UW Engineering Fall 2019 Lecture Series

UW College of the Environment Science Communications Fellowship

The University of Washington College of the Environment is pleased to announce a new science communications fellowship opportunity. College of the Environment Science Communications fellows gain skills in science writing. Fellows may write features for the College website, develop social media content or develop their own multimedia projects to connect people with science that matters. Along the way, they build portfolios that help them gain recognition as writers and communicators who can break down the barriers between scientific information and public understanding.

Eligibility

Graduate students in any field from the University of Washington may apply. Applicants must demonstrate strong writing skills, a good general understanding of and interest in natural science and/or policy. Applicants should have at least some social media experience or be interested in developing their digital content skills. The selection committee will consider writing samples, related experience and studies, references and the relevance of the fellowship to future career goals. Samples do not have to be from an academic source. References do not have to be from an academic instructor, but could be from another reputable source. The fellowship is open to graduate students only.

Award

Fellows receive a $3,400 stipend and are expected to work an average of 10 hours per week. Fellows are also expected to meet regularly with College of the Environment communications staff and to maintain consistent email contact when working offsite. The College hopes to work with a few fellows simultaneously.

Application deadline

Applications for the College of the Environment Science Communication Fellowship are due to Washington Sea Grant by 5:00 p.m. PST on September 20, 2019. Finalists for the fellowship will be selected and interviewed in late September, early October 2019.  Reference letters may be sent with the applications as part of the application package or separately.

Note: Applications for the College of the Environment Science Communication Fellowship and the Washington Sea Grant Science Communication Fellowship will be considered concurrently in a joint selection process. Applicants may apply to both opportunities with one application, but must note clearly on the cover letter that they are applying for both and why they qualify.

Fellowship dates

Fall-Winter Quarters: Oct 16, 2019 – March 20, 2020

Application requirements

1. A cover letter (500 words or less) explaining your qualifications for the fellowship and describing how the experience supports your long-term goals.
2. Two to three writing samples.
3. A two-page resume that includes any publications and any personal or work/volunteer- related social media channels that you’ve managed.
4. Two letters of reference, including one from your professor, instructor or academic advisor.
5. Unofficial copies of undergraduate and graduate transcripts.

Fellowship selection and placement process

Applications should be submitted electronically to sgfellow@uw.edu or by mail to:

ENV Science Communications Fellowship
Washington Sea Grant
3716 Brooklyn Avenue, NE
Seattle, WA 98105-6716

For additional information, contact Molly M. McCarthy at mollymm@uw.edu.

New Fellowship Supports Global Water Research

August 8, 2019

With water-related challenges on the rise around the world, there is a splash of good news. A newly established Ivanhoe Foundation Endowed Fellowship will support University of Washington graduate students who are gearing up to tackle some of the most pressing water-related challenges in developing countries.

“Threats to water, such as limited access to safe and clean water for health, insufficient water for food and energy, and declining resilience against extremes of floods and droughts, are ever morphing into newer problems requiring newer solutions and outside-the-box thinking,” said UW civil & environmental engineering professor Faisal Hossain, who works on sustainable water resources engineering.

Addressing complex water-related challenges around the globe requires creative problem-solving and the ability to translate cutting-edge research into real-world solutions, according to the Ivanhoe Foundation. Therefore, the fellowship will fund graduate students passionate about tackling the world’s greatest water resource challenges, especially those who are pursuing solutions to challenges faced by developing nations, such as limited access to safe and clean drinking water and insufficient water for food and energy.

The fellowship will support graduate students in both the College of Engineering and the College of the Environment. Graduate students and faculty from the two colleges are already collaborating on water research through the Freshwater Initiative, which promotes innovative research in the water science and engineering communities to address complex freshwater issues both locally and around the globe.

The endowment is made possible through a longstanding relationship and the strong support of Cheryl Townsend, chair of The Ivanhoe Foundation, which her father, L.F. “Buz” Ivanhoe, founded. An international expert on petroleum exploration in developing countries, Ivanhoe observed the plight of water-deprived localities firsthand, which inspired him to support graduate students working on global water-related challenges.

“In today’s world, this type of support to train the next generation of engineers and scientists for international development is almost non-existent,” Hossain said. “The generous support from the Ivanhoe Foundation will therefore fill a critical void that we see in the 21^st century.”

Ecocultural Restoration and Salmon Science in the Klamath Basin: Results and Reflections

Thursday, July 18, 11:00 am–12:00 pm, Allen Auditorium (inside UW’s Allen Library):

Please join students and faculty from the field course on Ecocultural Restoration and Salmon Science in the Klamath Basin as they share scientific results and reflections on water, salmon, fire, and reciprocal relations along the mid-Klamath River. A collaboration with the Karuk Tribe’s Píkyav Field Institute, the course has brought together undergraduate and graduate UW students with high school students from the Karuk and Quartz Valley tribes to study in the field in Karuk and Shasta ancestral territory.

Please help extend a warm welcome to visiting Karuk students and faculty, and to honor all of our students’ work. All are welcome!

Prepare River Ecosystems for an Uncertain Future

As the climate warms, we can’t restore waterways to pristine condition, but models can predict potential changes, write UW SAFS professor Julian Olden and colleagues in Nature Magazine.

June 18, 2019

Jonathan D. Tonkin, N. LeRoy Poff, Nick R. Bond, Avril Horne, David. M. Merritt, Lindsay V. Reynolds, Julian D. Olden, Albert Ruhi & David A. Lytle

In January, millions of fish died in Australia’s Murray–Darling Basin as the region experienced some of its driest and hottest weather on record. The heat also caused severe water shortages for people living there. Such harsh conditions will become more common as the world warms. Iconic and valuable species such as the Murray cod (Maccullochella peelii peelii) — Australia’s largest freshwater fish — could vanish, threatening biodiversity and livelihoods.

Rivers around the world are struggling to cope with changing weather patterns. In Germany and Switzerland, a heatwave last year killed thousands of fish and blocked shipping on the River Rhine. California is emerging from a six-year drought¹ that restricted water supplies and devastated trees, fish and other aquatic life. Across the US southwest, extended dry spells are destroying many more forests and wetlands.

What should river managers do? They cannot look to tools of old: conventional management techniques that aim to restore ecosystems to their original state. Ongoing human development and climate change mean that this is no longer possible. And models based on past correlations do a poor job of predicting how species might respond to unprecedented changes in future (see ‘Ecosystem change’). A different approach is called for.

To maintain water supplies and avoid devastating population crashes, rivers must be managed adaptively, enhancing their resilience and limiting risk. Researchers must also develop better forecasting tools that can project how key species, life stages and ecosystems might respond to environmental changes. This will mean moving beyond simply monitoring the state of ecosystems to modeling the biological mechanisms that underpin their survival.

Model process

Today, river managers track properties such as species diversity and population abundance, and compare them with historical averages. If they spot troubling declines, they might intervene by, for instance, altering the amount of water released from dams. But by the time trends are detected, they can be impossible to arrest.

Understanding how sensitive ecosystems might change is crucial to managing them in the future. For example, in the American west, native cottonwoods (Populus spp.) are valuable, long-lived trees that anchor river banks and offer habitats for many species. They are finely tuned to seasonal flood patterns, releasing their seeds in early summer when river flows peak. The seeds take root in moist ground after the flood recedes². But if the flood is delayed, even by a few days, many seeds fall on dry ground and die. Drought-tolerant species, such as salt cedar (Tamarix ramosissima), that disperse seeds over a longer period will move in and dramatically alter conditions for native flora and fauna.

Models based on biological processes or mechanisms — that is, how rates of survival, reproduction and dispersal vary with environmental conditions — can follow and predict such shifts. For example, by modelling the impacts of changes in flood timing on aquatic invertebrates, it is possible to predict how the numbers of dragonflies and mayflies in a dryland river will vary with different patterns of dam releases³.

Process-based models can be tailored to particular life stages of a species, or sequences of events⁴. They can identify tipping points and bottlenecks. For example, they have revealed that the early juvenile stage of coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) in the northwestern United States is most sensitive to summer droughts. The salmon spawn in streams that flow into coastal rivers, and might spend a couple of years in fresh water before moving to the sea. Juveniles might not survive, or might find it hard to travel downstream, when the river levels are low⁵.

Such models can also track how interactions among species in communities vary under changing conditions⁶. For example, the loss of riparian specialists in dryland river ecosystems and invasion by both non-native and upland species in a drier future could create a vicious cycle⁶. River ecosystems could become more vulnerable to climate change and to alien species.

Armed with all this information, managers can intervene before a problem arises. For example, in wet years, conservationists in the Pacific Northwest could find and support habitats that are crucial to juvenile salmon. They could manage water flows in dry years to enable the salmon to migrate. Similarly, in the US southwest, river flows could be increased strategically from reservoirs to protect important species, such as cottonwoods. And in Australia, letting more water pass through dams in spring could stop rivers drying up while the eggs of Murray cod mature⁷.

Rivers must also be managed for people. Allocating scarce water resources is contentious. Policymakers, water-resource engineers, conservationists and ecologists must work together to decide how much water should be diverted to people, agriculture and industry, and how much is needed to protect ecosystems during drought.

Some river basins are beginning to be managed adaptively — agencies are trying different management practices, learning from them and updating them as needed. For example, in Australia, state and federal agencies periodically reassess and rebalance water allocations, as climate trends, information and assessment tools develop. Similarly, the Bay–Delta Plan in California proposes to revisit relationships between target species, water flows and water quality in San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta every five years.

But adaptive management alone might miss conservation targets. Unexpected consequences could emerge over the long term as impacts mount. Process-based models can look further ahead and save time, money and disruption by limiting the number of interventions as well as avoiding adverse impacts. They would help stakeholders and managers to choose which features of ecosystems to maintain, to justify costly interventions such as major engineering works and to weigh trade-offs to build resilience under increasing climatic uncertainty⁸.

Obstacles to implementation

Process-based models are already used in fisheries and conservation. For example, they have shown conservationists that it is more effective to protect juvenile loggerhead sea turtles from being caught in fishing nets than to safeguard their eggs on beaches⁹. And such models help to guide the management of wetland habitats in the United States for the endangered Everglades snail kite (Rostrhamus sociabilis), the fledglings of which are susceptible to droughts¹⁰.

But they are rarely used in river management, mainly because data on the basic biology of local species are lacking. Such data are costly for scientists and agencies to collect. Measuring fecundity or survival, for example, takes years and thus requires long-term funding and commitment. Such campaigns are usually reserved for endangered or commercially valuable species.

Simplifying models might help to bridge the data gaps in the interim. Species with similar life histories or characteristics might respond similarly to changing river conditions. Studies of one could inform models and management of similar species in other places. For instance, plains cottonwood (Populus deltoides) in North America, river red gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) in Australia, and Euphrates poplar (Populus euphratica) in North Africa and Eurasia are all riparian trees that have similar hydrological requirements and drought tolerances. They share characteristics such as shallow roots and furrowed bark that resists flood scour, and can resprout after being buried by sediment. Analytical methods could also be developed to extrapolate across gaps in data sets.

Four steps

River scientists and managers should take the following steps.

Collect data on mechanisms. We call for a fresh global campaign to gather natural-history data on the responses of biodiversity to changes in river flow. Estimates of fecundity and survival at various life stages will require monitoring in the field. Other information, such as flood-induced mortality rates, could be gathered through field and laboratory experiments. Data from different sources can also be combined, including species traits, population abundances across life stages and remote-sensing data about the states of ecosystems on wider scales⁴.

We urge local, state and federal agencies, as well as researchers, non-governmental organizations and other bodies, to make existing data available. Facilities for hosting these already exist, such as the COMPADRE and COMADRE global databases, which hold population models for hundreds of plant and animal species, respectively. Organizations such as the Alliance for Freshwater Life, the wildlife charity WWF and the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network should lobby global funding bodies to support data collection.

Describe key processes in models. Scientists need to better articulate the relationships between population dynamics and water-flow patterns in process-based models. For example, the models need to describe how well different life stages of plants reproduce or survive under flood or drought conditions, the flow conditions and timing that are required for fish to reproduce or the growth rates of insect populations after floods of different sizes^3–5,7. Outputs need to be expressed clearly so that river managers and decision makers can understand and use them.

Focus management on bottlenecks. Targeted interventions to avoid populations collapsing during extreme flows will be a cornerstone of managing rivers for resilience in future. Accordingly, dam managers should focus on the most vulnerable or responsive life stages, not just population abundance. Sadly, as flow extremes become more common, scientists and managers will be able to observe die-offs and calibrate the models.

Pinpoint uncertainty. The level of confidence that managers have in the results of models will influence how willing they will be to deal with varying levels of risk. Predictions should thus quantify the level of trust that can be placed in them. Scientists must present uncertainties in forecasts clearly. Models should be tested by hindcasting (predicting past or present population size, for example), and uncertainty in model inputs should be traced through to the outputs. The knowledge gaps that most compromise accuracy should be identified. The models should be regularly updated, tested and improved as new data arrive.

Freshwater biodiversity is disappearing on our watch. As the crisis deepens, we must model and manage rivers to safeguard the services they provide.

This article was originally published in Nature magazine.

UW APL Open-Source Software Research Technician

The University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory is looking for a research technician to assist with the development of open-source software tools in the geosciences. This is a part-time, temporary position with the possibility of extension after the first year depending on the availability of funds.

The project: NASA is funding us to test and deploy Pangeo, a community platform for Big Data geoscience, as a prototype to enable transition of scientific workflows to a cloud environment. See http://pangeo.io for more information.

The team: we are a small team of research scientists (climatology, hydrology, glaciology, volcanology), technicians and data science experts in academia and industry. We collaborate via in person meetings, Slack and GitHub. We stay connected with a global Pangeo community.

The work: many of the core tools for deploying Pangeo are in place. Now, we need help with developing scientific use cases that make full use of Pangeo’s parallel workflow capabilities, connecting Pangeo tools to existing NASA products, and helping educate scientists in using these tools.

Education and background: Minimum two years Bachelor’s level training in computer science, data science, and/or a domain scientist with demonstrated data science skills. Required experience with Python, Jupyter, Linux and GitHub; desirable experience with AWS, Kubernetes and satellite imagery applications.

Location: The team is distributed across multiple locations. The core team at the University of Washington is affiliated with the eScience Institute, where much of the work occurs. There may be opportunities for telecommuting.

Opportunities: We are committed to building an open and inclusive community that is dedicated to principles of reproducible science. We foster opportunities for professional development and immersion in leading edge data science tools.

Contact us: for more information e-mail Anthony Arendt, arendta@uw.edu.

Data Science Software Carpentry Workshop

Water data fans and foes,

Are you the data rockstar that you want to be? Do you want to spend less time coding and wrestling data and more time on research?

The eScience Institute is holding a Software Carpentry workshop on July 15-18 (9 AM – noon each day) in the WRF Data Science Studio. The Carpentries is a non-profit volunteer organization whose members teach researchers how to use computing tools and tools for management, analysis and visualization of data

The workshop focuses on software tools to make researchers more effective, allowing them to automate research tasks, automatically track their research over time, and use programming in Python to accelerate their research, and make it more reproducible.

More Details & Registration

Email Sarah Stone (sstone3@uw.edu) or Ariel Rokem (arokem@uw.edu) with any questions about the workshop.

“Engineering with Nature – An Ode to Water, Wood, and Stone” at SIFF

To help tell the powerful story about a once-polluted and neglected creek that is becoming a flourishing home for spawning salmon, the documentary Engineering with Nature – An Ode to Water, Wood, and Stone, was selected to premiere at the 2019 Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) on Saturday, June 8.

Watch the trailer

Documenting the water quality changes in the creek, which is Seattle’s largest urban watershed and winds its way through north Seattle, are UW associate professor of civil & environmental engineering Edward Kolodziej and UW-Tacoma Center for Urban Waters postdoc Kathy Peter. Kolodziej is also an associate professor of science and mathematics at the Center for Urban Waters and UW-Tacoma’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences (SIAS).

The film will premiere at the 2019 Seattle International Film Festival on Saturday, June 8, 2pm at Seattle Central Library, located at 1000 4th Avenue, Seattle. The premiere was selected for a free public screening, but it’s best to arrive early as tickets (for 260 seats) will be given out on a first come first served basis. The doors open at 1:30pm, but the film maker recommends arriving between 12:30-1pm. Following the premiere, the project’s key participants will participate in a Q&A session, including Kolodziej.

Read more about the making of the film

Washington Water Trust 6th Annual Wild & Scenic Film Festival in Seattle

Celebrate adventure and conservation with the Washington Water Trust at an evening of happy hour and award-winning environmental films from around the world!

When: Tuesday, June 18th, 2019 | 5:30 PM Happy Hour | 6:30 PM Films
Where: SIFF Cinema Egyptian | 805 E Pine St, Seattle, WA 98122

Tickets are $35 and include:

• Festival admission
• A Klean Kanteen steel pint cup with WWT logo
• A digital Chinook Book subscription
• One happy hour beer/wine/soda
• Acknowledgement as a valued WWT supporter

Learn more

Get Tickets

SIFF Science Documentary Features FWI Faculty

By Brooke Shields, UW Civil & Environmental Engineering

If Thornton Creek could tell a story, it would not only be surprising— it would be surprisingly good.

To help tell the powerful story about a once-polluted and neglected creek that is becoming a flourishing home for spawning salmon, the documentary Engineering with Nature – An Ode to Water, Wood, and Stone, was selected to premiere at the 2019 Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) on Saturday, June 8.

Documenting the water quality changes in the creek, which is Seattle’s largest urban watershed and winds its way through north Seattle, are UW associate professor of civil & environmental engineering Edward Kolodziej and UW-Tacoma Center for Urban Waters postdoc Kathy Peter.

Watch the trailer

“The filmmakers, Leaping Frog Films, are very excited about the film being selected for SIFF,” said Kolodziej, also an associate professor of science and mathematics at the Center for Urban Waters and UW-Tacoma’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences (SIAS). “It’s quite difficult to get into SIFF, as there is a low acceptance rate.”

Filmed on location at Thornton Creek last year, Kolodziej and Peter discuss a water quality study they conducted for Seattle Public Utilities in 2017; they later published a paper with the results. In the film they discuss how the engineered streambed used modified natural processes to remove pollution.

Four years in the making, the documentary highlights the success of Seattle’s Thornton Creek Project. Initiated by Seattle Public Utilities as a neighborhood flood control project, the effort entailed rebuilding 1,600 feet of the creek’s channel. Workers realigned the channel, tore out the fill from development and repositioned the creek back into its natural flood plain.

Following the radical redevelopment project that revitalized the creek and cleaned up the water by removing pollutants through streambed filtration, adjacent neighborhoods no longer flood, water quality has improved, and, most surprisingly, Chinook salmon have returned to the creek to spawn. Researchers say the project could be an example for how to design cities with healthy ecosystems despite human-caused pollution.

According to the filmmakers, Leaping Frog Films, “This visionary project successfully demonstrates a fresh new approach to urban land use planning, storm water treatment, water quality management, and stream restoration, all of which have ‘real-life’ implications for coping with the increasing effects of climate change and urbanization.”

Free film premiere

The film will premiere at the 2019 Seattle International Film Festival on Saturday, June 8, 2pm at Seattle Central Library, located at 1000 4th Avenue, Seattle. The premiere was selected for a free public screening, but it’s best to arrive early as tickets (for 260 seats) will be given out on a first come first served basis. The doors open at 1:30pm, but the film maker recommends arriving between 12:30-1pm. Following the premiere, the project’s key participants will participate in a Q&A session, including Kolodziej.

Learn more about the premiere