FieldSound - The official UW College of the Environment podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

In this episode of FieldSound, we meet Eli Wheat, an assistant teaching professor in the University of Washington’s Program on the Environment, an environmental studies program housed within the College of the Environment. Wheat is passionate about sustainable farming, and our relationship as humans with the land and food we consume.

Wheat, who is also a core faculty member in the UW School of Public Health’s Food Systems, Nutrition, and Health program, brings a unique perspective as both a farmer and a scholar. He is helping to bridge the gap between academia and agriculture, inspiring the next generation to care for our planet.

Wheat’s teaching laboratory is UW Farm, which began as a student organization in the early 2000s and has grown to encompass three locations across the Seattle campus. Students from many UW departments and majors are able to get out and experience food production in an urban setting.

Beyond the campus, Wheat owns and operates SkyRoot Farm, a 20-acre certified organic animal and vegetable farm on Whidbey Island. SkyRoot’s farming practices are based on an ecosystem approach to land management in agriculture, and they grow mostly vegetables — plus keep a small herd of goats.

https://environment.uw.edu/podcast

In this episode of FieldSound, we hear from Michael Buck, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and a graduate of the UW School of Marine and Environmental Affairs. 

Buck’s path in science has been guided by the traditions, stories, practices and knowledge of his community. His research is not just academic; it’s a living practice, deeply rooted in the concept of relationality and “research as ceremony,” where self-reflection, ceremony and reciprocity form a foundation for his work.

Buck is passionate about passing on Indigenous Ways of Knowing to future generations, and infusing oral histories of the Pacific Northwest together with documented histories — offering a fuller, more nuanced understanding of our region’s unique ecology.

Related links:

https://smea.uw.edu/currents/the-lost-fish-indigenous-traditional-ecological-knowledge-and-translocation-for-the-ancient-pacific-lamprey/ 

https://environment.uw.edu/podcast

From the University of Washington College of the environment, this is FieldSound.

Join us as we explore the College’s impact around the globe with our researchers as they share stories of their exciting, groundbreaking and influential discoveries. 

FieldSound will both entertain and educate listeners about the field of environmental science while kindling personal connection to the world around them.

Join us in the field for season 2 of FieldSound, the official podcast from the University of Washington College of the Environment.

https://environment.uw.edu/podcast

Earthquakes can strike at any moment. On the final Season 1 episode of FieldSound, UW seismologists Harold Tobin and Audrey Dunham discuss the impending threat of “The Big One” - a large-scale earthquake that will strike along the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Tobin and Dunham also share recent advances in earthquake and tsunami preparedness for communities inland and along the coast in the Pacific Northwest.

Harold Tobin is a professor in the UW Department of Earth and Space Sciences and holds the Paros Endowed Chair in Seismology and Geohazards. He is also the Director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, and the designated Washington State Seismologist, studying tectonic plate boundaries, how faults work, and the conditions that lead to earthquakes.

Audrey Dunham is a UW Department of Earth and Space Sciences Postdoctoral Scholar working with the Cascadia Coastlines and Peoples Hazards Research Hub (CoPes Hub) focused on ground motion simulations of potential Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquakes and quantifying hazards for coastal communities in the Pacific Northwest.

The Pacific Northwest Seismic Network is supported by the Friends of Earthquakes fund.

https://environment.uw.edu/podcast

Mount Rainier Institute provides regional schools with in-depth programs focusing on forest science and STEM education, using the Charles Lathrop Pack Experimental Forest - located at the foot of Mt. Rainier, as an outdoor classroom.

Pack Forest, part of the UW School of Environment and Forest Sciences, sits on 4,300 acres of working forestland. The forest provides the resources to discover, teach and demonstrate the concepts of sustainable forestry.

On this episode, FieldSound visits the Mount Rainier institute for “Maple Syrup Day” to learn about experimental production of Big Leaf Maple Syrup alongside kids from a local elementary school.

Read about how UW is helping to build a maple syrup industry in Western Washington.

The Mount Rainier Institute is supported by the Mount Rainier Institute Fund and has received grant support from The Russell Family Foundation and Outdoor Schools Washington.

https://environment.uw.edu/podcast

Randie Bundy is a researcher with the University of Washington School of Oceanography. Her complex work looks into the cycling of trace metals in marine environments, how bioactive metals such as iron, copper, and cobalt are acquired by marine phytoplankton and bacteria, and how the organic forms of these metals affect their uptake and cycling in the ocean. 

Bundy recently co-led a team aboard the R/V Thomas G. Thompson for the recent Gradient 5 Survey with all female principal investigators,  LGBTQIA+ diversity represented, and participants from 14 countries of origin. 

On this episode, Bundy shares her path to science, how she approaches scientific inquiry, and what it's like to be an ocean scientist living and working at sea.

Since 2018, Randie Bundy has received 4 grants from the Simons Foundation: Mechanisms of trace metal regeneration in the upper ocean via organic ligands, The fundamental role of heterotrophic bacteria in the global iron cycle, The Impact of Trace Metals on Microbial Communities in the Pacific Ocean and In the Iron Continuum: Physicochemical Metal Speciation Dictates Bioavailability.

https://environment.uw.edu/podcast

Anne Polyakov is a PhD student in the Quantitative Ecology and Resource Management Program at the University of Washington. 

Anne's PhD research covers a variety of animals and ecosystems, including fungal communities along salmon streams. Recently, she spent a summer with the UW Alaska Salmon Program studying ecosystems along three streams, collecting data to track the uptake of salmon nutrients beyond the water’s edge, and how fungi might play a role in this intricate process.

She is passionate about interdisciplinary research at the intersection of ecology and statistics, utilizing a variety of modeling techniques to better understand ecological dynamics.

Read our recent article on Anne's research in Alaska: https://environment.uw.edu/news/2022/11/fish-forests-and-fungi/

https://environment.uw.edu/podcast

Aaron Wirsing is an ecologist with the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences studying predator-prey interactions.

On this episode of FieldSound, Wirsing discusses his research in both terrestrial and aquatic systems, the ways that top predators, such as grey wolves and tiger sharks, shape their ecosystems and how humans affect predator-prey interactions through processes such as urbanization and climate change.

The Predator Ecology Lab seeks to help better understand how predators influence their surroundings by interacting with their prey and seeks solutions to the challenges of large carnivore conservation & management in the changing world.

https://www.predatorecology.com/

Aaron Wirsing’s research has received support from the Seeley Fund for Ocean Research on Tetiaroa to establish and maintain a marine laboratory on the Tetiaroa atoll, the Save Our Seas Foundation and the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund.

https://environment.uw.edu/podcast

Laura Prugh is a wildlife community ecologist with the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. Research in her lab use a combination of intensive fieldwork, modeling, meta-analyses, and interdisciplinary approaches to study the response of wildlife communities to global change.

Recently, Prugh was lead author on a study published in the journal Science. Researchers at the University of Washington, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Spokane Tribe of Indians found that bobcats and coyotes were more than three times likely to die from human activity than from the claws and jaws of cougars and wolves, illustrating how humankind’s growing footprint is changing interactions among other species.

On this episode of FieldSound, Prugh discusses her pursuit to understand connections in the environment, and highlights her work with the critically endangered Kangaroo Rats - the “ecosystem engineers” of the Carrizo Plain National Monument in Southern California.

Laura Prugh is the current holder of the John C. Garcia Term Professorship. Prugh Lab research is supported by the Wildlife Dynamics and Conservation Research Fund.

http://prughlab.com

https://environment.uw.edu/podcast

Chelsea Wood is an Associate Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. She is a leader in the ecology of parasites and pathogens in freshwater and marine ecosystems, the ecological drivers of parasite transmission, and human impacts on parasites in a changing world. Wood discusses the fascinating world of parasites, their “Rube Goldberg-esque” life-cycles, and her recent study - the world’s largest and longest dataset of wildlife parasite abundance - that suggests parasites may be especially vulnerable to a changing climate.

https://chelsealwood.com/

Chelsea Wood is W.M. Keck Foundation grant recipient for her work with historical reconstruction of infectious disease prevalence in wildlife.

https://environment.uw.edu/podcast