Photo by Flickr user jules4oceans

If you’re a photographer spending Thanksgiving or Christmas weekend on the Oregon coast, the Oregon King Tide Photo Project would like your help.

The project seeks photographs documenting the unusually high tides known as King Tides, in an effort to better understand which areas of the coast might be most vulnerable to rising sea levels related to climate change.

This season’s King Tides are predicted to occur on Oregon shores November 24th-27th, 2011, December 23rd-25th, 2011 and January 20th-23rd, 2012.

Taking part is easy:

1. Choose a site to photograph
2. Pick a day and time to photograph high water levels
3. Take the photographs, noting the location, date, time of day, and the direction you are facing as you take the picture. Data from a GPS data can be particularly valuable.
4. Upload your photos to Oregon’s King Tide Flickr group (this requires having your own Flickr account).

The project hopes eventually to get photo-documentation of the highest tides along  accessible shorelines of all Oregon estuaries.  Most important, according to their Website, are sidewalks, parking lots, wetlands and other low-lying areas next to the shore.

Photographs should be framed to show the water level against a recognizable object or marker that will be there later, so someone can return to the post at a later date and measure the high-tide level shown in the photograph. Before-and-after pictures showing average and extreme high water levels at the same location are particularly useful.

The King Tide project is sponsored by the Climate Adaptation Planning Information System, an interagency partnership including Oregon Sea Grant, the state Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, the Oregon Coastal Zone Management Program,  the US Geologic Survey,  and multiple NOAA and NASA units. Similar projects take place in California, Washington and British Columbia.

Read more, and find predicted local times for the November King Tide, at the Oregon King Tide Photo Project Website.

CORVALLIS  -A new Oregon State University speaker series kicks off this month  with a Nov. 17 appearance by writer/activist Bill McKibben, author of the groundbreaking 1989 work “The End of Nature,” the first general audience book on global warming.

McKibben is the debut speaker in the “Discovery Lecture Series,” a project aimed at bringing prominent scientists, acclaimed writers and key policymakers to OSU to present on matters of national and international importance. The series is a project of the offices of the Provost and Vice President for Research.

McKibben will deliver the Discovery Lecture at 7 p.m. at CH2M HILL Alumni Center Ballroom on the OSU campus. The event is free and open to the public. He will also speak the following morning at the Benton County Fairgrounds as part of a “Local Foods Breakfast with Bill McKibben,” and that evening at an event hosted by the OSU Spring Creek Project.

For more details about the events and the Discovery series, visit OSU News & Research Communications.

NEWPORT – A new exhibit at the HMSC Visitor Center showcases the success of a two-year federal/state/industry partnership that employed fishermen to retrieve thousands of lost or abandoned crab pots off the Oregon coast.

Derelict Crab Gear Recovery: Oregon Fishing Industry Partnerships chronicles the outcomes of the partnership, which included a two-year, $690,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and involved commercial fishermen, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and Oregon Sea Grant,  among others.

Fishermen involved in the project hauled in more than 3,000 lost crab pots, nearly all of which were returned to their owners for repair and re-use.

Lost fishing gear is an international problem; nets; lines, traps and other gear left in the ocean can foul ships, endanger wildlife and  disrupt seafloor habitats.

The Oregon effort grew out of a 2006 pilot conceived by the Oregon Fishermen’s Cable Committee. Sea Grant helped the group win a modest proof-of-concept grant from NOAA, and monitored initial retrieval cruises to determine their success and check the recovered gear for dead or trapped marine life.

The broader project, launched in 2009, not only recovered tons of lost gear, but also advanced the understanding of the impact of derelict gear on marine resources. The new HMSC display includes a video documentary about the project intended to promote visitor awareness and stewardship of marine resources.

Read more about the gear retrieval project

Invasive crayfish are spreading in Oregon, and Sea Grant’s Sam Chan has put together a handy photographic guide to distinguishing three common invasive varieties from American signal crayfish, which is native to the state.

A recent KTVZ report on the invaders prompted several commenters to ask for photos to distinguish them from the native species, so Chan, Sea Grant’s aquatic invasive species specialist and chair of the Oregon Invasive Species Council, is offering the guide as, developed this past summer by his student interns, as a printable .pdf.

Download the .pdf here.

Oregon State University will continue to host and lead a federal federal/academic research partnership to study marine resources in the Pacific Northwest, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced yesterday.

The award means that NOAA will continue funding the Cooperative Institute for Marine Resource Studies (CIMRS), which was established at Oregon State in 1982, for at least five and up to 10 more years.

Following a competitive application process, NOAA chose Oregon State to continue to administer the CIMRS partnership,  which focuses on marine resources such as hydrothermal vents, seafloor volcanoes, marine mammals, and marine ecosystems. Research will also seek to improving protection and restoration of these marine resources.

Based – along with three NOAA labs – at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, CIMRS is one of 18 NOAA cooperative institutes nationwide. The agency funds cooperative institutes at universities with strong research programs relevant to its mission.

Read more:

• NOAA press release
• CIMRS Website