includes Shannon Ewanick, Brian Marquardt, Rick Gustafson, Erik Budsberg and Jordan Crawford. Here’s what she says about the lab’s work and her seminar presentation:
Improvements in individual processes (pretreatment, saccharification and fermentation) have been ongoing, but few researchers have considered the effect that the incoming heterogeneous raw biomass can have on the process. Even within the same species, biomass is physically and chemically very heterogeneous due to the agronomy practices, water and nutrients management, weed control, harvest and storage, seasonal changes, and age. Rather than designing a biorefinery around an ideal source of a given feedstock, it is preferable to understand how we can process heterogeneous feedstock. How can we alter the heterogeneous biomass to provide the maximum yield of hydrolysable and fermentable sugars from whatever is available?
In this presentation we discuss how by preconditioning of biomass, online reaction control, techno-economic and life cycle analysis we can deal with heterogeneous biomass such as switchgrass, sugarcane bagasse and hybrid poplar. We will present that by improving the uniformity of heterogeneous biomass in terms of moisture content, we could improve sugar yields by 28 percent. Another means of dealing with heterogeneous biomass is to improve overall process control by increasing the level of data collection. We will show how Raman spectroscopy could provide early detection of feedstock heterogeneity, leading to increased real-time awareness. Finally, when processing heterogeneous biomass, overall results of the techno-economic analysis have to be incorporated into life cycle assessment work to estimate life cycle greenhouse gas emissions from mixed lignocellulosics.
For Week 5 of the Wildlife Science Seminar, Robin Bowen of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Portland, Ore., will be presenting on the conservation challenges surrounding barred and spotted owls: “Killing one species to save another: Biology, ecology, ethics and the case of the barred owl.”
Hosted by Professor Ken Raedeke, the Wildlife Seminar is open to the public and meets from 3:30 to 4:40 p.m. in Kane Hall, Room 130. All are welcome, so come if you can!
Also, after today, only two more seminars are left in the Winter Quarter, so mark your calendars:
February 25
“Implementation of the wolf management plan in Washington State.”
Steve Pozzanghera, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Olympia, Wash.
March 4
“Forecasting the impacts of land use and climate change at regional and continental scales.”
Josh Lawler, Wildlife Science Group, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences
Professor Jerry Franklin of the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences will be one of two featured speakers, along with David Batker, executive director of Earth Economics.
Tickets are $10, and the celebration runs from 6 to 10 p.m. There will be live music, local food and refreshments, plus special recognitions for founding members.
Since it opened in 1934, the Washington Park Arboretum has hosted thousands of plant collections and species, each with a meticulously kept record and history. Until recently, many of those details from 1934 through the 1980s—when the database became digital—have been preserved solely on paper, scribbled on grid maps or filed in countless handwritten notes.
This past August, though, the University of Washington Botanic Gardens (UWBG) received a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to begin digitizing those records and create an interactive Geographic Information Systems (GIS) map for the entire park. In the end, planners and visitors will be able to go online and pinpoint specific plants and collections within the arboretum, and access all sorts of historical details—a prospect that has everyone at UWBG and the arboretum buzzing.
“People will be able to find an area in the Arboretum, then zoom down and see which plants are there,” says Tracy Mehlin, project manager and information technology librarian at the Center for Urban Horticulture. “It will be really fascinating and educational to have all of that history linked to the plant records, and accessible online to everyone.”
Arboretum grid map, after.
One of the first tasks of the project was to begin surveying and verifying the geospatial coordinates of the 230-acre park, which decades ago was originally divided into 595 grid squares, each 100 feet by 100 feet. When those grid markers and coordinates are confirmed, they will be used to create a map that supports the geo-referenced database. Two- and three-person teams of students and staff have already been out surveying for the past couple months.
It’s a multi-tiered project, and Mehlin has been working closely with other partners at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS).
Sarah Reichard, director of UWBG, is the principal investigator on the grant along with Soo-Hyung Kim, a professor of plant ecophysiology. Jim Lutz, a research scientist and engineer with the College of the Environment, has been helping coordinate the student survey crews and GIS mapping, and David Campbell is working on the searchable database and Web interface. Others involved are helping with various projects, including digitizing the existing maps, as well as handwritten notes and histories attached to each of the park’s 10,000 accessions (plants specifically added and catalogued as part of the arboretum’s collections).When completed, the searchable database will be a boon for environmental research and park management. It will also expand interpretative opportunities for visitors.
“The really fun part of it starts when it’s done,” says Reichard. “The idea is that eventually you’d be able to get the coordinates of a particular collection, like our magnolias, and locate them on your cell phone or GPS unit. We can start putting together virtual tours, and visitors can go from plant to plant.”
The grant covers two years and is expected to run through August 2014. By then, anyone with a Web-connected device will have unprecedented access to most of the living collections—barring a few rare species—at the arboretum. And for the rest, you’ll just have to come out and explore the park on foot!
All power will be out in Anderson, Bloedel and Winkenwerder halls for two hours tomorrow morning, Feb. 7, from 6 to 8 a.m., for scheduled maintenance. During this time, your Outlook email will still be operable, but all network files and the primary SEFS website will not be accessible.The buildings will be dark and completely without power.
Please plan your work schedules accordingly, and check the SEFS Facebook page—which will not be affected—for any updates or plan changes. All systems and building power should resume normally as soon as possible after 8 a.m.
You’re in for a real treat this Wednesday with a SEFS Seminar Series doubleheader!
