Liz Neeley is the Executive Director of The Story Collider. In live shows across the country, a weekly podcast, and intensive workshops, The Story Collider is dedicated to producing true, personal stories about science. After a decade of work in ocean conservation and science communication, Liz wanted to more deeply explore the performance and substance of narratives. From 2008 to 2015, she worked as the Assistant Director of Science Outreach for COMPASS, and was affiliate staff at The University of Washington during that time. Before that, she worked on locally-managed marine conservation in Fiji and Papua New Guinea, and on international trade policies for deep-sea corals.

Join Dr. Deborah Giles (instructor of the spring 2018 FHL 375: Marine Mammals of the Salish Sea course) for a guest lecture hosted by the Sea Dawgs student club.

The question of how best to ensure that science is considered within policy-making is a pressing one. One solution is to “span the boundaries” between science and policy and create a more comprehensive and inclusive knowledge exchange process. This approach aims to improve the chances that research results and decision-making needs are more closely aligned, and includes accounting for the many types of perspectives, values, and types of knowledge involved. A challenge, however, is that sufficiently accounting for all of these moving parts can be quite an undertaking.

In a world of changing climate and increasing human population size, fisheries are caught between the pressures of changing climatic influences on productivity and distribution and increasing market demand. Sustaining marine fisheries in the face of these two global drivers of change increasingly calls for Global Approaches to Fisheries. Whilst a stretch from current approaches, there are several  modelling and related tools that can be developed and used to address the increasing complexity and global connectedness of fisheries systems as well as account for changing targets and baselines.

I will discuss the essential link between a free press, and free scientific inquiry. In a world of fake news, how do scientists, and journalists get the truth out to the public and policy makers that need to hear it, in ways they will listen? What is the unique contribution that science has to make to the public policy debate? How do scientists get their data beyond the realm of technical papers and the academy to the public realm where it can make a difference – without tarting up, compromising or dumbing down the findings? How do reporters communicate science to a lay audience that may be unfamiliar to – and not even necessarily open to – what science has to say? Truth Telling in the Salish Sea is talk not only about the how-to of effective science communication, but why it is so critical.

Modeling the Distribution and Abundance of Ice-Associated Seals in the Arctic
Paul B. Conn
Research Statistician
Marine Mammal Laboratory, NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center, Seattle, WA, USA

Affiliate Associate Professor
School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Thursday, November 2, 2017 4:00 PM
Fishery Sciences Building, Room 102
info session for undergraduate academic programs related to marine & aquatic sciences hosted upstairs in FSH 203 from 3:00 – 4:00 pm
Abstract: Negative trends in seasonal Arctic sea-ice extent have prompted concern for the viability of ice-associated marine mammals.  

Lessons from Loowit: Changes to nutrient cycling and biological productivity in the new Spirit Lake
James E. Gawel
Associate Professor of Environmental Chemistry and Engineering, School of interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of Washington-Tacoma, Tacoma, WA, USA
Thursday, October 19, 2017 4:00 PM
Fishery Sciences Building, Room 102
no open advising in the FSH lobby this week, but drop-in advising available in FSH 116 – main office from 3:15-4:00 pm
Abstract: Spirit Lake was changed biologically, chemically and physically by the 1980 eruption of Mount St. 

Join us for the weekly SAFS Departmental Seminar at 4:00 in FSH 102 (open to the public) for a talk this week about using satellites to track the movements of large whales in the North Pacific.

In this presentation I review how current fisheries models account for ecological processes. Subsequently, I will introduce a class of size-structured population models based on individual energetics that explicitly account for ecological interactions of individual fish. Analysis of models of this kind will be shown to not only increase our understanding of the mechanisms shaping fish community dynamics, but also make counterintuitive predictions about the outcome of fisheries management strategies

Recreational shark fishing in Florida: An interdisciplinary analysis of an emerging conservation issue
David Shiffman
Liber Ero Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Simon Fraser University
Thursday, September 28, 2017 4:00 pm
Fishery Sciences Building, Room 102
Open advising about undergraduate programs hosted in FSH lobby from 3:30-4:00 pm
Sharks are one of the most threatened groups of marine fishes, but the majority of research, advocacy, and management attention to date has focused on threats stemming from commercial fisheries.