September 11, 2024
Forks, WA – The River & Ocean Film Festival returns October 18, 2024 to celebrate the freshwater and marine environments of the west side of the Olympic Peninsula — and the people who love them. Audiences will enjoy film explorations of Olympic Peninsula rivers and shores and learn about the issues facing its habitats and human communities.
After running annually ...
Read MoreSeptember 6, 2024
By Brian McGreal, WSG Science Communications Fellow
In the spring of 2024, students at high schools up and down the Oregon coast engaged with a different sort of education. Armed with sharpened knives and fish scalers, high school students learned to debone albacore, filet salmon and shuck oysters under the auspices of the Oregon Coast Visitors Association’s newly launched Seafood Butchery Pilot Program. Designed to increase young people’s awareness and interest in jobs in the ...
Read MoreSeptember 3, 2024
By Ashleigh Epps, WSG aquaculture specialist
In late May 2024, the Pacific coasts of Oregon and Washington experienced a paralytic shellfish poisoning harmful algal bloom event. Thirty-one people became sick in Oregon over Memorial Day weekend, which triggered increased paralytic shellfish poisoning testing and the closures of harvest areas by the Department of Health.
No illnesses occurred in Washington. The last time Willapa Bay ...
Read MoreAugust 22, 2024
We are pleased to announce that recent graduates Elise Adams, Jessica Clemens, Nika Hoffman, Heeju Jung, Jess Lechtenberg, Allison Morgan, Courtney Murphy, Rondi Nordal, Katalin Plummer and Jack Winterhalter have been awarded the Washington Sea Grant Hershman Fellowship for 2024–2025. This fellowship places highly motivated, qualified individuals with marine and coastal host offices throughout Washington, providing fellows with a unique perspective on building marine policy and allowing them to share ...
Read MoreAugust 22, 2024
Coastal Tribes and communities in Washington are on the front lines of climate change. Many are already grappling with associated coastal hazards, including sea level rise and flooding. However, all too often, these communities lack the capacity to adequately address the increasing climate risks that they face.
Washington Sea Grant (WSG) and the Climate Impacts Group (CIG) — both based at the University of Washington College of the Environment — collectively received $8.1 million in ...
Read MoreAugust 19, 2024
Washington Sea Grant (WSG) is excited to receive federal funding through NOAA Sea Grant to supplement its existing initiatives supporting aquaculture in Washington state. Two WSG initiatives are supported by this funding: the Willapa-Grays Harbor Estuary Collaborative and the new Tide’s Out aquaculture workforce training program.
Launched in April 2022 and facilitated by WSG, the Willapa-Grays Harbor Estuary Collaborative (Collaborative) holds the long-term mission of increasing the resilience of coastal communities and ecosystems in ...
Read MoreAugust 15, 2024
Washington Sea Grant (WSG) is excited to announce that Jezella Peraza, a recent graduate of the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, has been selected as the 2024 WSG Keystone Fellow. Jezella began working with host Seattle Aquarium August 1.
The WSG Keystone Fellowship seeks to build pathways into marine science, policy and related industry ...
Read MoreAugust 14, 2024
Washington Sea Grant (WSG) co-led with University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group and the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians a new report sharing Northwest coastal tribes’ needs and barriers as they work to adapt to climate change. The report compiles findings from six Tribal listening sessions where Tribal members were invited to share their experiences around climate change adaptation in their communities.
The report, “Climate adaptation barriers and needs experienced by Northwest coastal Tribes: ...
Read MoreBy Alison Lorenz, WSG Science Writer
The first time Ian Miller, Washington Sea Grant (WSG) coastal hazards specialist, heard about CoSMoS, he was in graduate school at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This was around 2009, when the first iteration of CoSMoS was being used to model coastal storms in southern California. While Miller was interested at the time, he ...
Read MoreBy Alison Lorenz, WSG Science Writer
The Big One. It’s the threat looming over all who live in western Washington and the greater Pacific Northwest: a magnitude 9 earthquake from the Cascadia Subduction Zone. A quake from the fault line stretching from Vancouver Island to northern California could create the kind of devastating tsunami documented in Coast Salish Peoples’ stories 300 years ago. Now, ...
Read MoreBy Alison Lorenz, WSG Science Writer
When Lisa Watkins started at WSG as a community science specialist, WSG Crab Team was almost ten years old. The Crab Team monitoring network — a network of several hundred volunteers and partner staff spread all across the state — has spent that decade on the front lines of the European green crab (Carcinus ...
Read MoreBy Erick Dowell, WSG student assistant
Beneath the coastal waters of Washington state, if you look in the right spots you’ll find green, grassy meadows. They are not too different from meadows you may want to frolic through on land, but down here the blades of grass undulate with salt water eddies and waves of the sea instead of a gentle summer breeze. Eelgrass (Zostera ...
Read MoreAugust 12, 2024
Washington Sea Grant (WSG) is excited to have a project selected for funding through the Climate and Fisheries Adaptation (CAFA) program, a partnership between NOAA Research Climate Program Office and the NOAA Fisheries Office of Science and Technology.
The WSG project aims to build on the foundation laid by the Willapa-Grays Harbor Estuary Collaborative (Collaborative). Launched in April 2022 and facilitated by WSG, the Collaborative holds the long-term mission of increasing the resilience ...
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