Generations of oyster farmers have weathered many challenges to continue the harvest. Their stories are braided together with significant history that have defined the modern-day Pacific Northwest: the arrival of white ...
April 6, 2023
By Emma Duckworth, WSG Undergraduate Science Communications Fellow
As the weather continues to warm, Puget Sound boaters are gearing up for another beautiful season. Whether it be their first time on the water or their tenth season in the Sound, all kinds of boaters are preparing their ...
April 3, 2023
We are thrilled to welcome Chandler Countryman as the new resilience and adaptation specialist at Washington Sea Grant.
In this role, Chandler works with communities in the South Puget Sound area and along Washington’s coast to advance efforts related to coastal hazards and climate resilience by gathering local knowledge and perspectives, identifying community priorities, and connecting local efforts to ...
Read MoreApril 3, 2023
Michele Blanchflower joined Washington Sea Grant in March 2023. In her new role as the fiscal specialist supervisor, she supports administrative and fiscal functions, assisting with coordination, planning, reconciliation, forecasting, procurement, and executing direct services for WSG.
She acts as an intradepartmental liaison for internal wide communication with external stakeholders.
Michele studied small business management at the University of Massachusetts ...
Read MoreMarch 29, 2023
It started in another century when towboats ran over crab pots, tangling their propellers in buoys and lines.
Both towboat operators and crabbers knew an agreement was needed to keep their gear intact. For 50 years they maintained an orderly understanding in occupying their separate businesses in the greater, shared ocean space. Then Washington Sea ...
Read MoreMarch 16, 2023
My name is Emma Duckworth and I am grateful for the opportunity to be Washington Sea Grant’s undergraduate science communication fellow for the spring of 2023. I grew up in Livermore, California, a small town in the Bay Area about an hour from the coast. Spending much of my childhood outdoors and traveling to the ocean, I quickly developed a love for nature and an interest in environmentalism. ...
Read MoreMarch 15, 2023
Indigenous peoples have been stewarding the ocean for thousands of years. This stewardship has appeared in many different forms around the world, all of which represent a reciprocal relationship between humans and the sea rooted in deep place-based knowledge. From ...
March 13, 2023
Crab Team has come a long way since a handful of intrepid early-adopter volunteers put their boots in the mud for our pilot season in August 2015. Since that time, the network has:
March 6, 2023
Two projects led by Washington Sea Grant (WSG) will receive a total of $1.59 million through the Puget Sound National Estuary Program’s Habitat Strategic Initiative, a partnership between Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and Washington Department of Natural Resources. The WSG-led projects will focus on sea level rise vulnerability ...
Read MoreFebruary 28, 2023
We are thrilled to welcome Sydney Fishman as a coastal management specialist at Washington Sea Grant.
In this role, Sydney helps shoreline and coastal decision-makers find solutions to their complex management issues. Her work spans the broad areas of shoreline management, shoreline stabilization and coastal resilience.
She fosters a shoreline management community of practice in western Washington with networking, outreach, ...
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February 9, 2023
Hello Crab Team community!
My name is Lisa Watkins and I’m thrilled to be joining you all as Washington Sea Grant’s new Community Science Specialist. A large part of my role will be to coordinate the Crab Team monitoring network, aiming to make participation–from recruitment and training to data reporting and beyond—as meaningful and smooth-running as possible.
As a network, Crab Team has set a standard of what meaningful, management-relevant community science efforts can look like, and ...
Read MoreFebruary 7, 2023
By Andrea Richter-Sanchez, WSG Science Communications Fellow
Kelp aquaculture has many potential benefits to society. For example, it can provide habitat for marine life, decrease erosion along shorelines, absorb excess carbon dioxide and nutrients from the water, and provide food for local communities. As of now there is only one open water commercial seaweed farm in Washington — but the state ...
Read MoreFebruary 1, 2023
We are thrilled to welcome Lisa Watkins as the new community science specialist for the Crab Team at Washington Sea Grant.
Lisa coordinates WSG Crab Team’s volunteer monitoring network, which collects detection data on the invasive European green crab across Washington’s Coastal and Puget Sound regions. She aims to ...
Read MoreJanuary 26, 2023
By Andrea Richter-Sanchez, WSG Science Communications Fellow
They say nothing brings people together better than good company over a warm home-cooked meal, and that story was no different for John Alto and Amy Sharp. John, a troller fisherman, one day got a call from a friend inviting him over to a troller family dinner. Troller vessels generally fit ...
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December 31 2022
We spend a lot of time thinking about how to quantify green crab efforts and numbers to understand status and trends. Suffice to say that any way you slice it, any way you define and quantify metrics, 2022 was a big year in Washington for European green crab management. With the launch of the Governor’s Emergency Order and WDFW-coordinated response measures, this year brought ...
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