Announcements
PSU awarded $1.9M NOAA grant to address microplastic pollution in coastal communities
Elise Granek, professor of environmental science and management and a UPP collaborator, is the project lead for a National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) three-year project that addresses microplastic pollution on the Oregon Coast. PSU was awarded $1,976,806 from the NOAA’s National Sea Grant Marine Debris Challenge Award Program to lead this project, which aims to push the boundaries of existing marine debris prevention and removal technologies, and transform research into tangible results. Congrats to Elise and her team!
PSU researchers awarded $310,000 Water Resources Research Act grant (104g General)
Congrats to Dr. Peyman Abbaszadeh, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, and his research team for securing funding as part of the Water Resources Research Act Program’s 104(g) General RFP. This funding stream is Abbaszadeh’s first grant as a PSU faculty member and will help continue the collaborative and valuable work between USGS and PSU.
2024 OLA/WALPA Joint Lakes Conference
The 2024 OLA/WALPA Joint Lakes Conference is October 9 to 11 at University Place and Conference Center. Registration is open now.
Partner Publications
In the paper “Working (around/within/against) prior appropriation: Diverse hydrosocial practices to secure water for rivers” professor of geography Alida Cantor and other PSU researchers discuss water allocation in the Western US and how water rights are primarily determined by Prior Appropriation. Also known as the ‘first in time, first in right’ principle, this legal doctrine states that the earliest user of water has the highest priority. The researchers use political ecology and diverse economies perspectives to consider the challenges of, and challenges to, prior appropriation.
Alida also contributed to the paper “Lithium and water: Hydrosocial impacts across the life cycle of energy storage” which discusses the considerable impacts lithium, a key ingredient of batteries for electric vehicles, has on water and society across its life cycle.
Kyla Zaret and Andres Holz studied how changes in fire patterns, combined with a warmer and drier climate, are impacting temperate rainforests and peatlands in their paper “Exploration of large-scale vegetation transition in wet ecosystems: a comparison of conifer seedling abundance across burned vs. unburned forest-peatland ecotones in Western Patagonia.” Zaret, a researcher at OSU’s Institute for Natural Resources, and Holz, associate professor of geography, found that frequent fires made it more difficult for these forests to recover, transforming these environments into non-forested wetlands.
USGS Hydrologist Brandon Overstreet contributed to the paper “Integrating Depth Measurements From Gaging Stations With Image Archives for Spectrally Based Remote Sensing of River Bathymetry” which introduces a novel remote sensing tool for mapping river bathymetry that does not require direct measurements. Bathymetric Mapping using Gage Records and Image Databases (BaMGRID) is a workflow that links existing data from river measurement stations to archived images to make depth estimations. The method worked well in two river basins, though accuracy varied depending on the images used. BaMGRID is currently most useful for specific areas, but more research is needed for larger-scale mapping.