On Monday, August 29, our community woke up to the heartbreaking news that Professor Sarah Reichard passed away while leading a UW Botanic Gardens tour in South Africa. We can’t begin to express our shock and sadness at the loss of such a tremendous person and scholar.
Read moreby Karl Wirsing/SEFS
Brian Harvey might not be able to pinpoint the exact moment he knew he wanted to be a professor, but he can definitely recall a series of “pinch me” moments that gradually crystallized his dream—a dream he’s now realized, as he will be joining our faculty this spring as an assistant professor of forest ecosystem science and services!
Coming up on Monday, September 12, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., the UW Botanic Gardens is hosting a talk with one of our doctoral candidates, Nate Haan: “Taylor’s Checkerspot: An Endangered Butterfly with an Interesting Diet.”
A member of Professor Jon Bakker’s lab, Nate studies interactions between plants and insects, and his dissertation focuses on the relationship between Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly and its larval host plants.
This summer, Professor Laura Prugh has taken two trips to the field—first with one of her current graduate students near Mount Rainer, and then to southeast Alaska with a master’s student who’s joining her lab and starting at SEFS this fall.
Read moreThis August, SEFS doctoral candidate Isabel Carrera Zamanillo is leading the first-ever Mission Earth Scout One science camp, which will guide more than 35 middle and high school students through four weeks of hands-on STEM activities and exploration.
Read moreNow in its fifth year (and counting), the Alaska Bear Project continues to build momentum. Working in collaboration with Professor Tom Quinn from the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, Professor Aaron Wirsing just returned from Bristol Bay, Alaska, where researchers have been non-invasively studying brown bears hunting along six sockeye salmon spawning streams since 2012.
Read moreby Karl Wirsing/SEFS
Few mushrooms are as beloved as the morel. From recreational pickers jealously protecting their secret hunting spots, to world-class chefs coveting them for their springtime recipes, morels have acquired an almost mythic status and even have a few festivals in their honor (one in Michigan has been running for 55 years).
On Tuesday, July 19, Alison Morrow from King 5 News brought a film crew to shoot some footage of the glass-enclosed observable beehive that we’re hosting this summer as part of the popular course, “Bees, Beekeeping and Pollination” (ESRM 491D for this quarter).
Read moreFrom June 22 to 24, USGS Landscape Ecologist and SEFS Affiliate Professor Christian Torgersen co-organized a workshop in Antony, France, “Putting the Riverscape Perspective into Practice: State of the Science and Future Directions in Freshwater Management.”
Sponsored and hosted by Irstea, the French National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture, the workshop focused on evaluating applications of the riverscape approach to address challenges for watershed and fisheries managers.
Earlier this summer, I headed out to the field with one of my graduate students to conduct some initial soil sampling on a new set of plots in the San Juan Islands.
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