Your daily coffee habit may someday help identify sources of bacterial pollution in Puget Sound. Researchers at the Puget Sound Institute are developing a new tool for targeting leaky septic tanks that may have broader implications for studies of emerging contaminants.
February 28, 2013
From the field: PSI forage fish study
PSI Research Scientist Tessa Francis sends us this photo of herring eggs on eelgrass (click photo to enlarge), part of a new forage fish study in collaboration with NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. The study, which began earlier this month examines the possible link between eelgrass abundance […]
February 7, 2013
Puget Sound Institute issues RFP to fund social science research
The Puget Sound Institute (PSI) requests proposals for 18-month research projects from social science investigators at academic and research institutes, government agencies and other professional consultancies to conduct research on Puget Sound ecosystem service values. As much as $200,000 will be available to support up to three projects selected through an open, competitive, peer-reviewed process. […]
December 14, 2012
The calculus of forage fish: an interview with Marc Mangel
By Jeff Rice One of the first things that many budding ecologists learn, often to their chagrin, is that they probably should have paid more attention in Math. Of all the biological sciences, ecology may be the most fundamentally rooted in numbers. Not only is it the study of distribution and abundance—where and how many?—but […]
June 7, 2012
Recent paper shows unarmored sites in Puget Sound taxa-rich
A recent publication in Estuaries and Coasts investigates the impacts of shoreline armoring along the Duwamish River estuary in Central Puget Sound on salmon diets, invertebrate communities and environmental conditions.
May 4, 2012
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 […]
February 22, 2012
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.
February 21, 2012
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 […]
February 21, 2012
Evaluating and ranking ecosystem indicators
Puget Sound Institute Research Scientist Andy James is co-author of a paper this month in the journal Environmental Management. The paper, “A Methodology for Evaluating and Ranking Water Quantity Indicators in Support of Ecosystem-based Management” uses Puget Sound as a case study, describing frameworks for identifying and ranking ecosystem indicators. Authors include: C. Andrew James, Jessi Kershner, […]
December 12, 2011
SoundCitizen program finds new home at Urban Waters
SoundCitizen, a program founded by UW oceanographer Rick Keil, will become part of the Center for Urban Waters at UW Tacoma under the directorship of the PSI’s Joel Baker. SoundCitizen is “a community-based water sample network in the Puget Sound region, focusing on scientific investigations of the chemical links between urban settings and aquatic systems. […]