Winter Quarter

Navigating higher education while juggling your mental health, having an active social life, taking classes, and potentially having a job is tough. The way we craft our own narratives and tell them as storytellers deeply informs our past, present, and future. In this talk, we will explore how knowing, recording, and sharing your own personal story through an exploration of nature and cultural + personal history can help you in your journey through college and beyond.

The Salish Sea Bioregion encompasses an intricate network of inland marine waterways and their upland watersheds in Washington and British Columbia. The concept of a cohesive Salish Sea region has become a critical focal point for local bioregional education, research, restoration, conservation, and policy development. However, the scarcity of accurate, cohesive, and easily available spatial data and thematic maps covering the entire bioregion is a critical impediment to these efforts.

As the second largest estuary in the United States, Puget Sound is a national figure for river restoration. River restoration is an important tool for repairing legacies of uneven economic development that have degraded river systems across the US and resulted in disproportionate impacts on communities who are poor and communities of color, leaving them exposed to all kinds of environmental hazards and harm. Currently, river restoration as a form of ecological improvement is also emerging as an important climate change adaptation strategy as well as a nexus of social justice concerns.

The recent saga of the Skagit River Headwaters “Donut Hole” saw a coalition of advocates and stakeholders on both sides of the U.S./Canada border come together for a common cause of environmental protection and resisting a gold mining proposal. This presentation analyzes this transboundary network to identify opportunities and challenges in organizing, communicating, and persuading across an international border.

Old-growth forests have all but disappeared on state forestlands, largely due to post-1945 industrial logging practices. Very few forests remain that aren't monocrop tree plantations. While WA State agencies define "old growth" worthy of protection as pre-1850 forests, there are still some remaining acres of mature naturally generated and structurally complex "legacy forests" that are WA state's best chance at retaining forests with old growth characteristics.

Michael will overview exciting projects and initiatives that Whatcom Million Trees Project has developed over the past year. You'll hear how WMTP can assist local citizens to protect our rapidly disappearing mature trees locally as well as to plant new tree seedlings where needed in local parks and Greenways. He'll also detail how anyone can become a Neighborhood Tree Ambassador as a way to focus this positive work in their neighborhood. Q&A will follow the presentation.

Washington State and British Columbia share many connections. Despite being separated by an international boundary, there are businesses, transportation networks, families, and Indigenous nations that knit the region together, as well as ecosystems that know no borders. In the past decade, the region has faced a growing number of climate-induced natural hazards, from fires to floods, which elevate the importance of working collaboratively with our neighbors to the north on shared challenges.

With the advent of lidar technology, we can now capture the three-dimensional (3-D) forest structure, which was previously impossible with traditional optical remotely sensed data. New insights into the interaction of forest structure, radiation regime, and physiological processes, the three cornerstones of forest ecological studies, are made possible by the 3-D structural information contained implicitly in forest lidar data.

Wetlands are widely recognized as important ecosystems that provide many critical services for both natural communities and human society, including nutrient cycling, wildlife provisioning, water storage & filtration, carbon sequestration, agriculture & recreation, and critical habitat for mammals, birds, and amphibians. Wetlands are also thought to be among the most sensitive ecosystems to climate change.

Beginning in 2019, a wave of youth-led activism unlike anything seen before swept across the U.S. and other countries, irrevocably altering the political dialogue about climate change. From school strikes for the climate, to campaigning for a Green New Deal, to pushing for fossil fuel divestment at universities, young people have taken the climate movement to new levels and won unprecedented victories.