Murres, a common seabird, look a little like flying penguins. These stout, tuxedo-styled birds dive and swim in the ocean to eat small fish and then fly back to islands or coastal cliffs where they nest in large colonies. But their hardy physiques disguise how vulnerable these birds are to changing ocean conditions.

A ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý citizen science program — which trains coastal residents to search local beaches and document dead birds — has contributed to a new study, led by federal scientists, documenting the devastating effect of warming waters on  in Alaska.

In 2020, participants of the UW-led Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, or , and other observers first identified the massive mortality event affecting common murres along the West Coast and Alaska. That study documented 62,000 carcasses in a single year, mostly in Alaska. In some places, beachings were more than 1,000 times normal rates. But the 2020 study did not estimate the total size of the die-off after the 2014-16 marine heat wave known as “the blob.”

In this , published Dec. 12 in Science, a team led by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service analyzed years of colony-based surveys to estimate total mortality and later impacts. The analysis of 13 colonies surveyed between 2008 and 2022 finds that colony size in the Gulf of Alaska, east of the Alaska Peninsula, dropped by half after the marine heat wave. In colonies along the eastern Bering Sea, west of the peninsula, the decline was even steeper, at 75% loss.

The study led by , a wildlife biologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, estimates that 4 million Alaska common murres died in total, about half the total population. No recovery has yet been seen, the authors write.

“This study shows clear and surprisingly long-lasting impacts of a marine heat wave on a top marine predator species,” said , a UW professor of aquatic and fishery sciences and of biology, who was a co-author on both the 2020 paper and the new study. “Importantly, the effect of the heat wave wasn’t via thermal stress on the birds, but rather shifts in the food web leaving murres suddenly and fatally without enough food.”

The “warm blob” was an unusually warm and long-lasting patch of surface water in the northeast Pacific Ocean from late 2014 through 2016, affecting weather and coastal marine ecosystems from California to Alaska. As ocean productivity decreased, it affected food supply for top predators including seabirds, marine mammals and commercially important fish. Based on the condition of the murre carcasses, authors of the 2020 study concluded that the most likely cause of the mass mortality event was starvation.

Before this marine heat wave, about a quarter of the world’s population, or about 8 million common murres, lived in Alaska. Authors estimate the population is now about half that size. While common murre populations have fluctuated before, the authors note the Alaska population has not recovered from this event like it did after previous, smaller die-offs.

While the “warm blob” appears to have been the most intense marine heat wave yet, persistent, warm conditions are becoming more common under climate change. A 2023 study led by the UW, including many of the same authors, showed that a 1 degree Celsius increase in sea surface temperature for more than six months results in multiple seabird mass mortality events.

“Whether the warming comes from a heat wave, El Niño, Arctic sea ice loss or other forces, the message is clear: Warmer water means massive ecosystem change and widespread impacts on seabirds,” Parrish said. “The frequency and intensity of marine bird mortality events is ticking up in lockstep with ocean warming.”

“We may now be at a tipping point of ecosystem rearrangement where recovery back to pre-die-off abundance is not possible.”

Other co-authors are and at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service offices in Alaska; , a former federal scientist now with the World Puffin Congress in Port Townsend; and at Tern Again Consulting in Homer.

For more information, contact Parrish at jparrish@uw.edu and Renner at heather_renner@fws.gov. Note: Parrish is currently attending a meeting in Washington, D.C. 

Seabirds, from cormorants to puffins, spend most of their lives at sea. Beloved by birdwatchers, these animals can be hard to study because they spend so much time far from shore.

New research led by the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý uses data collected by coastal residents along beaches from central California to Alaska to understand how seabirds have fared in recent decades. The , published July 6 in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, shows that persistent marine heat waves lead to massive seabird die-offs months later.

“This is truly a global data set that asked a global-sized question: Does a warming world significantly impact marine birds, among the top predators in the nearshore marine environment?” said co-author , a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the UW and executive director of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, known as .

“We find a dramatic delayed effect,” she said. “A warmer ocean, and certainly a suddenly warmer ocean as happens during an El Niño or a marine heat wave, will result in the death of hundreds of thousands to millions of marine birds within one to 6 months of the temperature increase.”

Marine heat waves have only recently gained attention. They include the unusually warm ocean surface off the Pacific Northwest nicknamed “” that persisted from 2014-2016, as well as prolonged El Niño events and warmer oceans in Alaska associated with retreating sea ice.

The UW team’s previous research linked recent ocean warming to individual die-offs among seabirds, including common murres, Cassin’s auklets and . This study takes a broader approach.

“Rather than track the specific numbers of any one species, this study measures the magnitude of mortality events, regardless of seabird species, above long-term normal,” Parrish said. “We asked: What rate are carcasses washing in, over what portion of coastline, and for how many months? Larger-magnitude events are those that push up all these measures.”

The study used surveys of beach-cast birds from 1993 to 2021 between central California and Alaska. Truly massive mortality events, with death tolls most likely exceeding a quarter million birds, occurred roughly once per decade. But between 2014 and 2019, five events met this mortality threshold.

“This is unprecedented. This type of massive die-off can be compared to a catastrophic storm that we would usually expect once per decade; they happen, causing massive damage, but usually there is enough time for areas to recover,” said lead author Timothy Jones, a UW research scientist in aquatic and fishery sciences. “From 2014 to 2019, the die-offs were not only some of the largest ever documented, but they kept happening year after year — like a catastrophic storm hitting without fail every year.”

Analysis shows that these extraordinary die-offs were statistically linked to persistently warmer conditions in the Northeast Pacific in the preceding months. Some birds, including murres, puffins, auklets and shearwaters, suffered much more than others.

The study included more than 90,000 surveys of 106 seabird species on more than 1,000 beaches, collected by four citizen science projects. The largest area was covered by the UW-based COASST program, spanning northern California to Alaska. Additional data came from and , both in central California, and the , in Canada. These organizations train participants to search local beaches for dead birds and submit their findings.

Additional data for remote northwest Alaska beaches came from community members’ reports to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Alaska Sea Grant.

The data show that carcasses began to wash up a few months after the warming began and followed a roughly three-year pattern. The exact cause of each die-off is different, but all are related to warming. Warmer water can promote harmful algal blooms and increase the likelihood of disease outbreaks, both of which provoked seabird mortality events during the study period. Most notably, prolonged ocean warming changed the type, abundance and nutritional value of seabirds’ prey, leading to widespread starvation, the authors said.

“With this intensity of warming, like the looming El Niño in the Pacific or the current marine heatwave in the North Atlantic, we are facing a new ocean,” Parrish said. “One with fewer birds.”

Other co-authors on the study are and at the UW, as well as and , both former science coordinators with COASST.

Additional co-authors are with the Aleut Community of St. Paul in Alaska; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; Bird Studies Canada; the U.S. National Park Service; Moss Landing Marine Laboratories; NOAA, Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary; and the Greater Farallones Association. Thousands of coastal residents and undergraduate interns also contributed to collecting the data.

For more information, contact Parrish at jparrish@uw.edu.

As their name suggests, know how to catch a breeze. Using a stiff, translucent sail propped an inch above the surface of the ocean, these teacup-sized organisms skim along the water dangling a fringe of delicate purple tentacles just below the surface to capture zooplankton and larval fish as they travel.

At the mercy of the wind, these jellies can wash ashore and strand — sometimes numbering in the trillions — on beaches around the world, including up and down the U.S. West Coast. And while these mass stranding events are hard to miss, very little actually is known about how or why they happen.

Now, thanks to 20 years of observations from thousands of citizen scientists, ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý researchers have discovered distinct patterns in the mass strandings of by-the-wind sailors, also called Velella velella. Specifically, large strandings happened simultaneously from the northwest tip of Washington south to the Mendocino coast in California, and in years when winters were warmer than usual. The were published March 18 in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

“Citizen scientists have collected the largest and longest dataset on mass strandings of this jelly in the world,” said senior author , a professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and executive director of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, known as .

“This paper contributes to fundamental scientific knowledge of this organism in a way that traditional ‘mainstream’ marine science has been unable to do. Thousands of trained, dedicated observers are better than any satellite because they know their beach and can alert us if something is weird or unusual.”

COASST’s citizen scientists are trained to search for and identify carcasses of marine birds that have washed ashore at sites from northern California to the Arctic Circle. Participants are asked to record and submit photos of anything strange or different they see on their stretch of beach.

In 2019, program managers received an email from COASSTers in Oregon who had expected to see Velella on their beach based on past observations, but hadn’t. That prompted COASST scientists to comb the database — 23,265 surveys in total — to see if others had taken note of these jellies over the years. This “data-mining” returned 465 reports of Velella littering 293 beaches, often in more than one year.

“On the water, Velella are beautiful, fragile creatures. When they wash ashore, these jellies quickly dry to the consistency of potato chips. During a mass stranding it’s like walking on a crunchy carpet,” Parrish said. “So of course, COASSTers reported in. Suddenly, we realized we had the largest dataset about Velella velella anywhere in the world.”

In analyzing the citizen science observations, UW researchers discovered that most by-the-wind sailors wash ashore on West Coast beaches during the spring, when the winds shift and push the organisms to shore. However, their analysis also revealed truly massive stranding events in 2003-2005 and again in 2015-2019. During the later years, jelly carcasses covered more than 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) of continuous coastline, all within a single two-week window between mid-March to mid-April.

The second period corresponds with the timing of the long-lasting marine heat wave known as “the blob” — also to blame for the largest seabird die-off of common murres, as well as mass die-offs of Cassin’s auklets, sea lions and baleen whales.

The researchers hypothesized that warmer winters during these years allowed for populations of by-the-wind sailors to spike in the open ocean. Then, when the winds shifted in the spring, massive numbers of the jellies were swept to shore and stranded.

Put another way — and though many ultimately end up dying on beaches — the jellies appear to be “winners” during warmer periods, because they can amass more numbers in the ocean. There’s some evidence that warmer-than-average winters are also calmer and less wavy in the open ocean, allowing increasingly large Velella aggregations to persist, Parrish explained.

“This paper and our data really do suggest that in a warming world, we’re going to have more of these organisms — that is, the ecosystem itself is tipping in the direction of these jellies because they win in warmer conditions,” Parrish said. “A changing climate creates new winners and losers in every ecosystem. What’s scary is that we’re actually documenting that change.”

As warmer winters are expected to increase with climate change, these findings could have clear implications for this jelly population, as well as for the fish they eat and the beaches where they strand and die.

The paper’s lead author is , a UW postdoctoral researcher in aquatic and fishery sciences. , now with the NOAA Office of Marine Debris, is a co-author.

This research was funded by Washington Sea Grant and National Science Foundation.

For more information, contact Parrish at jparrish@uw.edu.

At our nation’s research universities, including the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý, underrepresented minorities make up less than 6% of the faculty across non-medical science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. This severe underrepresentation among faculty has persisted for decades and comes, in part, from a lack of diversity among the doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars in these fields who elect to pursue faculty positions.

In turn, the lack of diverse science and engineering faculty discourages students of color from pursuing degrees in these fields — a negative feedback loop that has proven difficult to break.

With the help of new grants from the National Science Foundation and the Washington Research Foundation, UW is attempting to address this problem by combining efforts across an alliance of top research universities.

“The time has come for change,” said UW Provost Mark Richards. “Not years from now, but in the immediate future.”

The newly formed Research University Alliance joins UW with eight other leading research institutions, including University of California, Berkeley; California Institute of Technology; University of California, Los Angeles; Stanford University; University of Michigan; Harvard University; Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Texas at Austin.

Based on a well-tested precursor, the California Alliance, the larger Research University Alliance is working at many levels to redefine how doctoral students are mentored into the postdoctoral ranks, and how postdoctoral scholars are hired and mentored into faculty positions.

The Research University Alliance funds exchange visits across all of the nine partnering institutions, matching students and postdocs with faculty hosts in their area of research. Visits allow these early career scientists to share their work and ideas, learn new techniques and approaches, engage in collaborative discussions and innovation, and broaden their career opportunities. Annual retreats bringing all exchange participants together and professional development programming are also major components of the work of the alliance.

A key component of this effort — connecting underrepresented minority senior doctoral students with postdoctoral opportunities across the alliance — will be led by UW, under the co-direction of College of Environment Associate Dean Julia Parrish, Graduate School Dean Joy Williamson-Lott and Provost Richards.

The statistics are concerning. Just 8.5% of doctoral students in these science and engineering departments identified as underrepresented minorities, significantly lower than the demographics of the U.S. But these numbers are halved at the postdoc and faculty levels — to just 3.9% of postdoctoral researchers and faculty.

“That loss is a crucial starting point,” Parrish said.

Unlike the hiring process for faculty, which usually involves advertising open positions, the hiring of postdoctoral researchers has relied more on word-of-mouth networks among academics.

“Put simply, we are looking to establish a new network at the graduate and postdoc level that doesn’t depend on who you already know or are connected to, but is instead dependent on the excellent, interesting, edgy work that they do,” said Parrish. This new system will vastly improve upon the old networks.

As part of the alliance, the UW is creating a web portal for postdocs and senior graduate students to showcase their work, and for participating university partners to post postdoctoral positions.

“In many fields, postdocs are vital positions to hold before becoming faculty or before becoming an entrepreneur,” said Williamson-Lott. “It’s an incredibly important space. And so we want to force that space open to allow more people to be able to enter it, and compete in it, and then benefit from it.”

The Washington Research Foundation is dedicated to the diversification of science, Richards said, and the Washington state-based organization’s funding, $50,000 per year for the next four years, will be paired with the NSF/AGEP funds and funds from the Colleges of Engineering, Arts & Sciences, and Environment, and the Applied Physics Laboratory to allow UW to join with other institutions and meet the goal to attract more diverse candidates to the postdoc ranks and the professoriate.

“I’m glad to be part of an institution that values diversity, pursues it aggressively and refuses to stand still, and wants to be part of the solution rather than the problem,” Williamson-Lott said. “It speaks very highly for our institution to participate in this.”

For more information, contact Parrish at jparrish@uw.edu.

The common murre is a self-sufficient, resilient bird.

Though the seabird must eat about half of its body weight in prey each day, common murres are experts at catching the small “forage fish” they need to survive. Herring, sardines, anchovies and even juvenile salmon are no match for a hungry murre.

So when nearly one million common murres died at sea and washed ashore from California to Alaska in 2015 and 2016, it was unprecedented — both for murres, and across all bird species worldwide. Scientists from the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý, the U.S. Geological Survey and others blame an unexpected squeeze on the ecosystem’s food supply, brought on by a severe and long-lasting marine heat wave known as “the blob.”

Their were published Jan. 15 in the journal PLOS ONE.

“Think of it as a run on the grocery stores at the same time that the delivery trucks to the stores stopped coming so often,” explained second author , a UW professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “We believe that the smoking gun for common murres — beyond the marine heat wave itself — was an ecosystem squeeze: fewer forage fish and smaller prey in general, at the same time that competition from big fish predators like walleye, pollock and Pacific cod greatly increased.”

nest in colonies along cliffs and rocky ledges overlooking the ocean. The adult birds, about one foot in length, are mostly black with white bellies, and can dive more than two football fields below the ocean’s surface in search of prey.

Warmer surface water temperatures off the Pacific coast — a phenomenon known as “the blob” — first occurred in the fall and winter of 2013, and persisted through 2014 and 2015. Warming increased with the arrival of a powerful El Niño in 2015-2016. A number of other species experienced mass die-offs during this period, including , Cassin’s auklets, sea lions and baleen whales. But the common murre die-off was by far the largest any way you measure it.

From May 2015 to April 2016, about 62,000 murre carcasses were found on beaches from central California north through Alaska. Citizen scientists in Alaska monitoring long-term sites counted numbers that reached 1,000 times more than normal for their beaches. Scientists estimate that the actual number of deaths was likely close to one million, since only a fraction of birds that die will wash to shore, and only a fraction of those will be in places that people can access.

Many of the birds that died were breeding-age adults. With massive shifts in food availability, murre breeding colonies across the entire region failed to produce chicks for the years during and after the marine heat wave event, the authors found.

“The magnitude and scale of this failure has no precedent,” said lead author , a research biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center and an affiliate professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “It was astonishing and alarming, and a red-flag warning about the tremendous impact sustained ocean warming can have on the marine ecosystem.”

From a review of fisheries studies conducted during the heat wave period, the research team concluded that persistent warm ocean temperatures associated with “the blob” increased the metabolism of cold-blooded organisms from zooplankton and small forage fish up through larger predatory fish like salmon and pollock. With predatory fish eating more than usual, the demand for food at the top of the food chain was unsustainable. As a result, the once-plentiful schools of forage fish that murres rely on became harder to find.

“Food demands of large commercial groundfish like cod, pollock, halibut and hake were predicted to increase dramatically with the level of warming observed with the blob, and since they eat many of the same prey as murres, this competition likely compounded the food supply problem for murres, leading to mass mortality events from starvation,” Piatt said.

As the largest mass die-off of seabirds in recorded history, the common murre event may help explain the other die-offs that occurred during the northeast Pacific marine heat wave, and also serve as a warning for what could happen during future marine heat waves, the authors said.

UW scientists recently identified forming off the Washington coast and up into the Gulf of Alaska.

“All of this — as with the Cassin’s auklet mass mortality and the tufted puffin mass mortality — demonstrates that a warmer ocean world is a very different environment and a very different coastal ecosystem for many marine species,” said Parrish, who is also the executive director of the , known as COASST. “Seabirds, as highly visible members of that system, are bellwethers of that change.”

Additional UW co-authors are Timothy Jones, Hillary Burgess and Jackie Lindsey. Other study co-authors are from U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Farallon Institute, International Bird Rescue, Humboldt State University, National Park Service, NOAA Fisheries, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, NOAA Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary and Point Blue Conservation Science.

This research was funded by the USGS Ecosystems Mission Area, the North Pacific Research Board, The National Science Foundation and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

For more information, contact Parrish at jparrish@uw.edu and Piatt at piattjf@gmail.com.

The six UW faculty members who have been named as fellows are:

, professor emeritus in the School of Oceanography, is honored for his continuing work on the ecology of the plankton, the very small algae and animals that float with the currents. His career has focused on how plankton interact with light, temperature, oxygen, bound nitrogen, iron and other nutrients. At sea, Banse worked in the Baltic, the North Sea and Puget Sound, but especially the Arabian Sea. In other work, using an early color global satellite, he investigated the offshore seasonality of phytoplankton chlorophyll. With former students he also studied bottom-living polychaetous annelid worms and published identification keys for the nearly 500 species of these worms found between Oregon and southeast Alaska, between the shore and about 200 meters depth. Banse joined the UW faculty in 1960. The 90-year-old researcher became emeritus in 1995 and remains scientifically active.

, a professor of health metrics sciences and director of the at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, was selected for his research resolving infectious diseases in space and time in order to expose inequalities in health metrics and improve intervention strategies. He currently leads an international collaboration of researchers from a wide variety of academic disciplines to create even better maps of infectious disease. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed articles and other contributions, including two major, in-depth research papers published independently. His published works are cited more than 18,000 times each year, leading to more than 82,000 lifetime citations. With the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Hay has embarked on a project to expand this research to a much wider range of diseases to ultimately harmonize this mapping with the Global Burden of Disease Study, IHME’s signature project.

, a professor of microbiology, studies Kaposi’s Sarcoma Herpesvirus, a virus that alters the cells lining blood and lymphatic vessels. Those changes can cause Kaposi’s Sarcoma, a form of cancer that commonly affects AIDS patients worldwide and people in parts of central Africa. Lagunoff’s lab has studied how the Kaposi’s Sarcoma Herpesvirus interferes with endothelial cell signaling, gene expression and metabolism to promote the formation of tumors containing numerous blood vessels. His lab used RNA-sequencing, metabolomics, proteomics and other techniques to determine global changes in host-cell gene expression and signaling. This information has helped to identify key cellular pathways induced by the virus. His team is studying how the virus alters the host cell metabolism to mimic cancer cell metabolism, and is searching for novel therapeutic targets for Kaposi’s Sarcoma.

, a professor of pathology and genome sciences and an investigator at the , studies DNA damage and repair mechanisms, genome instability, and its role in cancer and other conditions. He is noted for his work on Werner, Bloom and Rothman-Thomson syndromes. These inherited disorders cause distinctive physical characteristics, such as premature aging in Werner’s, and predispose to cancer. Monnat’s team explores how the loss of key proteins important to DNA metabolism may underlie these rare syndromes. Aberrant expression of those proteins may be common in some adult cancers and affect response to chemotherapy. Monnat and his group use certain genome engineering techniques to try to correct disease-causing mutations in patient-derived stem cells. His lab has also identified “safe-harbor sites” in the human genome where new genetic elements might be inserted without disrupting the expression of nearby genes.

, professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and the Department of Biology, is elected for her work in marine ecology. Her research focuses on seabird ecology, marine conservation and public science. A committed advocate of citizen science, she founded and directs the , which for two decades has enlisted coastal residents from California to Alaska to monitor West Coast beaches for dead birds and marine debris. Parrish spoke at the White House in 2013 about public engagement in science and scientific literacy. She holds the Lowell A. and Frankie L. Wakefield endowed professorship, and is associate dean for academic affairs in the UW College of the Environment.

, a professor of Earth and space sciences, is honored for his work in glaciology and climate science. Steig uses ice cores and other records to study climate variability over thousands of years. He works on the climate history and dynamics of polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers, and develops new tools to extract the chemical clues in samples of ice and other material. Steig was among the leaders of a project to drill the first deep ice core at South Pole, and was on the team that drilled a 2-mile-deep ice core in West Antarctica. His recent research has focused on the links between large-scale climate conditions and changes in West Antarctica, where glaciers are rapidly retreating. In addition to his research and teaching, he is committed to fostering greater public understanding of climate change, and is a founding contributor to RealClimate.org.

In addition, , an investigator at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and an affiliate professor of genome sciences at the UW, was selected for his research on genetic conflict.

One of the most established hands-on, outdoor citizen science projects is the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý-based , COASST, which trains beachgoers along the West Coast, from California to Alaska, to monitor their local beach for dead birds.

With about 4,500 participants in its 21-year history and roughly 800 active participants today, COASST’s long-term success is now the subject of scientific study in its own right. What makes people join citizen science projects, and what motivates people to stick with them over years?

A UW-led published in the July issue of explores the interests and identities of participants who join and remain active in citizen science. Results could help other science projects aiming to harness the power of large teams.

Previous research led by the UW has shown that people who join online-based citizen science projects generally try it just once, and fewer than 1 in 10 remain active past one year. The rates for hands-on, in-person efforts are much higher: COASST, for example, has 54% of participants still active one year after joining.

But what separates those who stay from those who go? Years of responses to surveys from the COASST team’s recruitment and engagement efforts provide a unique window on citizen science.

“I came to the UW to analyze a gold mine of social science datasets accumulated by COASST,” said social scientist and lead author , a postdoctoral researcher in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences.  “Over a four year period, hundreds of participants responded to survey questions about why they were joining – or continuing – with the program. This represents an unparalleled opportunity.”

She analyzed answers to two freeform questions posed to project participants: “Why did you join COASST?” and “Why do you continue to be involved in COASST?” Some 310 new participants chose to answer the questions during their initial training. Another 623 seasoned participants, who had been involved for more than one year, completed a mail-in survey.

“People’s memory can be a bit tricky,” He said. “You may think that two or five years ago you had a particular motivation, but is that really so? With this study we can definitively answer the motivation question at two different times: at the moment of joining the program, just after they finish being trained, and once they have spent at least a year on the beach collecting monthly data.”

The analysis shows that new participants wanted to be outdoors on the beach, learning about birds. Many listed their scientific degrees, previous occupations and birding expertise. But responses from longer-term contributors displayed a slightly different pattern: Although birds and beach remained dominant interests, seasoned volunteers were more likely to mention interests such as the desire to monitor and observe their beach, help in making scientific discoveries, and the importance of project data and results for environmental conservation. Moreover, their “science identity” became focused on their data-collection team and the project collective, rather than on their personal traits.

One important finding, He said, was the value of place. Volunteers often mentioned the importance of continuing to visit their beach even if they hadn’t found any birds washed ashore after several months.

“We thought they would talk a lot about birds, and they did, but they actually talked more about the coastal environment, the beach and the ocean,” He said. “Place was either equally important or even more important to them than birds.”

Another surprising finding is the degree to which participants consider citizen science to be a social activity.  Of the five tasks volunteers listed as most important in defining their work for COASST, two – “communicating project results” and “recruiting others to participate” – were social.  The other three tasks were “collect data,” “make measurements” and “enter data.”

“Activities that help connect family members and friends, and provide opportunities to meet new people who share similar interests, can also be scientific in nature,” He said.  “COASST fulfills both science and social interests for coastal residents.”

The study’s conclusions based on the surveys included some take-home messages for organizers of hands-on citizen science efforts:

• Long-term participants tend to be motivated by a project’s mission and goals, and successful programs communicate scientific findings back to participants so that they can see their individual contribution as part of the big picture of project results.
• Experienced participants focus on where they conduct their project activities, indicating that sense of place is important to volunteers.
• Both new and long-term participants focused on their social interactions as a central part of project activities, suggesting that successful hands-on, citizen science combines high-quality scientific activity with building and maintaining social relationships.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Advancing Informal STEM Learning program and Washington Sea Grant’s support for COASST. Other authors on the paper were , a UW professor of aquatic and fishery sciences and director of COASST, , a UW postdoctoral researcher in aquatic and fishery sciences, and , an associate professor at Oregon State University.

Parrish is lead author, with co-authors including Jones and He, of another , published in February in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, exploring the relationship between participant retention over the long term and accuracy of data collection, which also revealed the importance of social networks in citizen science. That analysis looked at 54 citizen science projects, including COASST, to pinpoint the characteristics of and determine how citizen science projects can be designed for maximum success and reach.

“Both of these papers indicate that attention to social and scientific aspects of the project are likely to return the highest quality data,” said Parrish. “Attention to friends, family, community and other aspects of individual identity will make a difference in the success of our recruitment efforts.”

Other authors on the PNAS paper are at the UW,  at the University of Minnesota and at Arizona State University. That work was funded by the National Science Foundation and Washington Department and Fish and Wildlife’s support for COASST.

Parrish described the work last March at the National Academy of Sciences’ Arthur M. Sackler :

###

For more information, contact He at yrhe@uw.edu or Parrish at jparrish@uw.edu.

NSF grants: DRL-1322820, DRL-1114734

In the fall of 2014, West Coast residents witnessed a strange, unprecedented ecological event. Tens of thousands of small seabird carcasses on beaches from California to British Columbia, in what would become one of the largest bird die-offs ever recorded.

A network of more than 800 citizen scientists responded as the birds, called , turned up dead in droves along the coast. Beach walkers and local residents recorded the location and date of carcasses as they found them, entering the information into a real-time database that helped state, tribal and federal wildlife experts track the mass mortality event as it unfolded.

The efforts of these place-based data collectors — along with data on temperature, ocean circulation and the abundance of prey — have provided the first definitive answer to what killed the seabirds: starvation, brought on by shifts in ocean conditions linked to a changing climate. An international team of about 20 researchers from federal, state and provincial agencies, universities and wildlife organizations in the April 16 edition of Geophysical Research Letters.

“This paper is super important for the scientific community because it nails the causality of a major die-off, which is rare,” said senior author , professor in the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and executive director of the (COASST), one of the citizen science groups that counted the carcasses.

“When we see these mass mortality events, that’s the ecosystem saying, in big neon letters, that something is wrong. This paper can be used as definitive proof of the impacts of a warming world, and it’s a not a pretty picture,” Parrish added.

The team’s paper pinpoints starvation as the cause of death for between 250,000 and 500,000 Cassin’s auklets in late 2014 to early 2015. The birds’ main source of prey, aquatic zooplankton known as krill and copepods, was found to be smaller and less abundant than in previous years, forcing the seabirds to eat less nutritious “junk food” instead of their usual nutrient- and energy-rich prey.

Cassin’s auklets are palm-sized, stocky seabirds known for their remarkable ability to fly underwater in search of food. They are a gregarious species that nest in colonies and migrate south along the coast in early fall, after breeding.

Warmer surface water temperatures off the Pacific coast — a phenomenon known as “” — first occurred in the fall and winter of 2013, and persisted through 2014 and 2015. This event was the likely culprit for shifting the zooplankton “dinner table” toward less nutritious species, the researchers found. Energy-rich copepods thrive in colder water. When the massive marine heat wave spread along the coast, it swept in loads of smaller, less nutritious copepods typically found in warmer southern waters.

Through the summer of 2014, ocean circulation kept the blob at bay in the Pacific Northwest, creating a coastal wedge of cold water full of energy-rich food just off the coast of Oregon and Washington. But that refuge collapsed in mid-September when seasonal shifts in ocean circulation changed. As a result, Cassin’s auklets migrating south after breeding off the coast of British Columbia essentially lost their nearshore foraging habitat.

This study is the first to document the direct link between marine heatwaves and marine bird mortality events, the authors said.

“A lot of the evidence points to there being a very tangible link in the warming of the Pacific to changes in ecosystem structure that ultimately led to seabird starvation,” said lead author Timothy Jones, a UW postdoctoral researcher in aquatic and fishery sciences.

The warm “blob” of the Pacific Ocean for more than three years. After the auklet die-off, four more mass mortality events involving seabirds took place, occurring farther north each time. Murres, puffins, and most recently short-tailed shearwaters and northern fulmars in the Arctic experienced a similar fate as the auklets — as far north as the Chukchi Sea.

“The Cassin’s auklets story is really the opener of a saga of multiple seabird die-offs that are unprecedented, as far as we know,” Jones said.

The story of the auklet die-off is likely to repeat for other species under climate change, Parrish said. Researchers will continue to draw upon and learn from this example.

“This was a unique opportunity to have a window into the future,” she said. “We are getting a sense of what the largescale ecosystem — the entire North Pacific up into the Bering and Chukchi seas — might look like in the future, and where we will have winners and losers and how we might see change. In that sense, it was a tremendous natural experiment.”

The efforts of hundreds of beach walkers — many of whom survey their local beach for seabird deaths each month — combined with databases and the knowledge of scientists across many fields cracked the mystery of the Cassin’s auklets with a level of precision that is hard to replicate, the authors said. Critical to their success was the ability to collaborate and share resources.

“The big lesson here is you have to work together in the sandbox. No one on this author list has any hope of doing all that work by themselves,” Parrish said. “We had incredible luck in that citizen scientists were collecting for years the very data we needed to find the cause.”

This study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. The full list of co-authors is listed in the paper.

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For more information, contact Parrish at jparrish@uw.edu or 206-221-5787 and Jones at jonest26@uw.edu.

What if every coastal community along the entire Pacific Rim were involved in monitoring their local marine environment, and all of that data were brought together in one place? Imagine, for example, if residents in Long Beach, Washington, could submit information about seabirds they observe, then look up bird data from another coastal community in southeast Alaska to compare notes.

Think about the possibilities if new data were combined with traditional knowledge to bound climate impacts, or if local knowledge contributed to oceanography.

These are lofty goals, but a team of researchers led by the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý believes creating a network of community-based science is possible with new support from the National Science Foundation.

The grant comes from the agency’s new , which seeks to improve access to STEM education and careers by reaching more underserved populations, including the dozens of small, remote communities dotting the Oregon, Washington and Alaskan coastlines. The UW-led project is one of 37, totaling $14 million from the National Science Foundation.

“Almost everyone has a story about how the local outside environment that’s important to them is changing,” said , lead investigator and associate dean for academic affairs in the UW’s College of the Environment. “We aim to create something that is community based and community driven and shakes hands with mainstream science that we call the Coastal Almanac.”

The almanac, Parrish explained, will be two things: A physical network of people living in coastal communities — along with researchers from universities, colleges and agencies — and a digital collection of data that are curated and shared online.

“We see a future where every single coastal community has hundreds of people involved in data collection and data use, helping to make the decisions about natural resources in their backyards,” Parrish said. “The Coastal Almanac is a way of extending the discovery space and the solution space of science to include more people and ideas.”

Parrish, a fisheries professor who founded and directs the 17-year-old citizen science group (COASST), worked with at Western Washington University and at Oregon State University to submit the Coastal Almanac proposal. The National Science Foundation money will support a two-year pilot phase, with the goal of further funding.

More than 600 proposals were submitted for the prestigious INCLUDES awards, which will support both tried-and-true methods of engagement, as well as “edgy” projects that could bring big rewards if they succeed, Parrish explained.

“Our project is big and risky,” she said. “Trying to flatten the science landscape to truly involve everyone is a tough challenge. But I think UW is exactly the right place to do this, because we are an incredible powerhouse of information and expertise. We have it within us to speak with, and work with, everyone.”

During the first two years, the team will launch a Coastal Almanac website and determine the most effective ways of posting and sharing information. Hatch and Heppell will reach out to tribal nations and fishery organizations, respectively, while Parrish will focus on citizen science groups.

The UW will likely host the almanac’s central administrative hub, but Parrish said most of the activity will happen in coastal communities, as residents collect data on subjects as varied as weather, beach erosion, marine mammal sightings, invasive species and flower timing.

“In today’s quickly changing world, science needs to be a team sport,” Parrish said. “If everybody could participate in meaningful science without having to be scientists — how might we make decisions differently, as communities, as a society?”

The INCLUDES grant comes on the heels of another National Science Foundation award to the UW — Active Societal Participation In Research and Education (ASPIRE) — that will support early career researchers in the geosciences who wish to work more collaboratively with rural and/or underrepresented communities on issues that geoscience can address.

In total, the UW and its collaborators are receiving $700,000 in funding to encourage community-driven science, especially among underrepresented groups.

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For more information, contact Parrish at jparrish@uw.edu.