Author Archives: kightp

About kightp

Pat Kight is the web and digital media specialist for Oregon Sea Grant at Oregon State University.

Oregon Sea Grant partners in new regional STEM Hub grant

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Youngsters explore wave energy lab at HMSCNEWPORT – Oregon Sea Grant is partnering with the Lincoln County School District to create a new Oregon Coast Regional STEM Hub to serve coastal communities from Astoria to Coos Bay.

The effort, under a $644,000 grant from the Oregon Department of Education, will be based at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center under the guidance of Sea Grant’s marine education team. The goal is to help equip teachers to better provide STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education to k-12 students.

The grant is to the Lincoln County School District, which is partnering with Sea Grant, Tillamook School District and the Oregon Coast Aquarium. The new STEM Hub is one of six across Oregon intended to foster 21st Century career skills, particularly for historically under-served student populations. The new Oregon Coast Regional STEM Hub will help provide coastal schools and educators with the tools and support necessary to deliver world-class STEM instruction to rural students.

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Sea Grant survey: Coastal professionals, managers concerned about climate change

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High surf at Fishing RockThe American public may be divided over whether climate is changing, but coastal managers and elected officials in nine states say they see the change happening—and believe their communities will need to adapt.

That’s one finding from a NOAA Sea Grant research project, led by Oregon Sea Grant and involving multiple other Sea Grant programs, which surveyed coastal leaders in selected parts of the nation’s Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf and Great Lakes coasts, as well as Hawaii.

Three quarters of coastal professionals surveyed – and 70% of all participants – said they believe that the climate in their area is changing—a marked contrast to results of some national surveys of the broader American public which have found diverse and even polarized views about climate change and global warming.

The Sea Grant survey was developed to understand what coastal/resource professionals and elected officials think about climate change, where their communities stand in planning for climate adaptation and what kinds of information they need, said project leader Joe Cone, assistant director of Oregon Sea Grant.  Sea Grant programs in Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois-Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington—states that represent most of NOAA’s coastal regions—took part, administering the survey at various times between January 2012 and November 2013.

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Invasive species still a threat, three years after Japan tsunami

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Oregon Sea Grant’s invasive species specialist, Sam Chan, visited Vancouver B.C. recently and took some time to walk the beaches with his Canadian counterparts and talk about the potential for unwanted plant and animal visitors, washed to sea in the Japanese tsunami of 2011, to make it to North American shores – and the consequences if they do:

Sam Chan in Vancouver
http://globalnews.ca/video/1136779/still-waiting-for-tsunami-debris

Funds available for social science research

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Oregon Sea Grant will release a special call for Social Science and Human Dimension Research proposals on Monday, February 3, 2014.

Researchers who intend to respond must submit a Letter of Intent by Friday, February 14. Full Proposals will be due Monday March 3, 2014. The principal investigator on each proposal must be faculty at any public or private institution of higher education in Oregon.

We expect to invest up to $300,000 in two to four projects addressing one or more of our strategic planning focus areas. Examples might include learning more about factors that help or hinder Oregon’s coastal communities in becoming more resilient to social, economic or environmental stress, challenges communities face in moving toward-ecosystem-based management, or community governance concerns and challenges.

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Despite speculation, scientists see no Fukushima radiation risk in albacore

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Japan’s nuclear disaster released hundreds of millions of gallons of radioactive water in 2011, sparking rampant speculation that a contaminated plume would reach the waters of North America’s West Coast.

Three years later, such speculation is alive and well on the Internet. But scientists in Oregon and California have collected samples of tuna, a fish known to migrate back and forth across the Pacific, analyzed them for radioactive isotopes, Cesium-134 in particular, from Fukushima – and found levels so low they are barely detectable.

Delvan Neville labels albacore samplesDelvan Neville, a PhD candidate in Radiation Health Physics at Oregon State University, has tested dozens of samples of albacore tuna for radioactivity. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s intervention levels for cesium 134 and cesium 137 is 1200 becquerels per kilogram. The highest levels he’s seen in his albacore, of both cesium 134 and cesium 137 combined, is 1 becquerel per kilogram – a level so low that his device couldn’t pick it up until he concentrated the samples.

“That’s more than 1,000 times lower than the point where the FDA would even think about whether they need to let people eat that food still,” he said.

Neville, along with OSU fisheries graduate Jason Phillips, is working with Dr. Lorenzo Cianelli, a marine biologist with OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences , to learn more about the migration patterns of Pacific albacore. Their initial work was funded in part by Oregon Sea Grant and NOAA.

It was only the timing of their research – coinciding with the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent nuclear disaster – that led the scientists to consider radiation as a possible marker for learning which waters fish caught off the US Pacific coast might have traveled.

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Noted salmon biologist and fisheries historian to speak at OSU

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Salmon, People and PlaceCORVALLIS, Ore. – Jim Lichatowich, a noted biologist and author, will discuss the fate of Pacific salmon during a presentation on Wednesday, Jan. 15, at Oregon State University. The free, public event begins at 7 p.m. in the rotunda of the Valley Library on campus.

Lichatowich will speak about his new book, “Salmon, People, and Place: A Biologist’s Search for Salmon Recovery,” which was just published by the OSU Press.

Joining Lichatowich will be Carmel Finley, an OSU science historian, and author of “All the Fish in the Sea,” which was published in 2012 by the University of Chicago Press.

In his OSU Press book, Lichatowich points out many misconceptions about salmon that have hampered management and limited recovery programs. These programs will continue to fail, he argues, as long as resource managers look at salmon as “products” and ignore their essential relationship with the environment.

Lichatowich served for years on the Independent Scientific Advisory board for the Columbia River restoration program, as well as on Oregon’s Independent Multidisciplinary Science Team and other science groups in British Columbia and California. He is author of the award-winning book, “Salmon without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis.”

Finley and Lichatowich will discuss the status of salmon recovery, address its problems and outline the potential for revitalization. Audience members will have the opportunity to pose questions to the scientists, purchase books and have them signed.

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Shark Day in Newport next weekend

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Shark Riddle CoverNEWPORT – Saturday is all about sharks as the Hatfield Marine Science Center celebrates its annual  “Shark Day” at the Visitor Center on Jan. 11.

Join Oregon Sea Grant’s marine educators and scientists for a day of shark science, with a full day of hands-on crafts, family activities and games.  The Shark Riddle film and education program will be presented in Hennings Auditorium in the morning and again in the afternoon.  The Visitor Center is open from 10 am to 4 pm, and as always, admission is by donation.

SCHEDULE:

  • 11:00am and 2:45pm – Film: The Shark Riddle (30 min)
  • 11:30am and 3:15pm – Shark based education program

Erosion hitting Oregon’s coastline – hard

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High surf at Fishing RockMany beaches along the Pacific Northwest coast have experienced increased erosion since the late 1800s.

So says the U.S. Geological Survey, which is working with Oregon State University on a study that’s analyzing shoreline changes in the nation’s coastal regions. The agency made the discovery while examining coastal erosion and land loss.

The groups found that since the late 1800s, most beaches are either stable or adding a little bit of sand. However, 13 of 17 beach “littoral cells,” or beach stretches between rocky headlands and major inlets, have either eroded or built up less sand than in the past. The hardest hit littoral cells include the Neskowin, between Cascade Head and Pacific City, and the Beverly Beach littoral cell between Yaquina Head and Otter Rock. Shoreline change rates at Beverly Beach have averaged more than one meter of erosion a year since the 1960s.

The findings could provide baseline data that will help researchers analyze future climate change impacts

There’s also a pronounced difference in the effects faced between Oregon and its neighbor to the north.

“In a general sense, Oregon has faced much more erosion in the short term than has southwest Washington, which has seen more accretion as a result of sediments from the Columbia River and jetties at the mouth of the Columbia and at Gray’s Harbor,” said Peter Ruggiero, an associate professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.

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Investigating why kids lose interest in science, math

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PORTLAND (StreetRoots News) – Nobody’s quite sure why, but toward the end of middle school students lose interest in science and math. Researchers at one Portland school want to learn why. By solving the mystery, they hope to reverse the trend.

Northeast Portland’s culturally diverse, working-class Parkrose Middle School is the subject of an investigation by Oregon State University researchers hoping to discover why science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, no longer appeals to many kids once they reach the eighth grade.

STEM has become a watchword for educators wanting a trained workforce capable of flourishing in an increasingly science-and-technology-driven global economy. Others say STEM is essential to create an informed citizenry able to weigh in on issues from climate change to bioengineering.

However, whereas much of STEM education is currently dominated by in-school curriculum changes, the OSU Parkrose project is traveling a different path.

“The data says if they [students] have interests and are engaged, good things will happen,” says OSU professor John Falk.

Falk heads OSU’s Center for Research on Lifelong STEM Learning. He’s organizing the Parkrose project and its small team with his wife, OSU professor Lynn Dierking.

Both are also associated with Oregon Sea Grant’s program in Free-Choice Learning – operated out of the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport – which seeks to systematically study how people learn about science in “free-choice” settings such as aquariums and musems, where they can follow their own interests, set their own pace and explore at will. …

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(This story was written by Nathan Gilles, a Portland writer and former Sea Grant Communications intern)