Oregon's estuaries are important ecosystems for scientific study. Consequently, knowledge of what research has been conducted helps us identify benchmarks and plan new projects. A comprehensive bibliography of published research, technical reports, local documents, and data sets is one means of recording this knowledge. For these reasons, the Guin Library...
This five-lesson curriculum seeks to increase students' understanding of ocean acidification (OA) and help them understand that it is an issue they can address. There are five lessons in the unit and a final Call to Action project.
Lesson 1 explores a real-life story about the near collapse of the...
The Olympia oyster is a foundation species that increases habitat structure for associate species in estuarine systems of the Pacific Coast of North America (Kimbro & Grosholz, 2006). This oyster provides ecosystem services in the form of water filtration (zu Ermgassen et al., 2013), habitat for commercially valuable species such...
Ocean acidification (OA), the change in ocean chemistry due to increasing concentrations of anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is an environmental problem that is an active area of scientific research yet remains largely outside of the public’s awareness. It is often assumed that if we raise OA awareness, then...
The desire to understand the spatial and temporal drivers of animal behavior and distribution relative to scale is central to movement ecology. Optimal foraging theory states that a predator should continue exploiting a patch until it is no longer profitable to do so. As human developments increasingly encroach on the...
In the past two decades, occurrences of summertime upwelling-driven low dissolved oxygen (DO) events, or hypoxia, have increased along the northeast Pacific coast. If hypoxic events are severe enough to cause marine species mortality, the areas affected are often called "dead zones." In 2002 and again in 2006, the events...
Twelve years ago I was new to the Oregon coast and eager to learn about the natural setting. Field guides were available to birds, marine mammals, tide pools, seaweeds, and forest plants. Not so geology. I looked at a field guide to rocks and minerals, but it was hard to...