In a new book providing a guided walkthrough and toolbox to conduct population and ecosystem modeling at high-spatial resolution, James Thorson (SAFS alum and affiliate faculty, and Statistical Ecologist at NOAA) has co-authored Spatio-Temporal Models for Ecologists with Kasper Kristensen. Coming up with the idea for the book during a meeting at SAFS almost a decade ago, we sat down with James to find out more about why it’s a useful tool for ecologists. 

Stretching from Admiralty Inlet to the city of Olympia, Puget Sound has 1330 miles of shoreline, of which 25% is armored. In a new paper, SAFS Research Scientist Simone Des Roches, led a team studying the impact of armor removal and other restoration activities on shorelines through time in Puget Sound locations.

In a controlled experiment spanning three years and involving 11 scientists from a range of life science disciplines, a new study published in PLOS ONE demonstrates that sharing a paper on Twitter did not increase citations.
It has long been asserted that papers shared on social media platforms, such as X (formerly called Twitter), receive a higher number of citations. However, a team of leading science communicators, led by University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences Professor Trevor Branch, with a combined total of 223,000 followers at the end of the experiment, wanted to explore whether increased citations was actually caused by tweeting about them, or was a correlation due to other factors such as the quality of the paper and the importance of the information in the paper. 

As interest and investment in shellfish aquaculture have expanded both locally and globally, so has interest in how these farms modify intertidal habitat and whether the complex structure created by the shellfish and shellfish growing gear provides ecosystem services that are comparable to those of unfarmed areas, such as mudflats and eelgrass meadows. 

Diving into the world of marine renewable energy, Jezella Peraza, a masters student at SAFS, has recently published a paper looking into the probabilities of fish-turbine encounters and impact.
Whereas the renewable energy sector utilizing solar and wind energy is booming in the United States, the uptake of tidal energy is off to a slower start. Tidal turbines, placed on the sea floor, generate energy when water moves through a constricted area. 

With contributions from SAFS scientists including Jackie Padilla-Gamiño, Corey Garza and Xochitl Clare, Oceanography’s special issue addresses structural and cultural obstacles encountered by underrepresented and marginalized scholars. 

New research led by SAFS doctoral student, Arial Brewer, documents the vocal repertoire of Cook Inlet beluga whales for the first time. 

Understanding how obligate freshwater organisms colonize seemingly isolated ecosystems has long fascinated ecologists, with new research co-authored by Flavien Garcia and Julian Olden demonstrating possible bird-mediated colonization of lakes by European perch. 

Recently featured in Hakai Magazine’s article “All The Fish We Cannot See”, SAFS PhD student Helena McMonagle is conducting a deep dive into a hidden cache of fish that might play an unexpected role in how the ocean sequesters carbon. We caught up with Helena to find out more about it.
Since starting this research in 2019, I’ve been using data collected at sea and in the lab, along with bioenergetic models, to estimate how much carbon these mesopelagic fish, such as lanternfish, transport from surface waters into the twilight zone. 

A team at UW, including Trevor Branch from SAFS and Zoe Rand from QERM, have created an online interactive map called WhaleVis, which lets whale researchers visualize the IWC’s data on global whale catches and whaling routes. From this, researchers can estimate the animals’ spatial distribution and the effort whalers put into hunts.