Quantitative models, including Ecopath, take food web studies to a higher level of analysis

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As part of a project exploring the technical uncertainties surrounding Puget Sound water quality, we are reviewing how computer models are used to advance our understanding of natural systems. This blog post is part of a series focused on different models and their uses within the Puget Sound ecosystem. The project is jointly sponsored by King County and the Puget Sound Institute. In the early 1980s, NOAA scientist Jeffrey Polovina and fellow researchers at the National Marine Fisheries Service in Hawaii developed what they called the Ecopath model, designed to describe […]

New federal and state funding to study toxics in Puget Sound

A recently funded study at the Puget Sound Institute will look at the impacts of emerging contaminants on juvenile Chinook salmon. Photo: Roger Tabor/USFWS (CC BY-NC 2.0)
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The Puget Sound Institute (PSI) and its parent organization the Center for Urban Waters (CUW) are the recipients of more than $3.2 million dollars in grants this month from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Puget Sound Partnership. The funds will go toward understanding and reducing emerging threats from toxic chemicals in Puget Sound. The grants — six in total — will support projects based at our labs at the University of Washington Tacoma. These include: The research builds on earlier work coming from the lab including the discovery of 6PPDQ, […]

Second PCB symposium focuses on source identification and tracking

English sole are among the fish in Puget Sound that pick up contaminants from PCBs through the food they eat. Photo: biodiversityguy https://biodiversityguy.smugmug.com/Underwater/Reference-List-Photos-of/i-3GgD5hB/A
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This Thursday, June 15th, the Puget Sound Institute will host the second in a series of symposiums focusing on contaminant PCBs in regional waterways. The program will include three case studies about PCB source tracking in San Francisco Bay, the Newton Creek Superfund site, and Anacostia River & Lower Beaver Dam Creek. The presentations will be followed by a panel discussion and include opportunities for participant questions. More information is available on PSI’s Cross Program Contaminant Working Group web page. The symposium takes place on June 15, 2023 from 9 […]

Health of killer whales examined through Bayesian network modeling and informed predictions

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As part of a project exploring the technical uncertainties surrounding Puget Sound water quality, we are reviewing how computer models are used to advance our understanding of natural systems. This blog post is part of a series focused on different models and their uses within the Puget Sound ecosystem. The project is jointly sponsored by King County and the Puget Sound Institute. Qualitative network modeling, as shown in the previous post in Our Water Ways, is focused on actions that create either positive or negative results for actors in the model. […]

Researchers use a qualitative network model to test ways to boost production at shellfish farms

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As part of a project exploring the technical uncertainties surrounding Puget Sound water quality, we are reviewing how computer models are used to advance our understanding of natural systems. This blog post is part of a series focused on different models and their uses within the Puget Sound ecosystem. The project is jointly sponsored by King County and the Puget Sound Institute. The skeletal beginnings of nearly all models is a conceptual understanding of the basic workings of the system being studied: Who are the important actors, and what are their […]

Before supercomputers, a structural model helped scientists predict currents in Puget Sound

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As part of a project exploring the technical uncertainties surrounding Puget Sound water quality, we are reviewing how computer models are used to advance our understanding of natural systems. This blog post is part of a series focused on different models and their uses within the Puget Sound ecosystem. The project is jointly sponsored by King County and the Puget Sound Institute. One of the first working models of Puget Sound was a scaled-down concrete reproduction of the regional topography, with actual water running through channels, around islands and into bays, […]

Shutdown looms for Alaska summer troll fishery; court order aims to provide more salmon for orcas

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Southern Resident killer whales, which frequent Puget Sound, are expected to benefit from more Chinook salmon later this year, as expressed in a court order calling for the suspension of a major troll fishery in Southeast Alaska. Alaska state officials are dismayed by the ruling, saying that closing this commercial fishery would have a devastating effect on fishing families in Alaska and on many small communities along the coast. The state has launched an appeal of the ruling. The court order, signed last week by U.S. District Judge Richard Jones […]

Ed Kolodziej among finalists for Frontiers Planet Prize

Wearing safety goggles, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Deputy Administrator Janet McCabe (far left), Congresswoman Marilyn Strickland and Congressman Derek Kilmer watch Dr. Ed Kolodziej as he demonstrates the innovative methods researchers at UW Tacoma's Center for Urban Waters used to identify tire derivative 6PPD-quinone as a killer of coho salmon. Photo by Jeff Rice.
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Puget Sound Institute affiliate Dr. Ed Kolodziej is one of 20 finalists for the prestigious Frontiers Planet Prize honoring “impactful research breakthroughs” in global sustainability science. Kolodziej was selected by an international jury as the United States representative earning him the title of National Champion and advancing him to compete for a prize of one million Swiss francs (about $1.1 million dollars) to support future research. Recipients of the award will be announced on April 27th in Montreux, Switzerland. The prize is sponsored by the Frontiers Research Foundation, a non-profit […]

A tale of two islands

Adult breeding rhinoceros auklet (Cerorhinca monocerata). Photo: Frostnip (CC BY-NC 2.0)
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By Eric Wagner Science is hard, but coming up with a title for a scientific paper is harder. Exhibit A: the paper some colleagues and I recently published in Marine Ecology Progress Series. Originally I wanted to call it, “A Tale of Two Islands: Disparate Responses to a Marine Heatwave at Two Pacific Seabird Colonies.” I was an English major in college and literary allusions have always appealed to me. (I concede this is obnoxious.) But I felt that title wasn’t too far off the mark. There were indeed two […]

Inbreeding hinders population recovery among endangered Southern Resident killer whales

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While a scarcity of Chinook salmon and other environmental factors may be pushing the Southern Resident killer whales toward extinction, a new genetics study has revealed that inbreeding has been exerting a powerful, overriding influence upon the small, genetically isolated population. The weakened genetic condition of the Southern Resident orcas, which frequent Puget Sound, could help explain why their numbers have generally declined over the past 25 years, while other orca populations in Alaska and British Columbia have been growing at remarkable rates. Experts have long suspected that inbreeding could […]

Findings and reports: February 2023

Image of San Juan Islands from the Salish Sea Model
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Salish Sea Model provides insights on circulation and residence times The amount of time water circulates and “resides” in Puget Sound is of intense interest to regulators and emergency response officials who want to understand how quickly wastewater is flushed out of Puget Sound and into the ocean. A paper in the journal Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science reports that contrary to expectation, flushing of deeper waters may take longer in wintertime in large fjord-like basins such as Hood Canal. A new, higher resolution version of the Salish Sea Model […]

PUGET SOS brings new funding and a federal makeover

The U.S. Capitol building
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Recently passed federal legislation has increased funding to protect Puget Sound while also changing the way ecosystem recovery efforts are organized. The legislation includes key provisions of the PUGET SOS Act and establishes a national office for Puget Sound recovery based at the Environmental Protection Agency in Seattle. The end of 2022 marked a seismic shift for Puget Sound recovery efforts. Over the course of less than a week in late December, two landmark pieces of legislation were signed and enacted by President Biden. One of them, known informally as […]