Northern Spotted Owl. Photo by Dennis Newman.
As if old growth logging, and competition from barred owls wasn’t enough.
There’s another threat to Oregon’s fragile population of northern spotted owls.
Research from Oregon State University says climate change may also hurt the spotted owl’s chances for survival.
Didemnum vexillum can grow into colonies resembling soft coral. Photo by Vallorie Hodges, Oregon Coast Aquarium.
One of the state’s most feared invasive species has arrived.
The most immediate threat is to our coastal shellfish. The species, known as Didemnum vexillum, can form huge colonies that cover shellfish beds and literally smother them to death.
New research has found that older Douglas-fir trees in Oregon are just as susceptible to Swiss needle cast as younger ones, suffering the same needle loss and in some cases almost stop growing. Photo from OSU.
Oregon’s state tree, the Douglas Fir, is under attack from a disease that’s spreading and intensifying through the Coast Range.
It’s called Swiss needle cast, a fungus that causes the tree to lose its needles and stunts its growth. Researchers with Oregon State University say the disease has gotten so bad, it’s damaging forests to the tune of $200 million per year.
They suspect global warming may be a cause.
An invasive species of Asian fruit fly, first spotted in the Willamette Valley last fall, has survived the winter and remains a threat to Oregon’s fruit crop.
Researchers with Oregon State University say it was only a couple of weeks ago that they found evidence of the spotted wing drosophila in some of their monitoring traps.
A burned stand in the B&B Complex. The 2003 fire in Central Oregon killed about half the tallest trees. This photo by Garrett Miegs of OSU was taken in 2007.
Is Smokey Bear wrong?
A forestry professor at Oregon State University says its time we took another look at forest fires. John Bailey says we need to accept that fires actually do a lot of good for the forests. He says the billions we spend to control fires doesn’t really prevent them, it merely delays them.
And if climate change really does bring about more frequent and more intense fires, Bailey says that may not be a bad thing.
For a young steelhead on its way to the ocean, river estuaries are the last stop – in more ways than one.
Research from Oregon State University shows that about half of migrating steelhead never make it the ocean. Instead they get as far as the estuary at the river’s end and abruptly die. That came as a surprise to OSU researchers who are trying to figure out if that’s a typical mortality rate, or if something new is killing steelhead in larger than normal numbers.
Mt. Hood during the El Nino winter of 2005. No snow chains necessary this far up on Lolo Pass back then.
Sitting in my office with bright sunshine coming through the window, it’s a little hard to see anything wrong with that. Especially in January!
But a new report from Oregon State University warns we may be paying for this great weather somewhere down the road.
Blame it all on El Nino.
Waves pound a beach and structure between Depot Bay and Boiler Bay on the Oregon Coast. Photo by Erica Harris, Oregon State University
No one really knows why, but those waves that pound against the Oregon coast are getting bigger and bigger.
According to new research from Oregon State University, maximum wave heights are reaching 46 feet. That’s 13 feet taller than they were just 14 years ago. In one of those so called “100-year events”, waves are now expected to hit up to 55 feet high.
All this concerns scientists who have to rethink how this will affect the coast and the people who live along it.
Here in Western Oregon, we usually don’t run out of rain.
In some ways, that’s not a good thing. Much of the rain that falls on urban areas passes over roads, parking lots, and construction sites. Along the way it picks up some nasty stuff before entering our streams and rivers.
“As our landscapes became developed, rain falling on hard surfaces was directed to pipes, ditches and storm drains that route to streams or into stormwater sewer systems,” says Rob Emanuel of the OSU Extension Service. “The result is too much water arriving in a short amount of time and carrying pollutants.”
Which is why Emanuel and others want to show homeowners how to install rain gardens. They help restore some balance to the water cycle.
An OSU wave energy prototype being tested in 2007. Photo from OSU.
I love stories that challenge conventional wisdom. This is one of them.
Take a guess at what kind of Oregonians are most likely to support wave energy. If you think it’s people who hold strong pro-environment views and love nature, you’d be wrong.
New research from Oregon State University paints a very different picture. The most reliable supporters of wave energy are older, conservative, white males. Generally speaking, they don’t concern themselves too much with the environment and are opposed to government regulations to protect it.
The results were very surprising to Maria Stefanovich, an OSU graduate student in Environmental Science. Stefanovich was part of a team that studied the attitudes of Oregonians towards wave energy.
See our earlier story: Oregonians Unsure About Wave Energy
She says conservatives are lining up behind wave energy because they believe it will help drive economic growth and create jobs for the state. They see wave energy as a way to harness nature to serve the needs of people, but don’t care that it reduces carbon and helps in the fight against global warming.
There’s a lesson here for policy makers, according to Stefanovich. She says if they really want to convince people about the need to switch to renewable energy, they need to stress the economic benefits as well as the environmental ones.
In a recent editorial for Sea Technology Magazine she writes:
“These findings have important policy implications, because they suggest that our current methods of conveying the urgency of transitioning to renewable energy are off base. This survey indicates that policymakers may be more effective in getting the public to adopt renewable energy more quickly if they leverage the public’s economic bias and stress the socioeconomic benefits that wave energy could provide, rather than issues like climate change and the depletion of traditional energy sources.”
