Blogs

The Puget Sound Institute has invited representatives from seven major ecosystem recovery projects for a two-day workshop, May 14th and 15th in Seattle. Participants will represent Chesepeake Bay, Everglades, Long Island Sound, San Joaquin/Sacramento Delta, Columbia River Estuary, the Louisiana Coast and Puget Sound. The meetings will focus on the role of science in large-scale ecosystem recovery efforts.

If you missed the 2013 UW Water Symposium, you can find some of the highlights on Twitter at #h2o2013.

Congratulations to Lara Pracht, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington, for winning the Best Student Poster award for her poster "The Influence of Reducing Rice Field Irrigation Recharge on Groundwater Arsenic Concentrations in Bangladesh."

You can still register for the April 30th Water Symposium at the University of Washington Seattle campus. Themes this year will include ocean acidification, water and energy and climate adaptation. Presenters so far include scientists from NOAA/Northwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA/PMEL, EcoAdapt Cascadia Consulting, PNNL's Marine Sciences Lab, Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center and the University of Washington. Read more at the Center for Urban Waters homepage.

The Puget Sound Institute and the Puget Sound Partnership are co-hosting a discussion panel on Tuesday, April 2nd, about the Ocean Health Index and its scaleability to Puget Sound. Panelists include Ben Halpern, Ray Hilborn and Phil Levin. The event is at the Center for Urban Waters (Commencement Bay South) from 9AM – noon. Look for a followup in this blog after the event. 

Some historic conservation news related to the greater Puget Sound watershed yesterday. President Obama formally announced the establishment of the San Juan Islands National Monument. This creates additional protection for almost 1000 acres of undeveloped federal land in the San Juan archipelago.

Puget Sound Institute research scientist Tessa Francis reports a "lion country safari" on Hood Canal today. Thousands of spawning herring churned the otherwise calm waters of the canal, and brought the wildlife out in force.

This week has been a busy one for developing some of our Puget Sound/Salish Sea species lists. We recently digitized a list of marine invertebrates from Eugene Kozloff's book Keys to the Marine Invertebrates of Puget Sound, the San Juan Archipelago, and Adjacent Regions. The list is presented with Dr. Kozloff's permission, and you can find an alphabetized version of it here, although it is still in raw form and doesn't yet include links to species descriptions.

There's open-access. Then there's open access—or more emphatically, Open Access. Other versions include Open Knowledge, Open Science and Open Content. Sometimes you'll see several of these variations on a single web page. The Obama administration, for its part, went with "public access" a couple of weeks ago when it called for free access to research using federal funds.