News and events
Creating a culture of disaster preparedness: balancing contrasting responses to hazards
Join the Center for Collaborative Systems for Security, Safety, and Regional Resilience for Dr. Kathleen Tierney’s talk about how to build a more effective culture of preparedness in the Puget Sound region. She will discuss different social and cultural perspectives of natural hazard risk across the U.S. and describe how these perspectives shape our responses to extreme hazard events, such as a future Cascadia or Seattle Fault earthquake, and how these perspectives can be more appropriately balanced.
Read moreThe Northwest Nature and Health Symposium
This one-day symposium brings together professionals and community leaders to explore common goals and collective strategies related to the human health benefits of being in nature, from gardens to wildlands. At the intersection of contemporary thinking in healthcare, education, planning and conservation is a growing recognition that human well-being is interdependent with the natural world.
The event is sponsored by the Center for Creative Conservation.
Reconnecting with nature: a research agenda from Center for Creative Conservation working group
At a time of increasing disconnectedness from nature, scientific interest in the potential health benefits of connecting with nature has grown. Research in recent decades has yielded substantial evidence of nature’s health benefits, but large gaps still remain. The Center for Creative Conservation’s Nature and Health working group recently published a proposed research agenda on nature contact and health. Guided by a focus on key unanswered questions, new research has the potential to yield high-impact, consequential public health insights.
Read moreUW to host Interior Department’s Northwest Climate Science Center
The University of Washington is the new host for the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Northwest Climate Science Center. Boise State University, the University of Montana, Washington State University and Western Washington University are also new partners in the Northwest CSC university consortium.
These five universities were selected as the CSC host and consortium partners after an open competition and extensive review by scientific experts.
8th Annual Northwest Climate Conference
Registration is now open for the 8th Annual Northwest Climate Conference, Working Together to Build a Resilient Northwest, October 9-11, 2017. Early registration ends on September 20th!
Read moreEco, Shelter 2 and Walden win awards at EarthGames on Tap
Three earth-friendly video games won awards at the Center for Creative Conservation’s inaugural EarthGames on Tap event, which took place May 18, 2017 in Seattle. Twelve stunning “earthgames” were entered into the games showcase. A panel of three judges carefully evaluated the games based on their potential to have an environmental impact and the quality of their game play. In the judges’ competition, Shelter 2 won first place and Walden won second place.
Read moreDaily forecast model of Washington waters
Have you ever seen a painting so realistic that on first glance you assumed it was a photograph, where each colorful, textured stroke on the canvas perfectly matched the scene spread out before the artist?
In the same way that landscape artists represent the natural world with paint, scientists seek to represent the world through computer simulation models. These models integrate different natural forces to recreate dynamic environments such as Puget Sound, giving us a better idea of what’s happening now and what might happen in the future.
Q&A About "The Really Big One"
John Vidale has been interested in the earth and its inner workings since he was a young boy, thanks to his mother, a geologist. His longtime love for geology, math and physics brought him to Yale and Caltech for his undergraduate and graduate studies, respectively, followed by years as a researcher and professor across California before moving to Seattle.
Now, he’s nearing a decade at the UW, where he works with the state and federal government for public hazard mitigation and serves as Washington’s resident earthquake expert, where he’s tasked, among many other things, with collaborating with others to create an earthquake preparedness plan for at-risk areas—Seattle included.
Annual Bird Count opens a window into climate change
The Christmas Bird Count has helped scientists figure out how birds are responding to climate change, says Meade Krosby, from the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group.
“The Christmas Bird Count is actually one of the most powerful data sets that we have that demonstrate that birds’ ranges are changing,” she explains. “You can see these really dramatic shifts in their winter ranges on average moving northward.
Ocean acidification study offers warnings for marine life, habitats
Acidification of the world’s oceans could drive a cascading loss of biodiversity in some marine habitats, according to research published Nov. 21 in Nature Climate Change.
The work by biodiversity researchers from the University of British Columbia, the University of Washington and colleagues in the U.S., Europe, Australia, Japan and China, combines dozens of existing studies to paint a more nuanced picture of the impact of ocean acidification.