Pacific Northwest trees grown and harvested sustainably can both remove existing carbon dioxide from the air and help keep the gas from entering the atmosphere in the first place. Thats provided wood is used primarily for such things as building materials, instead of cement and steel, and secondarily that wood wastes are used for biofuels.
Author: Sandra Hines
W Day festivities captured Friday by Mary Levin, University Photographers.
Follow the serious science – and the development of novel “Will it crush?” segments inspired by the YouTube hit “Will it blend?” – as University of Washington Wavechasers work in the South Pacific near Samoa.
Ignoring the potential beneficial roles of non-native species is no longer a valid option, says UWs Julian Olden. His public talk Oct. 25, “Invasive Species: Exonerating Crimes to Envision a New Global Future,” is the annual deans lecture from the College of the Environment.
The first scientists to witness exploding rock and molten lava from a deep sea volcano, seen during a 2009 expedition, also collected boninite, a rare lava that accompanies the formation of Earths subduction zones. Current subduction zones are continually evolving but most formed 5 million to 200 million years ago.
Naturalists, kayakers and other volunteers – including University of Washington students, faculty and staff – are needed to look for as many birds, plants, insects, mammals and fungi as possible during the 24-hour Bioblitz 2011 at the Washington Park Arboretum.
Learn about some of the inaugural projects by students, faculty and staff using money from the student-funded Campus Sustainability Fund as part of the second annual Sustainability Summit on campus Oct. 26.
The University of Washington and Washington State University are leads for two separate grants of $40 million each that will use Pacific Northwest woody biomass to expand whats been a Midwest-centric biofuels industry into Washington, Oregon, Idaho, western Montana and northern California.
University of Washington President Michael K. Young announced today the appointment of Jack Johnson to a new chief of staff position in his office, effective Oct. 24.
The phrase “no guts, no glory” doesnt just apply to athletes who are striving to excel. Salmon and other fish predators take the adage literally.
Students already knowledgeable about the science behind ocean acidification and warming will learn more about the challenges those ocean changes pose for tribes, shellfish growers and other sectors of society – as well as helping seek solutions ¬– under a just-announced National Science Foundation grant of $3 million.
The University of Illinois today announced the appointment of Phyllis M. Wise, provost and executive vice president at the University of Washington, as its next vice president of the university and chancellor at Urbana-Champaign.
Submarine cables for the nations first regional cabled ocean observatory, a project led by the University of Washington, made landfall last week on the Oregon coast.
Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to grow, so forests have long been proposed as a way to offset climate change. But rather than just letting the forest sit there for a hundred or more years, the amount of carbon dioxide taken out of the atmosphere could be quadrupled in 100 years by harvesting regularly and using the wood in place of fossil-fuel intensive steel and concrete.
Earlier this week, NASAs Hubble Space Telescope logged its one millionth science observation during a search for water in an exoplanets atmosphere 1,000 light years away, according to a UW faculty member conducts theoretical interpretation of data from the Hubble.
A forest resources professor whos an expert on invasive species and rare plants became director of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens July 1.
With the launch earlier this month of NASAs satellite Aquarius, more than half a dozen University of Washington researchers are involved in projects to calibrate data from space with actual measurements of ocean salinity.
Keiko Torii, professor of biology, is among 15 of the “nations most innovative plant scientists” selected to share $75 million for fundamental plant science research.
The snowpack decline of the last 50 years in the Rocky Mountains is highly unusual in context of the past 800 years, according to findings published June 10 in “Science.”
An Amorphophallus titanum, also known as a corpse flower in its native Sumatra and elsewhere because of its foul odor, has bloomed at the University of Washington botany greenhouse. Visit weekdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. while the bloom lasts.
Students overall performed better – and educationally disadvantaged students generally made even greater strides than everyone else – in an introductory biology course at the University of Washington where recent budget woes doubled class sizes for the course, cut lab times and reduced the number of graduate teaching assistants.
The 25-story construction crane used since 1995 to investigate such things as how Pacific Northwest forests absorb carbon dioxide, obtain sufficient water and resist attacks by pests and diseases is being pruned back to just the tower.
Timothy Essington, UW associate professor of aquatic and fishery sciences, is one of four Pew fellows in marine conservation in the world this year.
The gender gap for physical oceanographers in tenure-track positions has almost doubled since the mid-1990s.
For more than two decades scientists have suspected theres a substantial source of energy for ocean mixing at ocean fronts. Researchers with the Applied Physics Laboratory are the first to devise a way to prove it.
In observation of the UN International Year of Forests, the UW School of Forest Resources has scheduled a forest film festival, a talk May 6 with alums who are leaders in global forestry and a look at forestry education, research and management May 10.
This Saturday, join local and nationally known speakers as they compare the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon oil spills and look in particular at how people and organizations told stories about the two events.
Sea-ice algae – the important first rung of the food web each spring in places like the Arctic Ocean – can engineer ice to its advantage, according to the first published findings about this ability.
APLs Kristin Laidre talks Thursday at the Seattle Aquarium about working in the high Arctic and her projects on narwhals and polar bears.
With live presentations and 40 exhibit and activity stations, Polar Science Weekend March 3-6 offers opportunities to learn about extreme polar environments from those who work there.
The speaker at the School of Forest Resources annual public lecture has climbed trees on four continents using ropes and mountain-climbing techniques to study animals and plants that live in the treetops.
On her plane trip to Ecuador Wednesday, UWs Kiki Jenkins will write her first entry for the “New York Times” blog “Scientist at work: Notes from the Field.”
When invasive plants gain a foothold in new territory they become about as abundant as on their home turf, a new finding that challenges a widely held assumption.
Want to hear one of the biggest icebergs of the last decade crack up? UW researchers compressed a five-hour event in Antarctica into a two-minute audio file that you can listen to.
Reporters can turn to UW experts on PNW climate variability, effects of La Nina and flooding.
Scientists question widely adopted indicator of fisheries health
The decades-long tradition of salmon returning to campus each fall is ending because of new directions in fisheries research and budget cuts.
New directions in fisheries research, along with budget cuts, led the UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences faculty to decide to discontinue the research salmon run created some 60 years ago at the campus.
Alarming news reports and journal articles in recent years about fisheries facing ruin the world over has led to calls to curtail, or more drastically, to completely cease harvesting fish from coastal and ocean waters.
New directions in fisheries research, along with budget cuts, led the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences faculty to decide to discontinue the research salmon run created some 60 years ago at the campus.