By mounting a specialized mobile sonar called a DIDSON (Dual-frequency IDentification SONar) under a kayak, UW research scientist Kerry Accola is able to count the juvenile salmon along the shoreline from the water’s surface. The sonar is capable of capturing high fidelity images during the day and also the night, when normal visibility is greatly reduced.

Graduate student Jessie Hale released a paper rethinking the status, trends, and equilibrium abundance estimates of Washington State’s sea otter population and Ruth Drinkwater’s (BS 2021) capstone project, “Estimating proportions of identical twins and twin survival rates in cetaceans using fetal data,” was published in Marine Mammal Science.

Parasites play an outsize role in balancing ecosystems, and some species may be in danger. Read the article from Scientific American featuring SAFS’ Chelsea Wood.

SAFS Emeritus Professor Jim Karr began a long-term bird study in Panama 55 years ago while he was a Ph.D. student and later as a professor of ecology at the University of Illinois. He explains that the core of the current study design and its methodology were initiated in 1977. The study continues to this day under its third generation of leadership.

Each year, our students, faculty, and staff win regional, national, and international awards. Please join us in congratulating this year’s group of award winners!

SAFS Associate Professor Chelsea Wood is the recipient of a 2022 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). This prestigious award will support Wood’s novel research on the historical ecology of parasitism and will allow her to create an active-learning, open-access version of her undergraduate parasite ecology course.

A new paper co-authored by researchers at the Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), the University of Washington and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras describes the important contribution of submersibles to increasing our knowledge about the diversity of deep-reef fishes in the Greater Caribbean.

Researchers, including SAFS Assistant Professor Gordon Holtgrieve, have developed a model using artificial intelligence to analyze the environmental impacts of 351 hydropower dam projects currently under evaluation in the Amazon Basin. The model aims to provide information that would help planners and policymakers optimize the capacity and location of new dams to minimize their negative impacts.

The Lenfest Ocean Program (LOP) funds research projects that address the needs of marine and coastal stakeholders and supports grantees who will engage with the people most likely to use the results. By pulling back the curtain on their processes, the LOP hopes they can help managers, stakeholders and others better understand the many ways in which the philanthropic community can help link useful science with decisions. 

To find the missing gap in the understanding of hair growth on polar bears, researchers are dyeing parts of their fur with colored dots so they can track the progress visually.