Jeff Rice Social media now proliferates across almost every sector of the Web, from commercial enterprises like Facebook to crowd sourcing of science and medical data. New online communities are created constantly, but not all of these efforts succeed, and the Web is littered with failed attempts and false starts. How can you tell which …
Category: Insight
Burke exhibit traces Elwha restoration
This month, the University of Washington’s Burke Museum opens the exhibit Elwha: A River Reborn, based on the book by Seattle Times reporter Lynda Mapes, with photography by Steve Ringman. The exhibit tells the story of the largest dam removal in U.S. history, and PSI’s Jeff Rice spoke with Mapes about her experience covering the story, her …
Decision science for Puget Sound recovery
As a dedicated group of natural resource managers met for the nth time around a set of tables in the Coupeville, WA rec hall, one participant spoke up plaintively, “But do we really need to rate and rank all these proposed actions in order to move forward?”
An idea whose time has come (25 years later)
We recently came across this editorial from Seattle Times writer John Hamer. The text still seems fresh, like it could have been written just a few years ago. The issues that prompted it remain pressing, but the date — January of 1985 — shows that it can take a while for words to resonate. “Nearly every …
PSI convenes coastal ecosystem recovery workshop
A workshop convened by the Puget Sound Institute in May brought leading scientists and managers to Seattle to compare and contrast the role of science in large scale coastal ecosystem recovery projects. At first glance, the projects and systems couldn’t have seemed more different. There was Puget Sound, an urban estuary, represented alongside the swamps …
Media: Puget Sound scuba pioneer
Puget Sound science owes a debt to the researchers and explorers who got there first. We profile some of these important figures in an occasional series we call Puget Sound Voices. Today we feature Vern Morgas, one of Puget Sound’s first scuba divers. Vern Morgas (second from the left) and friends
EoPS is blogging
Get an inside take on the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound through the EoPS blog. We’ll keep you updated on new additions to the site, as well as topics like open access publishing and interesting happenings in Puget Sound science. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Puget Sound species
Creating a checklist of the species of the Puget Sound watershed sounded simple enough. It was one of the first orders of business for the new Encyclopedia of Puget Sound. If you are going to try to create a comprehensive collection of information about a natural system, it makes sense to first find out what …
Is beer toxic to Puget Sound?
Recently spotted in Grist.org: SoundCitizen founder Rick Keil and new PSP Science Panel member Tracy Collier weigh in— Is it OK to pour beer down the drain?
Study shows Puget Sound “artificially flavored”
A recent study by UW undergraduates at SoundCitizen, which recently moved from Oceanography to the Center for Urban Waters, shows that Puget Sound is awash in vanilla, pain relievers and other man-made compounds.
Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” meets Puget Sound research
PSI/Urban Waters post-doctoral researcher Justin P. Miller-Schulze was recently the lead author on a paper published in Atmospheric Environment, “Characteristics of fine particle carbonaceous aerosol at two remote sites in Central Asia,” and a co-author on a paper in Environmental Science and Technology, “Chemical Characterization and Source Apportionment of Fine and Coarse Particulate Matter inside …
Puget Sound Voices
The Puget Sound watershed has gone through extraordinary change in just a few decades. As conservation groups wrestle with ways to protect the region’s environment, a key priority in many cases is also to “restore” Puget Sound to its former health. But what is a healthy Puget Sound? To what condition do we seek to …