Humans drove wolves to extinction in Washington state around the 1930s. Thanks to conservation efforts, by about 80 years later, wolves had returned — crossing first from the Canadian border into Washington around 2008 and later entering the state from Idaho. Since then, wolf numbers in Washington have been steadily growing, raising questions about what the return of this large predator species means for ecosystems and people alike.

In northeast Washington, where wolves have recovered most successfully, researchers from the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife tracked one of their primary prey — white-tailed deer — in part to see what impact wolf packs are having on deer populations. The answer? So far, wolves aren’t having as much of an impact on deer as other factors.

In a published June 18 in Ecological Applications, the team reports that the biggest factors shaping white-tailed deer populations in northeast Washington are the quality of habitat available and a different, long-established large predator in the state: the cougar, also known as the mountain lion or puma. Wolves were a distant third in their impact.

“A big take-away from this study is that wolves are not returning to empty landscapes. These are places with humans and other carnivore species, like cougars, which will affect the impact that wolves can have,” said lead author , who conducted this research for her UW doctoral degree as part of the . “This area has a relatively high human footprint compared to other areas where wolves have been studied. These are not national parks or dense, old-growth forests. They are areas with active logging, farming, ranching and towns. Our findings show that these factors are likely limiting the impact of wolves on one of their primary food sources.”

It’s not that wolves aren’t preying on white-tailed deer. According to the study, they are, just not enough to take a large bite out of the population as a whole.

White-tailed deer are widespread east of the Cascades. The state’s highest-density population of this species lies within the study area, which includes farmland and timber forests in parts of Stevens and Pend Oreille counties in northeast Washington. For the study, researchers radio-collared 280 white-tailed deer, 14 wolves, 50 cougars, 28 coyotes and 33 bobcats from 2016 to 2021. At the time of collaring, the researchers also noted vital statistics, including body condition, age and whether females were pregnant. When collared animals died, the team conducted a mortality investigation, if possible, and attempted to determine the cause of death.

The team, which also includes researchers with Washington State University and the Spokane Tribe of Indians, used the resulting dataset to estimate the growth rate of the white-tailed deer population over the four-year study, and to identify the major factors shaping it. The analysis determined that the white-tail population in the study area was likely stable, or slightly declining, but that wolves were not largely responsible.

The biggest factor impacting the deer population was habitat quality, including the amount of forage available for deer. For white-tailed deer, which are highly adaptable to human activity, foraging sites can range from forests and shrublands to agricultural fields. The study area includes both agricultural land and forests recently harvested for timber, both of which could provide deer with high-caloric density foraging sites, according to Ganz.

After habitat quality, the study found that predation by cougars had a smaller effect on the white-tailed population. Wolf predation had a still smaller impact. Bobcats and coyotes — both medium-sized predators — had a negligible impact on deer numbers.

“Studies like this provide valuable insights about the complexity of these systems and how managing predator and prey populations is challenging and dynamic,” said co-author Melia DeVivo, a research scientist with the WDFW. “It’s important to continue evaluating these systems to understand the impacts of management decisions. Prior to this study, one might have expected that relying solely on wolf management strategies would result in a booming deer population, when it is clearly more complex than that.”

Since their return, the number of wolves in Washington has risen steadily, reaching a minimum of 260 in 2023, according to state researchers. Four wolf packs reside in the northeast Washington Predator-Prey Project study area. The total number of wolves in the study area — about 23 — remained steady overall during the research period.

The team’s findings contrast with studies of long-established wolf populations in protected areas, like Yellowstone National Park, which show a higher impact of wolves on the population dynamics of their prey species. To the authors of this new study, those differences highlight the importance of studying wolves in a variety of habitats.

“This study reminds us that the population dynamics of predator and prey species can vary quite a bit,” said senior author , a UW associate professor of environmental and forest sciences. “Habitat quality, the species that are present and the degree of human activity all affect the impact that large predators like wolves will have. It’s critical to compare different types of sites.”

The paper is part of the Washington Predator-Prey Project, a partnership between the UW and the WDFW to investigate the impact of the wolves’ return on state ecosystems. Additional co-authors are , a UW doctoral alum in environmental and forest sciences; Lauren Satterfield, a UW doctoral student in environmental and forest sciences; biologists Brian Kertson and Benjamin Turnock with the WDFW; , a professor at WSU; Savannah Walker and Derek Abrahamson, both biologists with the Spokane Tribe of Indians; , a UW associate professor of environmental and forest sciences; and , a UW professor of environmental and forest sciences. The research was funded by WDFW, the National Science Foundation, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and the UW College of the Environment.

For more information, contact Ganz at trganz@uw.edu.

As climate change warms the planet, weather patterns are likely to shift. Even the consistency of snow — how fluffy it is, for example — could change.

, a wildlife ecologist and ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý associate professor in the School of Environmental & Forest Sciences, wants to know how these changing conditions will affect how predators hunt prey.

“When you wear snowshoes in deep snow, you stay on top of the snow. But if you take the snowshoes off, you might go in up to your waist. Certain species, such as wolves and lynx, have adapted to deep snow conditions because their feet act like snowshoes,” Prugh said. “But their prey, such as caribou and moose, are heavier and have hooves instead of paws, so they sink in more. As climate change is making things warmer and changing the amount of precipitation, it’s going to affect how deep and hard the snow is. And that’s going to affect how deep the animals are sinking into the snow. Few scientists have looked at this before.”

To answer this question, Prugh needed a snow expert. She teamed up with , a UW professor of civil and environmental engineering. Together with a group of researchers, the two measured snow properties that led to a “danger zone,” where prey would sink but predators would not. In a recent paper, the team defined .

The first step was to figure out how to measure changes in the snow that would affect animals’ ability to stay on top of the snow.

“Imagine having a snow fort — you’ve got this cave under the snow and it has a roof. And when people run on top of your snow fort, you hope it doesn’t collapse on you, right? This is what we are trying to measure: the strength of the snow to support itself against collapsing,” Lundquist said. “But snow is such a dynamic thing. It’s not even one phase; you can’t call it a solid, liquid or gas. It’s all of the above, and that makes snow really fun to study.”

The researchers used snow density as a proxy for its strength. Denser, more tightly packed snow, they reasoned, would be more likely to hold up an animal, compared to light, fluffy “powder skiing” snow.

To test this theory, the team traveled through Denali National Park and the Methow Valley via snowmobile or on cross-country skis in search of animal prints in the snow. Upon finding tracks, the researchers could then investigate the density and other properties of the surrounding snow.

Both Prugh and Lundquist agreed that one of the best parts of the collaboration was being able to learn from each other — Prugh learned to appreciate different types of snow, and Lundquist learned how to identify different animal tracks. The researchers also enjoyed working outside.

“There’s this where Calvin’s standing in front of his class holding a box of water. And he says, ‘this was a snowflake outside,'” Lundquist said. “It’s unique and exquisite, but when you bring it into the classroom, it melts. The science is outside. You cannot bring snow inside and have the same characteristics as the snow outside.”

For more information, contact Prugh at lprugh@uw.edu and Lundquist at jdlund@uw.edu.

Since their protection under the Endangered Species Act, wolf populations have been making a comeback in the continental United States. Conservationists have argued that the presence of wolves and other apex predators, so named because they have no known predators aside from people, can help keep smaller predator species in check.

New research shows that in Washington state, the presence of two apex predators — wolves and cougars — does indeed help keep populations of two smaller predators in check. But by and large the apex predators were not killing and eating the smaller predators, known as mesopredators. Instead, they drove the two mesopredator species — bobcats and coyotes — into areas with higher levels of human activity. And people were finishing the job.

The — published May 18 in the journal Science by researchers at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Spokane Tribe of Indians — reports that bobcats and coyotes were more than three times likely to die from human activity, like hunting or trapping, than from the claws and jaws of cougars and wolves.

The findings illustrate how humankind’s growing footprint is changing interactions among other species.

“When cougars and wolves moved into an area, coyotes and bobcats employed a specific strategy to avoid apex predators by moving into more human-impacted regions,” said lead author , a wildlife ecologist and UW associate professor in the School of Environmental & Forest Sciences. “That indicated to us that coyotes and bobcats likely perceived these large carnivores as a greater threat to them than people. But when we looked at causes of mortality for the mesopredators, humans were by far the largest cause of death.”

For the study, researchers used GPS collars to track the activity of 22 wolves (Canis lupus), 60 cougars (Puma concolor), 35 coyotes (Canis latrans) and 37 bobcats (Lynx rufus) across two study areas in north central and northeastern Washington from winter 2017 to summer 2022 as part of the . The study areas — which included portions of Okanagan, Stevens, Spokane, Pend Oreille and Lincoln counties — consisted of national forests; recreational areas for camping, hunting and fishing; and lands dedicated to agriculture, timber harvesting, ranching and residential use.

Tracking data indicated that, when wolves or cougars moved into their region, bobcats and coyotes would shift their movements accordingly.

“Coyotes and bobcats started using areas that had twice as much human influence compared to where they were before the large carnivores moved in,” said Prugh.

Researchers also attempted to determine the cause of death for any tracked animals that died during the study period. They discovered that areas with high human activity were far more deadly to mesopredators than those without a large human presence.

More than half of the 24 coyotes that died over the course of the study were killed by people. Some were shot after preying on livestock. Humans also killed half of the 22 bobcats that died during the study, including several that were attacking chickens.

In general, humans killed between three and four times more mesopredators in this study than wolves or cougars, both of which typically avoid areas with high levels of human activity.

In the short term, human activity poses little threat to the overall populations of bobcats and coyotes, which are two of the most widespread mesopredators in North America. Neither are endangered, and coyotes in particular are highly adaptable to the presence of people.

But not all mesopredator species are as resilient in human areas as coyotes and bobcats, said Prugh. Others reproduce more slowly or may be vulnerable in multiple ways to human activity. Rodent poisons used to keep away pests, for example, can kill fishers, another mesopredator species.

Future studies would need to investigate how mesopredators use space and resources in areas with high human activity, and what the risks of these shifts are to people.

“These are not trivial shifts in territory or space,” said Prugh. “There are real consequences.”

The findings also add a wrinkle to a working theory of wildlife-human interactions called the human shield hypothesis. Under the hypothesis, the presence of predators in a region causes prey species to move to areas with higher human activity. In Yellowstone National Park, for example, elk have at times moved near hiking trails, which wolves and other large carnivores typically avoid.

But the impact of humans in Yellowstone is typically smaller compared to other types of recreational areas or farms, grazing lands and residential developments – leaving some scientists to wonder if humans would be much of a “shield” in those areas.

“In these areas with higher levels of human activity, it was unknown whether a mesopredator would perceive the apex predator or humans as the greater threat,” said Prugh. “Here, we found that bobcats and coyotes perceived their apex predators as the greater threat, but their strategy of avoiding those large carnivores backfired by bringing them into contact with a much more effective predator: us.”

Co-authors are UW postdoctoral researcher Calum Cunningham; former UW researcher Rebecca Windell; Brian Kertson, a biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife; , a UW doctoral student in environmental and forest sciences; Savanah Walker with the Spokane Tribe of Indians; and , UW professor of environmental and forest sciences. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Australia Fulbright Program.

For more information, contact Prugh at lprugh@uw.edu.

In much of the United States, there is a twice-yearly shift in timekeeping between standard time and daylight saving time, or DST, which delays both sunrise and sunset to make mornings darker and evenings brighter. Recently, scientists, policy experts, lawmakers and citizens have debated abandoning the twice-a-year switch and adopting either year-round standard time or DST.

A team of researchers at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý — led by postdoctoral researcher Calum Cunningham and , an associate professor of quantitative wildlife sciences — have found that one of those options would sharply reduce a hazard common to much of the country: deer-vehicle collisions. In a published Nov. 2 in Current Biology, they report that adopting permanent DST in the United States would reduce deer-vehicle collisions and likely prevent an estimated 36,550 deer deaths, 33 human deaths, 2,054 human injuries and $1.19 billion in costs each year. Deer-vehicle collisions would decrease under permanent DST because skies would be brighter later into the evening.

There are an estimated 2.1 million deer-vehicle collisions in the United States each year, killing about 440 people, causing 59,000 injuries and costing upwards of $10 billion.

“Wildlife-vehicle collisions are a huge and growing problem,” said Cunningham. “There are social costs — people killed and injured — and it’s also a conservation problem as it’s one of the largest sources of human-caused mortality of wildlife.”

Cunningham, Prugh and their colleagues analyzed wildlife-vehicle collision data from 23 states. The vast majority of these were collisions involving two widespread species of deer, white-tailed deer that predominate in the eastern U.S. and mule deer, which are more common in the western U.S.

The dataset, which includes more than 1 million deer-vehicle collisions from 1994 to 2021, revealed that the risk of deer-vehicle collision depends on the overlap of both human and deer activity. Deer and related species are crepuscular, meaning they are most active around dawn and dusk. The team found that most collisions occurred in the hours between sunset and sunrise the next morning. Collisions were 14 times more frequent two hours after sunset than two hours before sunset.

The researchers found that deer-vehicle collisions peak in the fall, with nearly 10% occurring during the two-week period around the switch from DST to standard time. The shift itself causes an abrupt increase in the amount of driving after sunset, which corresponded with a 16% increase in deer-vehicle collisions in the week following the time shift.

For ungulates like deer, fall is also the “rut,” their mating season, during which their activity level increases by as much as 50%.

“We believe that this fall spike really happens due to the overlap of these two factors: the breeding season and the change from daylight saving time back to standard time,” said Prugh. “We don’t see a corresponding shift in deer-vehicle collisions in the spring during the other time change, and we believe that’s in part because spring is not a breeding season for deer.”

The patterns that Cunningham, Prugh and their colleagues found on deer-vehicle collisions allowed them to model collisions under permanent standard time and permanent DST. They estimate an increase of 73,660 deer-vehicle collisions under permanent standard time, with 66 additional human deaths and 4,140 additional injuries, and an added $2.39 billion in collision costs. Permanent DST showed the opposite trend, with a decrease of about 2.3% in deer-vehicle collisions over a full year. Both scenarios would do away with increased accidents caused specifically by the biannual time-shift and the subsequent “social jetlag” caused by out-of-sync circadian rhythms.

Vehicle collisions are a major source of human-wildlife conflict. Since human societies in modern times tend to live their lives more by clocks than the sun’s position in the sky, understanding the factors that lead to these collisions could help save lives and prevent injury, Cunningham said.

“Humans today have this ‘evening bias’ in our activity: we get up later and stay active later than what the sun is telling us to do,” said Cunningham. “As long as people are living their lives ‘by the clock,’ which animals do not, people need to be aware of risks and make adjustments where we can. If people are thinking about what they can do for wildlife and for their own lives, reducing driving during dark hours is likely to help significantly. In areas with deer, the risk of harming wildlife and yourself while driving is 14 times higher when it is dark.”

Co-authors on the paper are Tristan Nuñez, Yasmine Hentati, Ben Sullender, Catherine Breen, Taylor Ganz, Samantha Kreling, Kayla Shively, Ellie Reese and Jeff Miles, all in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. Cunningham was funded by the Australian Fulbright Commission.

For more information, contact Cunningham at cxcunn@uw.edu and Prugh at lprugh@uw.edu.

People often visit U.S. national parks to catch a glimpse of wildlife. But how does our presence impact the animals we hope to see?

National park traffic has grown steadily over the past decade, and popular parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone can easily see over a million visitors a year. In these heavily used areas, one might expect animals to change their behavior to avoid humans.

But a new ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý-led study has found that even in remote, rarely visited national parks, the presence of even just a few humans impacts the activity of wildlife that live there. Nearly any level of human activity in a protected area like a national park can alter the behavior of animals there, the study found. The was published Oct. 13 in the journal People and Nature.

“There’s been increasing recognition of how much just the presence of humans in these places, and our recreating there, can impact wildlife,” said senior author , associate professor in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. “These results are striking in showing that really any level of human activity can have an effect on wildlife.”

The research team based its study in Glacier Bay National Park, a coastal area in southeast Alaska that is accessible only by boat or plane. Most visitors arrive on cruise ships, but the boats don’t dock on shore, and the park has very little human foot traffic. Because so few people visit each year — only about 40,000 but increasing — the park was an ideal place to locate this study, Prugh explained.

“Glacier Bay is a great park to explore what the lower limits are where humans start to affect wildlife behavior,” Prugh said.

The researchers worked with the national park’s staff to design and implement an experiment that compared wildlife activity in areas used frequently by humans to areas where people were absent. They installed 40 motion-activated cameras across 10 sites to capture detections of people and four animal species — wolves, black bears, brown bears and moose — over two summers. By controlling where and when people could access certain areas of Glacier Bay and then measuring wildlife responses to the differing levels of human activity, the researchers identified two important thresholds.

First, if humans were present in an area, the cameras detected fewer than five animals per week across all four species studied. In most cases, this likely meant that animals avoided areas where humans were present. Second, in backcountry areas, wildlife detections dropped to zero each week once outdoor recreation levels reached the equivalent of about 40 visitors per week.

The researchers were surprised by the apparent low tolerance wildlife had for the presence of people nearby.

“It was eye-opening to see the number of wildlife sightings we are ‘missing’ just by recreating in backcountry areas of Glacier Bay,” said lead author , who completed this work as a UW graduate student. “I was surprised that for all four species, wildlife detections were always highest when there wasn’t any human activity. So many people visit national parks for the chance to view wildlife, and that desire alone may reduce the chance of it happening.”

Though all four species showed some change in activity due to humans, wolves were most likely to disappear from cameras when people were around. Brown bears were the least impacted by human presence. Moose, however, were more active during the times of day and locations where people were seen. The researchers hypothesize that moose might be using humans as a protective shield from predators, opting to align their active hours with humans to avoid becoming prey.

The researchers expect that in parks where animals are more accustomed to seeing people, at least some individual animals won’t react as strongly to humans as in Glacier Bay. But the findings do shed light on a reality that’s likely playing out at national parks and wilderness areas across the country: More people are visiting these areas than ever before, and the presence of humans is almost certainly impacting the behavior of animals that live there.

“I expect that similar results could be found in other national parks, particularly those with relatively low visitation. I wouldn’t be surprised if more and more people seek out less popular national parks to explore, which will have interesting and important implications for park management and wildlife,” Sytsma said.

National parks and wilderness areas aren’t just seeing more visitors during the high season. More people are opting to use the trail systems during less-busy times to avoid crowds. Additionally, some parks are expanding their trail networks to accommodate more visitors.

The authors hope this study can help park managers consider different approaches to making parks accessible both to humans and animals. For example, managers could consider concentrating trails and human use in certain areas to reduce their total footprint, or put restrictions on the time of year or days in which people can visit.

“Our findings lend support to concentrating human activities in some areas, because if you’re going to go above zero human activity and it’s going to have an impact, you might as well go way above zero in some areas and then have other areas where you have almost no human activity,” Prugh said. “In those areas, then, wildlife can live their natural lives unaffected by people.”

Co-authors are at the UW and at Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. This research was funded by the National Park Service.

For more information, contact Prugh at lprugh@uw.edu and Sytsma at mirasytsma@gmail.com.

The Arctic’s dramatic changes — warmer winters, earlier springs, shrinking ice and more human development — are impacting native animals. Researchers have long been observing the movements and behavior of animals in this region, but it’s been difficult to discover and access these data for meaningful collaborations.

Now scientists from around the world have established the , an online repository for data documenting the movements of animals in the Arctic and Subarctic. With this archive, scientists can share their knowledge and collaborate to ask questions about how animals are responding to a changing climate.

So far, researchers from more than 100 universities, government agencies and conservation groups, including the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý, are involved in the archive. The project currently contains over 200 projects with the movement data of more than 8,000 marine and terrestrial animals from 1991 to the present.

The global archive and several case studies on wildlife movement and behavior are described in a published Nov. 5 in Science. The archive project is led by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany and the Ohio State University.

“In terms of recent calls for more open science, platforms like this are a major leap forward in making valuable data discoverable and useful for researchers to address far more science questions than would otherwise be possible,” said project collaborator and co-author , associate professor in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

One of the case studies, led by Prugh’s lab at the UW, looked at the movement speeds of bears, caribou, moose and wolves from 1998 to 2019 and found that all species changed their movement rates in response to climate conditions — but with no consistent pattern. This inconsistency shows that responses of large mammals to climate change in the Arctic may not be straightforward to predict.

“This work has highlighted strong changes in movement rates in response to climate, but the reasons why animals are moving more or less are still not understood,” Prugh said. “I hope the work spurs future research to understand the ‘why’ behind our findings, and whether these changes are indicative of positive or negative climate change impacts.”

Movement rates are important to track because they can influence how effective animals are at finding food and other resources, when animals encounter predators, and how much energy they expend during different seasons. Additionally, large mammals in the Arctic are adapted to cold conditions and may experience heat stress due to warming temperatures, the authors explained.

“How animals respond to variable weather conditions through movement will have interesting implications for species competition and predator-prey dynamics,” said co-author , who conducted this research as a UW postdoctoral researcher and is now a wildlife biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

To create the case study of two decades of movements of bears, caribou, moose and wolves that is included in the new archive, Prugh and Mahoney relied on data from nine national and international institutions. The case study was funded by a grant from .

In related work, Prugh currently is leading a new NASA-funded to understand how changing snow conditions are affecting ungulates such as deer, moose and elk, and carnivores like wolves, cougars and coyotes in northern Washington and Alaska’s Denali National Park. The UW team will examine how changes in snow affect movement and predator-prey interactions.

While hundreds of studies are already included in the animal-movement archive, the resource is continually growing as data are transmitted from animals in the field and as more researchers join. This should help to detect changes in the behavior of animals and ultimately in the entire Arctic ecosystem.

“We are also providing a much-needed baseline of past behaviors and movements,” said , project co-lead and data curator at Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. “This can be used to improve wildlife management, address critical research questions and document changes in the Arctic for future generations.”

See a related from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.

Every spring, teaches a wildlife research techniques class at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý. Her students spend much of their time outside, complementing their lecture notes with actual experience. They learn to identify and properly handle animals — frogs, salamanders and bushy-tailed woodrats, for example — and they practice using equipment for tracking animals and estimating populations.

But when the UW announced it was moving its spring quarter 2020 classes entirely online to combat the novel coronavirus, Prugh and other instructors across campus faced a new, uncharted challenge.

“During our faculty meeting on Zoom to discuss what to do with field courses, I burst into tears, much to my surprise,” said Prugh, an associate professor of environmental and forest sciences. “I love teaching this course. It’s great getting the students out into the field and getting to know them really well.”

Prugh initially considered canceling the class, which is a requirement for some students majoring in environmental sciences and resource management.

“I had to go through a mourning period before I could readjust my expectations and accept that the students are going to need to learn about some of the techniques just in the lecture component,” Prugh said. “But then maybe we can come up with a plan for the rest of the content.”

Prugh decided to mail each enrolled student a kit that includes a camera trap, an acoustic recorder, a compass and binoculars. Students will use their kits to complete independent research projects from home. The class will also participate in timely citizen-science projects that aim to understand how stay-at-home orders across the world have affected urban wildlife.

Prugh wasn’t the only instructor who initially felt their stomach drop when the UW announced the switch to remote instruction. Professors and lecturers across the university take pride in providing hands-on opportunities for their students, but also felt reluctant to outright cancel their courses this quarter, often citing graduation or major requirements.

Of the approximately 7,000 courses the UW typically offers across its three campuses during spring quarter, about 400 have been canceled two weeks into the quarter — many of which were one-on-one instruction and practical training, according to , UW’s vice provost for academic and student affairs. In addition, about 200 classes were added to spring quarter and the enrollment caps were increased in an effort to limit impacts to student academic progress.

UW instructors have taken a variety of approaches to give students as close to an in-person experience as possible. Like Prugh, many have figured out ways for students to be hands on at home. But others took different approaches — such as using online platforms to promote student engagement or having students analyze datasets from a previous quarter.

Student enrollment also remains high. As of the start of the quarter, 52,845 students were registered for at least one course, compared to 51,884 students last spring. Two weeks into the quarter, about 930 students had withdrawn, compared to 600 at the same time last spring — a difference of about 330.

“It’s heartening that even in this unprecedented time, we still see the resiliency of our community through our innovative instructors and our students who are eager to learn,” Reid said.

Labs at home

In the move to online courses, many instructors joined Prugh in devising ways to shift in-class projects to activities students can do at home.

, a UW assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been restructuring a power electronics course into a year-long series of classes where students design and build electric bikes. This school year was the first full run of the sequence. In fall 2019, students designed the electronics necessary to power an e-bike. Then, over winter quarter, they shifted gears to develop the code that would regulate the system. Spring quarter was supposed to be the “Tour de France,” where the students put the pieces together to power and control actual e-bikes that they would race at the end of the quarter.

“I did my best to distill everything into something they can build at home,” Johnson said. “Instead of using a battery to power an e-bike motor, their circuits will transfer energy from a small power supply to resistors which will warm up slightly. It will be a great learning experience and it will require students to carefully plan their builds.”

Introduction to Engineering Design is a hands-on course where students learn how to go from thinking of an idea to actually building something. This class normally takes place in the so that students learn how to use tools such as laser cutters, 3D printers and soldering equipment. This quarter, students will build devices — a “smart” lamp that can turn on depending on the time of day, for example — using materials in kits that the instructors are sending home. Then students will use software to design and model updated versions. Shown here are TAs for this course, Suvesha Chandrasekaran, brown shirt, and Gorkem Caylak, preparing kits to be packaged and shipped to students. Credit: Dennis Wise/����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý

Instructors from other College of Engineering courses are having their students complete lab work at home as well. After modifying experiments so that they would be safe to perform at home, instructors prepared and sent more than 300 kits for six different courses to students across the state — including to Spokane, Yakima, Bellingham, Chehalis and Aberdeen — and around the globe to students in China, India, Uganda and Brazil, among other countries.

In the College of the Environment, , an UW professor of environmental and forest sciences, sent kits — including seeds, pots and media — to students so they can grow plants at home for his Native Plant Production course. This course also normally involves tours of local nurseries. This quarter, Bakker has invited nurseries around the state and the country to give virtual tours to the students.

Virtual options abound

Other instructors across the UW are taking advantage of the plethora of virtual options to try to make their previously hands-on courses more engaging.

, a principal lecturer in Earth and space sciences, teaches Introduction to Geology and Societal Impacts, a course for mostly nonscience majors. Swanson’s class typically includes labs, field trips and movie nights in addition to a lecture component.

“This quarter, the difficult thing is trying to bring the excitement of the class —  the rocks and the hands-on, tactile feel of this — through a screen,” Swanson said.

Swanson has opted to livestream his lectures on both and Zoom, saying that students learn better when he can appear more human on camera, sometimes correcting himself if he makes a mistake live.

The class still “gathers” for movie nights, too, though this year they watched on Zoom instead of in Kane Hall. Swanson plans to take the students on virtual field trips across the state, using an assortment of cameras to allow him to focus on the fine-grain details he wants his students to pay attention to.

, a lecturer in civil and environmental engineering, is teaching a construction materials class this quarter. This class has a major lab component so Yamaura is filming video modules that students can watch and then discuss in an interactive Zoom class each week. This week, Yamaura is filming how to make concrete. In one of the videos, Yamaura is including mistakes that students may encounter on real job sites after they graduate.
Credit: Kiyomi Taguchi/����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý

Despite a variety of tools available for moving classes online, professors and lecturers have to be thoughtful about what their students have access to, instructors said. , an associate professor of anthropology, is teaching a contemporary archeology course, which was supposed to have field trips around the UW and city of Seattle. Gonzalez has shifted it to a course where students will be engaging with each other and archeologists around the world through a class , a and .

“One of the initial reasons I was hesitant to move online is our students face a digital divide: I see a lot of students relying on using only their cellphones to access our course Canvas pages or to complete their work,” Gonzalez said. “I think this approach of using several different platforms gives everyone an opportunity to be able to engage regardless of whether or not they can download huge files. It’s as easy as using their cellphone to check in on the class Twitter feed and see what’s happening for the class.”

Learning from the past

Virtual tools, however helpful for keeping students engaged, can still fall short of replacing the full experience that many UW classes aim to offer.

“Nothing out there is going to give you the same hands-on experience as being in a general chemistry lab,” said , a senior lecturer of chemistry. “Performing dilutions, trying to figure out how some of the glassware and instrumentation work, and making some of those typical mistakes students make — that piece is going to be gone when the courses are moved online.”

Regardless, Carroll and the general chemistry team will continue teaching labs this quarter. TAs will develop a “tour” of each lab activity that walks students through the entire procedure — from a full explanation of lab safety to photos and videos of each of the steps, and what students would see if they were performing their own experiment.

Then students will receive a dataset from previous quarter’s version of the lab to work through their lab report assignments.

“It’s all real data,” Carroll said. “Some of it will have common errors that people often see in these experiments, and these students will have to explain what might have happened. We’ve tried to keep this as realistic as possible.”

While instructors across the UW expressed relief and pride at being able to transition their classes online for this quarter, they’re already looking forward to future quarters when they can hold their classes in person again. Many instructors are using this time as an opportunity to find new ways to enhance their in-person classes. For example, Gonzalez has always been interested in having her students engage with a larger public audience around issues of archeology’s relevance — in this case, she decided to try using Twitter.

“Right now is the perfect opportunity to be able to demonstrate the importance of public scholarship to my students while also creating an online community for them,” Gonzalez said. “The saddest part of not being able to meet in class is that we miss out in a lot of community building. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t be creative and find community in other spaces.”

In many parts of the world, there is an imbalance in the food chain.

Without top predators such as wolves and grizzly bears, smaller meat-eating animals like coyotes and foxes or grazers such as deer and elk can balloon in population, unchecked. This can initiate more deer-vehicle collisions, scavenging by urban coyotes and other unnatural human-animal interactions.

����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý researchers have discovered that large predators play a key yet unexpected role in keeping smaller predators and deer in check. Their “fatal attraction” theory finds that smaller predators are drawn to the kill sites of large predators by the promise of leftover scraps, but the scavengers may be killed themselves if their larger kin return for seconds.

The , published March 18 in the journal Ecology Letters, is the first to examine carnivore killing and scavenging activities in relation to each other across dozens of landscapes around the world. Patterns that emerged from their analysis could be used to make important management decisions about large carnivores worldwide, the authors said.

“I hope this paper will spur researchers to think more holistically about these killing and scavenging interactions, because currently we’re not really getting a full understanding of how carnivore communities function by examining them separately,” said senior author , a wildlife ecologist and associate professor in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

Large carnivores such as cougars, wolves and grizzly bears have disappeared from many regions, allowing some smaller carnivores — coyotes, foxes and bobcats, for example — to increase in population. The absence of large carnivores, especially on the East Coast, also has ignited populations of deer and other prey, creating an imbalance in many areas.

But in regions where top carnivores are present, such as the western U.S., their relationship with smaller predators is complex. When they kill deer and other prey, they often leave scraps for smaller predators to scavenge. But larger predators also are known to kill smaller carnivores.

With these dynamics in mind, the researchers wanted to test whether large carnivores serve as an overall net benefit to smaller predators by providing more food supply, especially when other food is scare due to drought, wildfires or particularly harsh winters.

The team analyzed more than 250 earlier papers, looking globally at patterns of killing and scavenging to quantify the positive and negative interactions among top and smaller predators. Overall, they found that large predators generally suppress smaller predators, even though they provide a significant amount of food in the form of leftover prey.

“We initially thought maybe smaller carnivores are scavenging the wolf kills and benefiting,” explained Prugh, referencing one of the top predators, wolves, examined in the study. “But then we realized that at these scavenging sites, they might be running into the wolves and getting killed. The scavenging, instead of providing a benefit, could actually be functioning as a trap that’s drawing in the smaller carnivores.”

The researchers thus developed their fatal attraction theory, which proposes that even though large predators are helpful providers of food, their kill sites ultimately are dangerous for smaller predators, which can then become prey themselves when the top predator returns.

A wolf and a wolverine were caught on camera fighting for dinner in Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska. Their behavior illustrates a key finding of this paper: That top predators (wolves) often return to their kill sites, which sometimes attract the attention of smaller predators (wolverines).

As populations of deer and small carnivores like coyotes have surged in areas without top predators, research has posited that humans might be able to take over the role of large carnivores through hunting activities. But though hunters sometimes leave gut piles after they kill a deer, they certainly don’t return to the kill site to hunt smaller predators. The research shows this behavior, not replicated by human hunters, could be an important way that smaller carnivores’ populations are kept in check.

“If scavenging increases the risk of mortality of smaller carnivores, that might explain why it appears to be very hard for humans to replace the role of large carnivores in a landscape,” Prugh explained. “This link between scavenging and mortality might be one of the mechanisms that make large carnivores so effective in controlling smaller carnivores.”

From their analysis, the researchers noted these additional findings:

• In areas where there were at least three larger predators, smaller predators had more than twice the mortality rates as their counterparts in areas with only two larger predators. This shows that each predator leverages its unique hunting strategy — such as outrunning or stalking prey — and that more predators with different ways of hunting made it much harder for their target, smaller prey, to survive. Having a diversity of larger predators is a good strategy for keeping smaller carnivore populations in check, the authors said.
• Large cats such as cougars were “equal opportunity killers,” meaning they were just as likely to kill smaller animals in the cat, dog or mustelid families. But large animals in the dog family such as wolves were five times more likely to kill smaller dogs than animals in other families. Big picture, this means that large cats might have a more widespread impact on smaller carnivores, compared with large dogs that mostly target smaller dogs.

“This finding shows that it really is a dog-eat-dog world out there,” Prugh said.

The study’s other co-author is , who completed the work as a UW research scientist.

This work was funded by the National Science Foundation.

For more information, contact Prugh at lprugh@uw.edu.

, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and a data science fellow with the eScience Institute, was nominated by the Army Research Office in the Army Research Laboratory.

Brunton is a mechanical engineer whose research focuses on data-driven modeling and control of complex systems, such as studying how turbulent fluids behave. Brunton was nominated for his work on using machine learning to develop efficient models that accurately describe the complexities of fluid mechanics. These models will then be used in part for designing better aircraft and more efficient energy systems.

, an assistant professor of physics and faculty member with the Clean Energy Institute, was nominated by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Chu was nominated for his research on high-temperature superconductivity and materials with unique properties emerging from the laws of quantum mechanics, the probability-based rules that govern the behavior of matter at the subatomic level. These materials could revolutionize telecommunications and other fields. Chu uses strain tuning, a method he developed, to deform the 3D crystalline structure of materials and probe them for exotic combinations of quantum-level properties for applications in the laboratory, industry and beyond.

, an assistant professor of epidemiology and faculty member at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, was nominated by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

Lindström is a genetic epidemiologist with an interest in understanding how genetics contributes to common complex diseases, such as cancer. She was nominated for her work investigating the shared genetic origin of different types of cancer, using genetic data on more than 500,000 individuals. Her research will inform future study designs and help identify global biological mechanisms that underlie cancer development and progression.

, an assistant professor of chemical engineering and faculty member with the Center on Human Development & Disability and the Molecular & Engineering Sciences Institute, was nominated by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

Nance’s research focuses on developing nanotechnology-based therapeutics to treat diseases and injuries to the brain. Using a combination of tissue imaging techniques, nanotechnology approaches and data science tools, she models the conditions present in different brain microenvironments — information needed to streamline the development of more effective and more precise nanoscale therapeutics to repair and protect the core of our central nervous system.

, an associate professor of environmental and forest sciences, was nominated by the National Science Foundation.

Prugh is a wildlife ecologist whose research explores interactions among species and the response of wildlife communities to global change. Prugh was nominated for her work that looks at the effects large carnivores have on smaller carnivores, particularly as animal distributions change rapidly worldwide. As part of this project, Prugh is the impacts gray wolves have on coyotes and bobcats as wolves naturally recolonize Washington state.

, currently an assistant professor of computer science and engineering, also received a PECASE. Cheung, who was nominated by the U.S. Department of Energy, will join the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley later this summer.

In addition, , a chief engineer at the , received a PECASE. Schneider, who is also a UW affiliate associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, was nominated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

The PECASE was established in 1996 to recognize the contributions that scientists and engineers have made to STEM fields, as well as education, leadership and public outreach. Participating federal departments and agencies nominate scientists for consideration. Final awards are coordinated by the Office of Science and Technology Policy within the Executive Office of the President.

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The Carrizo Plain National Monument is a little-known ecological hotspot in Southern California. Though small, it explodes in wildflowers each spring and is full of threatened or endangered species.

A long-term study led by the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý and the University of California, Berkeley tracked how hundreds of species in this valley fared during the historic drought that struck California from 2012 to 2015. It shows surprising winners and losers, uncovering patterns that may be relevant for climate change.

The are published Aug. 20 in .

“The Carrizo Plain is one of the global hotspots of endangered species, with endangered species at every trophic level: plants, rodents, carnivores,” said lead author , a UW assistant professor of quantitative wildlife sciences, part of the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. “It also is an ideal laboratory to see how an exceptional climate event affects a whole ecosystem.”

By studying this natural laboratory for many years, researchers found that drought actually helped ecological underdogs by stressing the dominant species. Similar patterns are likely to hold up for other ecosystems, Prugh said.

“We think that even though these extreme climate events, in the short term, can be pretty devastating for some populations, in the long run they might be important in maintaining biodiversity in the system, by keeping inferior competitors from getting pushed out of the system entirely,” she said.

The results also showed surprising losers: carnivores, ranging from foxes to barn owls. These suffered when their favorite prey species became scarce in year three of the drought.

“A lot of times when people think about drought what they’re really concerned about is plants, and there isn’t as much focus on animal populations,” Prugh said. “Our results show that when these extended droughts occur, we really want to pay attention to animals at the top of the food chain, because they’re likely to be hit pretty hard.”

Prugh began the project in 2007 as a postdoctoral researcher with co-author , at the University of California, Berkeley, to study the and other endangered species that are abundant in the Carrizo Plain. She sought to understand the relationship between different species to see how protecting one might affect the others.

Then in 2012, the drought began — a prolonged dry spell that studies show may be the worst that California has experienced in 1,200 years.

“We saw our sites turn from these areas that were just beautiful and filled with wildflowers in the spring to what really looked like the surface of the moon,” Prugh said. “We realized that we were in a unique position to look at how this historic climate event affected an entire community.”

Field crews collected data on 423 species spanning plants, birds, reptiles, mammals and insects. Their field season went from late March through late August from 2007 onward, with support from the National Science Foundation, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The laborious endeavor took many forms. Researchers cordoned off random plots of land and counted plants inside each square. They dug holes and put pitfall traps to catch insects, and identified everything that fell inside over a two-week period. They set live traps to catch rodents and other small animals during the day, and different traps to catch nocturnal rodents. The volunteer-run provided the best numbers for birds. While driving around at night, researchers shone flashlights to look for reflections off the eyes of nocturnal animals. Observers counted the numbers of pronghorn antelope and tule elk from small airplanes.

Over the years, the fate of hundreds of species show how the prolonged drought affected the ecosystem:

• Plants suffered immediately from the drought, and the impacts grew gradually more severe every year
• Giant kangaroo rats remained plentiful during the first and second year of the drought, but in the third year their numbers plummeted 11-fold
• As populations of dominant species collapsed, plant and animals that had been rare became less so, including several other species of kangaroo rats
• Some 4 percent of 423 species were named “winners” because their overall numbers actually increased during the drought
• Toward the end of the drought, carnivores, such as coyotes, badgers and hawks, were the hardest hit, likely because their giant kangaroo rat prey had grown scarce

“If we’d given up earlier or narrowed our efforts, we would have missed this rare and powerful opportunity to quantify how an ecological community is impacted by a major environmental shock,” Brashares said. “Such shocks are intensifying on our rapidly changing planet, and we can’t predict and manage their effects if we don’t have studies in place to monitor them.”

Since the drought ended in 2015, the Carrizo Plain ecosystem has bounced back and the giant kangaroo rat population has also recovered.

“In terms of implications for climate change, it gives some cause for optimism in showing that ecosystems have a remarkable ability to handle some of these extreme events,” Prugh said.

Results suggest that focusing on how key prey species respond to a drought could help to predict the fate of top predators, Prugh said, and those key prey species could become a focus for conservation efforts.

Other co-authors are Nicolas Deguines at the University of Paris-Sud; Joshua Grinath and Katharine Suding at the University of Colorado Boulder; William Bean at Humboldt State University; and Robert Stafford at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Additional funding was from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and The Nature Conservancy.

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For more information, contact Prugh at 206-543-1588 or lprugh@uw.edu or Brashares at 510-643-6080 or brashares@berkeley.edu.

NSF: DEB-1628754, DEB-1354931, DEB-1355055