Category Archives: environment

Space Station images provide insights into coastal regions

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Mouth of the Columbia River, imaged from spaceCORVALLIS  – A prototype scanner aboard the International Space Station is providing scientists with a new set of imaging tools that will help them monitor Earth’s coastal regions for events from oil spills to plankton blooms.

The images and other data are now available to scientists from around the world through an online clearinghouse coordinated by Oregon State University.

Additional details of the project will be announced in a forthcoming issue of the American Geophysical Union journal, EOS, and can be found on the project’s website.

The Hyperspectral Imager for the Coastal Ocean, or HICO, is the first space-borne sensor created specifically for observing the coastal ocean and will allow scientists to better analyze human impacts and climate change effects on the world’s coastal regions, according to Curtiss O. Davis, an OSU oceanographer and the project scientist.

Read more from OSU News & Research Communications

Visit the HICO website

(Image: Mouth of the Columbia River, from HICO image gallery)

As Kitzhaber is sworn in, a look back

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The last time John Kitzhaber was Oregon’s governor, he made a major policy address at Oregon State University in January 2000, on the “Oregon Approach to Environmental Problems.”

Now, with Kitzhaber returning for a new four-year term, his reflections  on the environment and politics and on salmon recovery 11 years ago may have renewed interest. The 30-minute speech, introduced by then-OSU President Paul Risser and produced by Oregon Sea Grant as part of the John Byrne lecture series:

Seattle symposium: Energy use in Fisheries

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Federal agencies are teaming with nongovernmental organizations to sponsor a symposium on “Energy use in Fisheries: Improving Efficiency and Technological Innovations from a Global Perspective,”  November 14-17 in Seattle.

Sponsored by NOAA Fisheries Service, NOAA National Sea Grant, Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, the Pacific Marine Expo, the World Bank and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, the symposium will look at  the direct and indirect effects of global energy costs on the seafood harvesting, processing and marketing sectors.

The symposium resulted from planning by the Sea Grant Safe and Sustainable Seafood Supply (SSSS) focus team. More than 90 presentations by experts from all over the world will address local and regional solutions for addressing energy challenges. Participants will identify and discuss management strategies, alternate gear and vessel designs, alternate fuels, vessel operation and maintenance strategies, and a set of metrics to measure the level of energy reduction.

Guest speakers include Jeff Steele, who led a green refit for the F/V Time Bandit, a vessel featured on Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch” television show, and Chris Dixon who supplied a South Carolina shrimp boat with waste vegetable oil from the Margaritaville Restaurant.

To register and to learn more: http://www.energyfish.nmfs.noaa.gov/index.html

Sea Grant, State Parks collaborate on iPhone guide to newest park

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NEWPORT – A new iPhone application gives visitors an inside look at Oregon’s newest state park, the Beaver Creek State Natural Area south of Newport.

The application, “Paddle Beaver Creek,” was developed jointly by the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department and Oregon Sea Grant at Oregon State University. It is available free for downloading from the iPhone store.

The project is designed to provide park visitors with an additional way to learn more about the park. “We are adapting to the needs of present and future generations of park visitors,” stated Mike Rivers, Ranger Supervisor for Oregon State Parks. “Having a park-specific smart phone guide to water trails, wildlife and natural history will hopefully deepen our visitors’ experiences in Oregon State Parks’ 2010 park of the year, Beaver Creek State Natural Area.”

The core of the application is an interactive map of the Beaver Creek Water Trail – about three scenic miles of an easy-paddling waterway in a pristine coastal marsh open to kayaks and canoes. With no feasible way to post interpretive signs along a water trail, the application provides iPhone-equipped canoeists and kayakers a way to track their progress via GPS, and interactively highlights points of interest along the way, from nesting ospreys to beaver lodges.

Oregon Sea Grant’s interest in developing new tools for effective science education brought them to this cooperative project. “We are always exploring tools that deepen understanding of the coast,” said Dr. Shawn Rowe, Sea Grant Extension’s free-choice learning specialist at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. “Giving visitors the ability to seek the depth of information they prefer is the future of parks and interpretive centers.”

Beaver Creek State Natural Area  is located seven miles south of Newport, just east of Ona Beach State Park. The park, which celebrated its grand opening Oct. 1, offers recreation for boaters and nonboaters alike. A newly created Visitor Center features interpretive exhibits, an ADA-accessible deck overlooking the wetland, and trail access. Free Wi-Fi access allows visitors to download the iPhone App on the spot.

Other Sea Grant personnel involved in conceptualizing and creating the application and coordinating logistics include Mark Farley, Nancee Hunter, Joe Cone and Evelyn Paret. Plans are in the works for additional applications, in versions for a variety of mobile smart-phone platforms.

Oregon Sea Grant, founded in 1968 and based at Oregon State University, supports research, education, and public engagement to help people understand, responsibly use, and conserve ocean and coastal resources.

Sea Grant director to blog Gulf research cruise

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Stephen Brandt, director of Oregon Sea Grant, embarks tomorrow on a week-long research cruise attempting to map and quantify the effects of this summer’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the marine ecology of the northern Gulf of Mexico.

The cruise, supported by a National Science Foundation rapid-response grant, includes scientific collaborators from Oregon State University, the University of Maryland and Eastern Carolina University. The scientists will be building on data they’ve collected from the same region in seven years of research cruises there.

Time and shipboard Internet connections permitting, they intend to blog about the experience at http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/sciencefromthespill/

Read more about the research

Symposium at UO: Ocean impacts of climate change

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EUGENE – Leading Oregon scientists and scholars will discuss Ocean Impacts of Climate Change: Science, People and Policy, in a one-day symposium at the University of Oregon’s Knight Law Center on Sept. 10. The symposium, which is free and open to the public, runs from 8:30 am to 4:30 p.m.

Organized by 2010-11 Resident Scholar Richard Hildreth, the symposium is co-sponsored by the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans (PISCO) and the UO School of Law.

The earth’s oceans buffer us from climate change by absorbing heat and dissolving CO2 initially discharged into the atmosphere. The resulting thermal expansion of the ocean contributes to sea level rise along with melting ice caps and glaciers. Further, the ocean’s increasing acidity is adversely affecting important ocean ecosystems and species. Accelerated sea level rise adversely affects low-lying island and coastal communities as well as the ecosystem. This conference highlights the relevant science, the impacts on people, and potential policy and legal responses to these impacts of climate change.

Scientists and scholars taking part in the symposium include Oregon State University oceanographer Jack Barth, Dr. Mary Ruckleshouse of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, and Meg Caldwell of Stanford University’s Center for Ocean Solutions. Topics range from marine ecology, biology, and physical science to social consequences, including the disparate impact of climate change on poor communities, international ocean law and environmental justices.

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New video: Preparing for Coastal Climate Change

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Climate change carries with it both risk and uncertainty, which makes it a challenge to discuss and an even greater challenge to prepare for. Oregon Sea Grant has joined the climate conversation by listening to coastal residents and trying to address their most pressing questions, with the assistance of topical experts.

Questions addressed by Preparing for Coastal Climate Change include:
• What’s the difference between weather and climate?
• What tools are used?
• How can scientists make claims about what the climate will be like 100 years from now if they can’t always reliably predict the weather just a few days from now?
• How is climate change related to storms, El Niño, and rising sea levels?
• What are some likely erosion effects we can expect to see as a result of these changes?
• What do “dead zones” have to do with climate change?
• How might increased levels of carbon dioxide affect sea life?
• How will storms and flooding affect the landscape in the coming years?
• What is government’s role in helping coastal communities prepare for and respond to climate change?
• What provisions are there for shoreline protective structures?

For additional resources about the changing climate, its local effects, and other coastal issues, visit seagrant.oregonstate.edu

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New video showcases Cummins Creek Wilderness

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Cummins Creek on the central Oregon coast is perhaps easy to miss. Where it enters into the ocean about three miles south of Yachats, it’s just a modest stream. But those who know it consider it a hidden gem, as Congress recognized in 1984 by protecting the forest that surrounds the creek in order to “preserve in a wilderness state the last remaining virgin stands of Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and Douglas fir in Oregon’s coastal lands.”

This short video highlights not only the beauty of the place but the role of the Sitka spruce forests in both Oregon history and environmental understanding.

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Sea Grant director to take part in “rapid response” study of Gulf fish ecology

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Stephen Brandt

CORVALLIS, Ore. – An Oregon State University researcher who leads the Oregon Sea Grant program will take part in a rapid response team studying how the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is affecting fish and other marine life in the Gulf of Mexico.

The National Science Foundation has announced that the team, including OSU’s Stephen Brandt, will receive $200,000 to support a week-long research cruise this September to collect data about the conditions of fish in the northern Gulf. The new information will be compared with baseline data the team has recorded in multiple cruises of the same region dating back to 2003.Funds come from the NSF’s RAPID program, which supports quick-response research into the effects of natural and man-made disasters and other urgent situations.

Brandt, the director of the Oregon Sea Grant program at OSU, is an oceanographer and freshwater scientist with a long history of studying fish ecology around the world, including the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and the Adriatic Sea. Before coming to OSU in 2009, he was director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Michigan.

He is part of a research team that has conducted seven research cruises in the northern Gulf of Mexico since 2003, collecting detailed data about temperature, salinity, oxygen, phytoplankton, zooplankton and fish, and analyzing the effects of human activity on marine fish ecology. The result is what Brandt calls “an extremely valuable data set” to compare the possible effects of the BP oil spill on the pelagic ecosystem of the northern Gulf of Mexico. The team also plans to make its historical data available to other Gulf researchers via the NSF’s Biological and Chemical Oceanography Database.

“We’re proposing to conduct the new cruise in September because that’s the same time of year when we conducted our previous studies,” Brandt said. “That will allow us to compare the new data with comparable periods from past years, which should give us a good picture of how the spill is affecting the marine environment.”

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NOAA adds Deepwater oil spill site

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has launched Current trajectory map for Gulf oil spilla new Web site for information about the Deepwater Horizon oilspill in the Gulf of Mexico.

From the site:

“As the nation’s leading scientific resource for oil spills, NOAA has been on the scene of the BP spill from the start, providing coordinated scientific weather and biological response services to federal, state and local organizations. We have mobilized experts from across the agency to help contain the spreading oil spill and protect the Gulf of Mexico’s many marine mammals, sea turtles, fish, shellfish and other endangered marine life.”

Along with monitoring and predicting the oil’s trajectory and providing detailed weather forecasts to officials attempting to contain the spill and clean up the oil, the agency is providing aircraft and  marine mammal spotters from its Southeast Fisheries Science Center to assess what species might come into contact with the oil,  and using experimental satellite data from their Satellite Analysis Branch to survey the extent of spill-related marine pollution.

The site contains up-to-date predictions of the oil’s trajectory and maps showing the path of the layers of oil floating on the ocean surface.  It also includes links to the official  Deepwater Horizon Joint Information Center, which has detailed information about the spill containment and recovery effort, including information for volunteers.

The  Joint Information Center is also distributing information about the effort via  social networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.