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Golden-crowned kinglet (Regulus satrapa). Photo: Minette Layne (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Golden-crowned kinglets in Puget Sound have seen a steep decline since 1968

The number of golden-crowned kinglets in the Puget Sound watershed has declined by more than 91% over a recent 50-year period, according to data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey. The data was reported by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, which tracks the information for the Puget Sound Partnership’s terrestrial bird indicator. The indicator was established to monitor the health of Puget Sound’s species and food webs.
The findings come amid widespread bird declines across North America. Overall, bird numbers across the Continent dropped by almost 30% over the last half-century, a loss of more than three billion birds that biologists in the journal Science called “staggering.”
The figures for Puget Sound show an even steeper rate of decline for the kinglets, which inhabit Puget Sound’s interior forests. Over the 50-year period from 1968 to 2018, golden-crowned kinglets declined by an average of 4.78% per year, according to WDFW biologist Scott Pearson, who compiled the information for the Partnership’s terrestrial bird population abundance indicator. That amounts to a population loss of 91.36% over the duration of the survey. The declines were measured in “routes that occur, or partially occur, within the Puget Sound watershed,” according to the Partnership’s website.

Map of North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) routes that occur, or partially occur, within the Puget Sound watershed.

The golden-crowned kinglet is described by the American Bird Conservancy as “one of the world’s smallest perching birds,” and lives in Puget Sound’s coniferous forests year-round. It feeds mostly on insects in trees and shrubs and must eat almost constantly to feed its high metabolic rate. It is one of three normally common forest species measured by the Partnership’s Vital Sign indicator. The other forest indicator species include the varied thrush, which declined by less than 1% per year over the study period, and the brown creeper which saw moderate increases of about 2% per year. The Vital Sign indicator takes an average of the status of all three birds as a way of measuring the health of the food web in interior forest habitats. Driven by the drop in kinglets, the overall indicator showed a decline of 46% over 50 years.
Other bird species measured by the indicator are several “human-associated species” including the American crow, European starling, rock pigeon, house finch and house sparrow. Biologists say those birds adapt more easily to human development and can nest on human structures or eat discarded food in garbage. On average, those birds were more stable but still declined as a group by 8%. The Partnership has classified the status of the terrestrial bird abundance Vital Sign indicator as “Getting Worse.”
According to Pearson, the decline in kinglets is “not well understood” but could be driven by factors such as loss of forest habitat and pressures from climate change leading to forest fires or increasing winter storminess.
The decline in forest birds tracks roughly with the Partnership’s Land Cover and Development Vital Sign indicator which shows an estimated decline in forest habitat in Puget Sound of 836 acres per year. “To the region it [forest bird declines] suggests that we are losing our predominant land cover,” Pearson says.
Percent change per year (1968-2018) in population abundance of three forest interior bird species. (Graph courtesy of the Puget Sound Partnership and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.)

Kinglets are also prone to die-offs during severe winter events such as ice storms. “If trees freeze up, the birds can’t get to the bugs to eat,” Pearson says. “We have had a number of unusual winter events,” a phenomenon that is predicted to increase in frequency, according to climate change models.
While golden-crowned kinglets have dropped precipitously in Puget Sound and are declining generally, they are still relatively common across North America. “It’s hard to imagine we would get to a world without kinglets,” says Pearson.
However, the story of the golden-crowned kinglet in Puget Sound may be one of many playing out across North America. According to the 2019 article in Science  that described the massive loss of billions of birds across the Continent, the declines “are not restricted to rare and threatened species—those once considered common and wide-spread are also diminished.”
One positive sign for the kinglets may be that the loss of forest habitat in Puget Sound, while still ongoing, is less severe than it has been in previous years. According to the Partnership, forest declines in the watershed have dropped to about 38% of what they were in the early 2000s. “If this decline in habitat loss continues, it will be interesting to see if the rate of forest associated bird populations begins to stabilize,” Pearson and his colleagues wrote on the Partnership’s website.

Stormwater picks up contaminants from vehicles. Photo: Daniel Parks (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://www.flickr.com/photos/parksdh/7014755513

Could tire discovery go beyond impacts on coho?

Scientists have suspected for several years that chemicals from tire wear particles are to blame for the deaths of thousands of coho salmon that have returned to spawn in Puget Sound’s urban streams. Sometimes referred to as “pre-spawn mortality” or “urban runoff mortality syndrome,” these deaths typically occur in streams near roads, and scientists have been analyzing a wide variety of automobile-derived chemicals to see if they produced similar toxic effects.
Now, thanks to some painstaking detective work by our partners at the University of Washington Center for Urban Waters (our groups are affiliated and share lab space) and many other collaborators, researchers can point to 6-PPD-quinone, a derivative from a preservative in tires called 6-PPD. The finding is as unexpected as it is fraught with implications. The chemical comes about only when the tire preservative is exposed to naturally occurring ground-level ozone in the environment creating a “transformation product” not previously identified. A paper outlining the discovery is published today (Dec. 3) in the journal Science and you can read more details from Christopher Dunagan in our magazine Salish Sea Currents.

A dying female coho salmon in the Lower Duwamish spotted by Puget Soundkeeper volunteers in October 2017. Photo: Kathy Peter
A dying female coho salmon in the Lower Duwamish spotted by Puget Soundkeeper volunteers in October 2017. Photo: Kathy Peter

In some ways the research on 6-PPD-quinone is just beginning. What started out as a local mystery could now catalyze studies around the world. Scientists wonder if the newly identified chemical is harming more than just coho.
“This is the first thing I’ve worked on in my career where I have no idea where the story ends,” says the paper’s co-senior author Ed Kolodziej. “It’s kind of what keeps you up at night. You’re wondering, ‘How wide is it?'”
Tires and similar rubber products are found everywhere in the world, he points out, and while 6-PPD-quinone has not been shown to kill some other species of salmon (it doesn’t appear to harm chum, for example) there is speculation that the impacts could be more widespread.
“We just have no idea,” he says. “All these questions are just totally wide open because there’s just no information out there.”
Given the potential ramifications, scientists may now begin to search for similar impacts among often vulnerable species such as stream invertebrates and amphibians, but it is also clear that humans are sometimes exposed to similar 6-PPD compounds. “We know the 6-PPD parent compound [has been documented] in house dust,” Kolodziej offers as an example. It also occurs in recycled tires that are used for crumb rubber playing fields and gym mats. “We’re generating a billion tires a year globally that need to be disposed of,” says Kolodziej. “All these things and all those recycled products likely contain some level of 6-PPD and the 6-PPD quinone as well. So, humans, I think, have a variety of exposure pathways.”
Could that endanger human health? “Again, we just have no idea,” Kolodziej says. 
What is known, however, are the implications for coho salmon. In the short term, Kolodziej hopes that the revelations in the Science paper will at least lead to more “salmon safe” tires.
“Tires need these preservative chemicals to make them last,” Kolodziej told UW News. “It’s just a question of which chemicals are a good fit for that and then carefully evaluating their safety for humans, aquatic organisms,” and other species, he says. “We’re not sure what alternative chemical we would recommend, but we do know that chemists are really smart and have many tools in their toolboxes to figure out a safer chemical alternative.”


View a video about the discovery below.

An endangered southern resident orca leaps out of the water in Puget Sound. Photo courtesy of NOAA.

Research in the time of the coronavirus

As the state’s stay-at-home order drags on, much of the work to recover Puget Sound has shifted online. Funding schedules for the state and federal Strategic Initiatives remain on track and events like the Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference are going virtual next week with presentations by video conference.
But researchers face an entirely different situation as labs are shuttered and field work is cancelled almost across the board.
Megan Dethier, director of the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories calls the situation at her lab fairly typical. Friday Harbor, known for its hands-on research among the tide pools of San Juan Island, is in “maintenance mode” as scientists work out which projects are critical and which ones can go on hold for the near future.
“Right now, we’re mostly trying to keep things from dying or crumbling,” Dethier said. On any given day, she told PSI over the phone, one scientist ventures into the office to exercise the valves on her electron microscope. Others come in to feed the captive fishes, but few are doing active research. The field study classes that have made Friday Harbor famous as a place for experiential learning have been cancelled as university courses go online.
“You just can’t do that virtually,” Dethier explains. “A quarter abroad in Rome is not the same as watching a bunch of videos about Rome.”
Dethier hopes that more field research will proceed later in the spring or summer if restrictions lift, but for now, as for most scientists, it is a good time to write papers and crunch old data.
Jenna Judge, monitoring lead for the Puget Sound Partnership says members of the Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program have been meeting to discuss ways to continue studying Puget Sound environmental conditions while staying safe and complying with the state’s social distancing mandates.
With exceptions for research deemed critical to safety or conservation needs, Judge says, most scientists at state and federal agencies and universities are not allowed to go into the field to do their studies. “We’re assuming that most field research is shut down right now,” she says. That means huge amounts of monitoring data for the spring — from herring counts to water sampling — are expected to be lost. At the same time, scientists are hoping to study what the global decrease in human activity might reveal about human pressures on the ecosystem.
The report that impacts from the virus have, temporarily at least, reduced the global carbon footprint is one dramatic example. Carbon emissions dropped by 18 percent in China between February and mid-March during the height of that country’s coronavirus lockdown and regions all over the world are reporting cleaner air.
Amy Snover, director of the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group told KIRO News, “We are seeing reduced emissions for really horrible reasons,” but she hopes that society can use this as a wakeup call “that actions that I take today will affect the impacts on you tomorrow.”
Fewer cars on the road and airplanes in the sky have also meant less noise in the environment. Seismologists have even observed a drop in vibrations on the Earth’s crust. 
One remaining question is whether the coronavirus shutdown has influenced noise in the oceans. Vessel disturbance has been a big problem for Puget Sound’s endangered southern resident orcas because it has interfered with the whales’ ability to use echolocation to hunt for scarce salmon. Could ocean noise be declining as well?
One source on this is the Orcasound hydrophone network run by orca scientist Scott Veirs. While Veirs, too, is staying at home, “We have acoustic data that continues to come in as long as those hydrophones don’t break,” he says.
Veirs suggests that now is a great time to listen to the hydrophone network that streams live sounds 24 hours a day from beneath the waters of Puget Sound. The network listens for the sounds of marine mammals such as Puget Sound’s orcas and other whales, but also captures shipping noise.
While the number of large vessels crossing Puget Sound has not decreased much during the COVID-19 crisis — the current numbers actually exceed those from just five years ago, according to the Marine Exchange — anecdotal reports from around Puget Sound suggest the number of smaller vessels may have declined. “That’s what my ears tell me, anyway,” says Veirs, “although we haven’t analyzed the data.”
If indeed small vessel activity and related noise levels have decreased, Veirs wonders how this might affect the southern residents. The orcas are not currently known to be in Puget Sound, but if they arrive, Veirs hopes scientists will be ready to analyze their behavior in this brave new environment.
“If the southern residents come back, the whales are potentially going to be in a very different situation. My gut tells me it is almost surely a good thing for the southern residents to not have all those boats out there,” Veirs says. But will there be observers out on the water to record what happens? Scientists can only hope.

PSI senior research scientist Marc Mangel.

Marc Mangel joins PSI

By Jeff Rice

How many fish are in the Salish Sea? It’s an impossible question that drives the Puget Sound Institute’s newest senior scientist Marc Mangel. 

Mangel has spent his career working on fish and fisheries issues and uses mathematical models to answer critical questions about species such as their population numbers and population health. He joins PSI this month as an affiliate professor at the University of Washington Tacoma where he will focus on a range of subjects related to species such as salmon and forage fish.

Mangel comes to PSI from the University of California, Santa Cruz where he is a Distinguished Research Professor of Mathematical Biology. For the past 30 years, he has been a leader in ocean conservation and his research has been cited by fisheries managers worldwide. He currently serves as chair of the board of directors at Fishwise and is a member of the review board of the Pacific Halibut Commission. In 2014, Mangel was a principle scientific expert in a successful lawsuit by the Australian government to stop Japanese whaling in the Antarctic. This spring, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

One of the challenges when studying the ocean — and fish in particular, Mangel says — is getting enough good field data. “We barely know how many fish we take out,” he says of fisheries catch reports and other sources. Numbers for actual fish populations are even more complicated, requiring more opaque ecological studies and plenty of math. In Puget Sound, for example, Mangel has been working with biologists on Protection Island to enlist “seabirds as samplers” as part of a long-term study counting the numbers of forage fish consumed as prey by birds such as rhinoceros auklets. “Based on that, we can infer the abundance of prey species,” he says. Other collaborations include ongoing studies of steelhead numbers with scientists at the Manchester Environmental Laboratory in Manchester, Washington.

Mangel has been a regular contributor to PSI as a visiting scholar since 2013 when he co-chaired PSI’s Forage Fish Study Group, with PSI Lead Ecosystem Ecologist Tessa Francis. The study group produced a set of research and management recommendations for Puget Sound’s forage fish species, including Pacific herring. Last year, Mangel and Francis were co-authors on a paper, led by University of Bergen student Gabriella Ljungström, investigating the tradeoffs faced by migrating herring between feeding, survival, and reproduction, using Puget Sound as a case study (Ljungström et al. 2018).

Read a Q & A with Marc Mangel


Other related articles:

Read a Q&A with Marc Mangel

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U.S. EPA commits funding to support PSI’s role in Puget Sound science

The Puget Sound Institute and Puget Sound Partnership are located at the Center for Urban Waters on the eastern shore of Tacoma's Thea Foss Waterway.
The Puget Sound Institute and Puget Sound Partnership are located at the Center for Urban Waters on the eastern shore of Tacoma’s Thea Foss Waterway.

A collaboration between the University of Washington Puget Sound Institute (PSI), Oregon State University, Northern Economics, and the Puget Sound Partnership has been selected by the Environmental Protection Agency to coordinate the region’s science program. The four-year cooperative agreement provides an anticipated $7.25 million to create and communicate timely and policy-relevant science to support and enhance new recovery strategies. The collaboration also strengthens monitoring and modeling programs and identifies and promotes regional science priorities.
The Puget Sound Partnership will receive and administer the primary award and other partners will receive sub-awards from PSP over the four-year project period.
“As Puget Sound continues to feel the impacts from a changing climate and a rapidly growing population, it is more important than ever that policy decisions are grounded in solid and accessible science” said PSI Director Joel Baker. “We will need the creativity and energy of the region’s diverse science community to meet the challenges of restoring and protecting Puget Sound.”
In addition to contributing targeted technical support, this award provides PSI and its partners the capacity to explore emerging issues, to combine thinking across topics, and to connect with other regional, national, and international ecosystem recovery efforts.
The new funding continues work already underway at PSI to connect the dots between scientific findings around the region. “The goal is to combine big picture, ecosystem-scale thinking with practical solutions,” Baker said. “Given the thousands of scientists and practitioners working to understand the health of Puget Sound, synthesis and analysis is a critical need.”
A strong area of focus will include the region’s newly established Implementation Strategies, a series of inter-agency recovery plans funded by the EPA’s National Estuary Program. The Puget Sound Partnership will help to integrate these strategies across a broad range of agencies and other groups.
The grant also expands the role of social science and communications. Partnerships with Oregon State University and Northern Economics will support an improved understanding of how humans interact and engage with the Puget Sound ecosystem. Social scientists with those organizations will work closely with Puget Sound’s Local Integrating Organizations to develop cost-benefit frameworks and other decision-making tools. Funding for communication supports continued development of informative science articles in PSI’s Salish Sea Currents magazine series on the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound.
Funding for the collaboration begins in October 2017 and is slated to run through 2021.
The Puget Sound Institute was established at the University of Washington Tacoma in 2010 to identify and catalyze the science driving Puget Sound and Salish Sea ecosystem recovery. Since its founding, PSI has advanced our understanding of the region through synthesis, original research and communication in support of state and federal agencies, tribes and other organizations working in the region.

U.S. EPA commits funding to support PSI’s role in Puget Sound science

The Puget Sound Institute and Puget Sound Partnership are located at the Center for Urban Waters on the eastern shore of Tacoma's Thea Foss Waterway.
The Puget Sound Institute and Puget Sound Partnership are located at the Center for Urban Waters on the eastern shore of Tacoma’s Thea Foss Waterway.

A collaboration between the University of Washington Puget Sound Institute (PSI), Oregon State University, Northern Economics, and the Puget Sound Partnership has been selected by the Environmental Protection Agency to coordinate the region’s science program. The four-year cooperative agreement provides an anticipated $7.25 million to create and communicate timely and policy-relevant science to support and enhance new recovery strategies. The collaboration also strengthens monitoring and modeling programs and identifies and promotes regional science priorities.
The Puget Sound Partnership will receive and administer the primary award and other partners will receive sub-awards from PSP over the four-year project period.
“As Puget Sound continues to feel the impacts from a changing climate and a rapidly growing population, it is more important than ever that policy decisions are grounded in solid and accessible science” said PSI Director Joel Baker. “We will need the creativity and energy of the region’s diverse science community to meet the challenges of restoring and protecting Puget Sound.”
In addition to contributing targeted technical support, this award provides PSI and its partners the capacity to explore emerging issues, to combine thinking across topics, and to connect with other regional, national, and international ecosystem recovery efforts.
The new funding continues work already underway at PSI to connect the dots between scientific findings around the region. “The goal is to combine big picture, ecosystem-scale thinking with practical solutions,” Baker said. “Given the thousands of scientists and practitioners working to understand the health of Puget Sound, synthesis and analysis is a critical need.”
A strong area of focus will include the region’s newly established Implementation Strategies, a series of inter-agency recovery plans funded by the EPA’s National Estuary Program. The Puget Sound Partnership will help to integrate these strategies across a broad range of agencies and other groups.
The grant also expands the role of social science and communications. Partnerships with Oregon State University and Northern Economics will support an improved understanding of how humans interact and engage with the Puget Sound ecosystem. Social scientists with those organizations will work closely with Puget Sound’s Local Integrating Organizations to develop cost-benefit frameworks and other decision-making tools. Funding for communication supports continued development of informative science articles in PSI’s Salish Sea Currents magazine series on the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound.
Funding for the collaboration begins in October 2017 and is slated to run through 2021.
The Puget Sound Institute was established at the University of Washington Tacoma in 2010 to identify and catalyze the science driving Puget Sound and Salish Sea ecosystem recovery. Since its founding, PSI has advanced our understanding of the region through synthesis, original research and communication in support of state and federal agencies, tribes and other organizations working in the region.

Wide angle view of commuters in city

Interview: Can ’Silicon Valley North’ change the way we think about Salish Sea recovery?

South Lake Union Streetcar, August 2017. Photo: SDOT (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://www.flickr.com/photos/sdot_photos/36924152151/
South Lake Union Streetcar, August 2017. Photo: SDOT (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://www.flickr.com/photos/sdot_photos/36924152151/

By Jeff Rice, Puget Sound Institute
A strong economy driven by a world-leading technology industry is expected to draw millions of new residents to the Salish Sea region within decades. This changing population brings with it new strains on the environment but also new perspectives. Incoming residents may not see Puget Sound the same way as previous generations. Many will have different relationships to the natural world or come from other cultural backgrounds and traditions.
Technology will also play a role, not just as an economic driver, but as an influence on the way that people receive and share information. Our smartphones and digital lifestyles will have their own geography, and some say we will have to navigate and understand that virtual world as surely as we understand the real bays and inlets of Puget Sound. Given this changing landscape, can Puget Sound recovery efforts adapt and keep pace? Puget Sound Partnership Science Panel member Robert Ewing says it’s absolutely critical.
Ewing is currently a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources and is actively involved with strategic training for members of Seattle’s technology industry through the organization Pathwise, where he is Director of the group’s Fellows Program. He will be co-chairing a special panel with PSI at next year’s Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference titled “Can ‘Silicon Valley North’ change the way we think about Salish Sea recovery?” PSI spoke with Ewing earlier this year and asked him how he thinks the Puget Sound science community can reach the region’s changing population — particularly its technology sector — and why it matters.
PSI: In the broadest sense, who do we need to bring to the table?
Robert Ewing (RE): I think everybody who lives in the region is a potential constituent as well as visitors and others. I think we ought to be able to articulate the region’s importance in terms of the quality of life here, the reason that businesses locate here — the [conditions] that allow us to live in a healthy, natural environment. All those things are part of what we’re trying to accomplish and should have resonance for everybody in a sort of a civic, nonpolitical frame of mind.
PSI: How important do you think the technology sector and its economic engine are to the equation?
RE: If you really were doing some business model development and you looked at the distribution of brainpower and wealth in Puget Sound, you would quickly come to a conclusion that those are the people you should be talking to. And the management council for the [Puget Sound] Partnership is part of that community — Bill Ruckelshaus certainly was — so it’s not like there hasn’t been contact or thinking there. But if you were an objective observer looking at who lives in the Puget Sound region, you’d want to know how to deal with all those people and bring them to the table.
PSI: Do you think those folks — the Bill Gates’s and the Jeff Bezos’s — really care about the environment? Or do they care more about making money and building software?
RE: I’m doing some work with a leadership training group called Pathwise. I’m managing their fellowship program. Most of their students are Microsoft, Expedia, Gates Foundation professionals and engineers. And in dealing with them I find that most of them don’t think about the environment very much. But you don’t have to talk very long until they get quite interested.
I’ve been in a class with engineers [whose] whole world is about getting a search a nanosecond faster than Google. Just giving them a few minutes to think about where they are in the world with their family and so on can open a path to environmental discussions.
We are all so much more capable through intuition and emotion to understand the world we live in — and [to understand] that we are part of the natural world — but we don’t communicate in that way. That’s something Pathwise is trying to do and is doing pretty successfully. I’m not saying I’m an expert in these things, but I see it working.
PSI: So what should we do to bring these people in?
RE: There are a lot of people struggling with exactly how to do this. I think there’s a way of not putting all the action items within a bureaucratic framework. There are ways to think more experientially, and organically, about how to move forward. [We should] try more things. Be more open to ideas and changes. Be more adaptable. One of the reasons that I’ve wanted to be active on the science panel is I think we have to be able to answer the question you just posed. That’s going to take a collaborative effort, an open source effort if you will. This is where the brainpower of the region comes in. I mean, we have Amazon, the University and a variety of start-ups and a lot of smart people walking the streets. Collectively, I think the answer is there. We just need to figure out how to bring it all into action. My goal is to be around the people who can figure this out. And hopefully it’s younger, higher powered people with a lot of energy with some guidance from people with experience. My main goal is to try to have this dialogue go forward and find the resources we need to collectively involve the people who will give us the answer.
About Robert Ewing:
Robert Ewing was trained as an economist and holds a PhD in Wildland Resource Science. He has worked in both the private and public sectors and was Director of Timberlands Strategic Planning for Weyerhaeuser for 20 years. Before that, he was head of resource assessment and strategic planning at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. He is currently a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources and is Director of the Pathwise Fellows Program, which offers leadership training for business professionals. He is also a member of the Puget Sound Partnership Science Panel.
Related article: Urban lifestyles help to protect the Puget Sound ecosystem
See also: Land Development and Land Cover Implementation Strategy.

Wide angle view of commuters in city

Interview: Can ’Silicon Valley North’ change the way we think about Salish Sea recovery?

South Lake Union Streetcar, August 2017. Photo: SDOT (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://www.flickr.com/photos/sdot_photos/36924152151/
South Lake Union Streetcar, August 2017. Photo: SDOT (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://www.flickr.com/photos/sdot_photos/36924152151/

By Jeff Rice, Puget Sound Institute
A strong economy driven by a world-leading technology industry is expected to draw millions of new residents to the Salish Sea region within decades. This changing population brings with it new strains on the environment but also new perspectives. Incoming residents may not see Puget Sound the same way as previous generations. Many will have different relationships to the natural world or come from other cultural backgrounds and traditions.
Technology will also play a role, not just as an economic driver, but as an influence on the way that people receive and share information. Our smartphones and digital lifestyles will have their own geography, and some say we will have to navigate and understand that virtual world as surely as we understand the real bays and inlets of Puget Sound. Given this changing landscape, can Puget Sound recovery efforts adapt and keep pace? Puget Sound Partnership Science Panel member Robert Ewing says it’s absolutely critical.
Ewing is currently a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources and is actively involved with strategic training for members of Seattle’s technology industry through the organization Pathwise, where he is Director of the group’s Fellows Program. He will be co-chairing a special panel with PSI at next year’s Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference titled “Can ‘Silicon Valley North’ change the way we think about Salish Sea recovery?” PSI spoke with Ewing earlier this year and asked him how he thinks the Puget Sound science community can reach the region’s changing population — particularly its technology sector — and why it matters.
PSI: In the broadest sense, who do we need to bring to the table?
Robert Ewing (RE): I think everybody who lives in the region is a potential constituent as well as visitors and others. I think we ought to be able to articulate the region’s importance in terms of the quality of life here, the reason that businesses locate here — the [conditions] that allow us to live in a healthy, natural environment. All those things are part of what we’re trying to accomplish and should have resonance for everybody in a sort of a civic, nonpolitical frame of mind.
PSI: How important do you think the technology sector and its economic engine are to the equation?
RE: If you really were doing some business model development and you looked at the distribution of brainpower and wealth in Puget Sound, you would quickly come to a conclusion that those are the people you should be talking to. And the management council for the [Puget Sound] Partnership is part of that community — Bill Ruckelshaus certainly was — so it’s not like there hasn’t been contact or thinking there. But if you were an objective observer looking at who lives in the Puget Sound region, you’d want to know how to deal with all those people and bring them to the table.
PSI: Do you think those folks — the Bill Gates’s and the Jeff Bezos’s — really care about the environment? Or do they care more about making money and building software?
RE: I’m doing some work with a leadership training group called Pathwise. I’m managing their fellowship program. Most of their students are Microsoft, Expedia, Gates Foundation professionals and engineers. And in dealing with them I find that most of them don’t think about the environment very much. But you don’t have to talk very long until they get quite interested.
I’ve been in a class with engineers [whose] whole world is about getting a search a nanosecond faster than Google. Just giving them a few minutes to think about where they are in the world with their family and so on can open a path to environmental discussions.
We are all so much more capable through intuition and emotion to understand the world we live in — and [to understand] that we are part of the natural world — but we don’t communicate in that way. That’s something Pathwise is trying to do and is doing pretty successfully. I’m not saying I’m an expert in these things, but I see it working.
PSI: So what should we do to bring these people in?
RE: There are a lot of people struggling with exactly how to do this. I think there’s a way of not putting all the action items within a bureaucratic framework. There are ways to think more experientially, and organically, about how to move forward. [We should] try more things. Be more open to ideas and changes. Be more adaptable. One of the reasons that I’ve wanted to be active on the science panel is I think we have to be able to answer the question you just posed. That’s going to take a collaborative effort, an open source effort if you will. This is where the brainpower of the region comes in. I mean, we have Amazon, the University and a variety of start-ups and a lot of smart people walking the streets. Collectively, I think the answer is there. We just need to figure out how to bring it all into action. My goal is to be around the people who can figure this out. And hopefully it’s younger, higher powered people with a lot of energy with some guidance from people with experience. My main goal is to try to have this dialogue go forward and find the resources we need to collectively involve the people who will give us the answer.
About Robert Ewing:
Robert Ewing was trained as an economist and holds a PhD in Wildland Resource Science. He has worked in both the private and public sectors and was Director of Timberlands Strategic Planning for Weyerhaeuser for 20 years. Before that, he was head of resource assessment and strategic planning at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. He is currently a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources and is Director of the Pathwise Fellows Program, which offers leadership training for business professionals. He is also a member of the Puget Sound Partnership Science Panel.
Related article: Urban lifestyles help to protect the Puget Sound ecosystem
See also: Land Development and Land Cover Implementation Strategy.

Year in review: 2016

Winter sunset alpenglow on Mt Baker and the North Cascades. Copyright: LoweStock
Winter sunset alpenglow on Mt Baker and the North Cascades. Copyright: LoweStock

This year has been as busy as any we have had since our founding in 2010. As we look forward to year seven (!) of our organization, we have put together a sort of highlight reel of accomplishments.
At various points, PSI scientists worked to prioritize emerging contaminants in our waterways. We studied the health of forage fish populations, analyzed eelgrass abundance and brought together key scientific findings for Puget Sound’s marine and nearshore. 
Most recently, our team began helping to develop new state and federal Implementation Strategies that will prioritize future Puget Sound cleanup efforts (you can read more about the Implementation Strategies in the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound).
Through it all, we have kept you informed with dozens of articles in our magazine Salish Sea Currents, as well as many new papers in scientific journals. After a strong 2016, we believe that science is more vital than ever to Puget Sound recovery. We look forward to building on our accomplishments in 2017.
View some of PSI’s research and products.

New report details the broad sweep of climate change in Puget Sound

PS-SoK_2015_cover_0A new report commissioned by the Puget Sound Institute and the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound provides the most comprehensive assessment to date of the expected impacts of climate change on the Puget Sound region.
The report was produced by the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group, and is meant as an easy-to-read summary that covers topics such as increasing landslides, flooding, sea level rise, impacts on human health, agriculture and rising stream temperatures for salmon. Partners in the report include NOAA, The Nature Conservancy, the Puget Sound Partnership, the WWU Huxley Spatial Institute and others including dozens of contributing scientists. Major funding for the report was provided by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Download: “State of Knowledge: Climate Change in Puget Sound” 
You can also read highlights from the report in a three-part series from Puget Sound Institute senior writer Chris Dunagan. This week’s story covers the potential increase in landslides, something of special concern during the winter rainy season. Read more