The typical middle-aged woman takes care of everybody in her household except one — herself. The consequences of this benevolent self-neglect can be dire: chronic disease, even death.

Even the healthiest lifestyle can’t always prevent disease. Still, millions of wives, mothers and grandmothers could better fend off, or at least slow down, the ravages of diabetes, heart disease and stroke if only they could find the time (or make the time) to exercise and eat right. Professor Alexis Walker in OSU’s College of Health and Human Sciences is digging into the social and psychological reasons they can’t (or don’t). If she can identify barriers, she can help craft interventions that break them down.

Walker’s area of expertise, family dynamics, is the third prong of a cross-disciplinary OSU investigation into lifestyle choices among women who have been diagnosed with “metabolic syndrome” — a dangerous complex of risk factors that has reached epidemic levels in the United States. Tackling the first prong of the study, motivational interviewing, is Rebecca Donatelle in Public Health. The second prong, diet and nutrition, is being handled by Melinda Manore in Nutrition and Exercise Sciences (see “Energy Source,” for more on Manore).

“My role in the study,” says Walker, “is to pay attention to how women’s family lives and responsibilities limit their ability to make changes that would benefit their health.”

Afflicting fully one-quarter of middle-aged Americans, metabolic syndrome is the coexistence of high blood sugar, low HDL (“good”) cholesterol, elevated blood pressure and extra fat at the waistline. After menopause, women’s risks go up. So middle age is the “last window of opportunity” to head off illness, Walker stresses.

For women juggling jobs, kids, husbands and homes, going to the gym usually means dropping something else. And then there’s the eternal question, “What’s for dinner?” When the answer is, “spinach salad,” the groans can be heard in Missoula. In short, alterations in daily routines can gum up the works of domestic routines and expectations.

“Women feel they have to keep the machinery of their families running — the psychological machinery, the emotional machinery and the practical machinery,” Walker says. “So it’s very difficult to work out these kinds of changes.”

Walker’s research on the ways family members support, or fail to support, one another in everyday tasks and care-giving is the key reason she holds the Petersen Chair in Gerontology and Family Studies, endowed with a gift from JoAnne (“Jody”) Petersen, who grew up in Silverton, Oregon. The 1947 OSU graduate was inspired to endow the chair after sharing the in-home care of her elder parents with several siblings, Walker explains.

“This research is really about helping women to be self-caregivers,” she says. “I think this is just the sort of social science that Jody would absolutely applaud.”

Brian Wilson sorts through tangled wires to isolate a soil moisture sensor at the Andrews Forest. (Photo: Lina DiGregorio)

The science of mountain airsheds requires a strong back as well as a sharp mind — especially when you’re lugging a 65-pound golf-cart battery in your pack.

An interdisciplinary team of OSU students spent 10 weeks this summer scaling the steep slopes of H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest to enable researchers to unplug their high-tech gear — the sensors they use to study the ebb and flow of carbon-laden air through old-growth and second-growth landscapes. Their project, funded by the National Science Foundation, represents a new generation of ultra-low-power sensing devices and novel methods of “harvesting” power that save energy and vastly extend the range of existing equipment in mountainous terrain.

The three seniors — Drew Smith, Erin Wyckoff and Brian Wilson — pooled their individual expertise in electrical engineering, soil science and atmospheric science to test and refine a networked wireless system for monitoring what OSU’s Terra magazine calls the “exhaled byproducts of the forest” (see Grasping for Air). Their goal: to make those monster batteries obsolete in the Andrews. Thanks to their efforts, the miles of electric wire that currently snake through the experimental watershed in glistening black tangles will be relegated to the dustbin of technology.

“Wires are hard to work with,” says Adam Kennedy, the forest science faculty research assistant from Kennewick, Washington, who coordinated the team. “They degrade, animals chew through them, we trip over them. Battery-free wireless sensors offer a promising solution to these limitations. This could totally reshape the design of future research sites.”

For their project, the students used equipment ranging from scrounged (10-year-old temperature sensors scavenged from a professor’s storage cabinet) to super-sophisticated (a shiny new $18,000 soil-sampling machine with a robotic arm). Two or three times a week, they would set out from their labs on campus to the damp coolness of Oregon’s western Cascades. Rising into the lush understory of Watershed 1 is a 120-foot tower of steel that captures air quality data every 15 minutes, sending measurements to a nearby computer. An electronic “net” of other sensors throughout the watershed adds data on sap flow, soil moisture, solar radiation, wind speed and air temperature.

The research is novel in rugged terrain like the Andrews. That’s because most ecosystem sensing work has been done on flat ground, where impediments are fewer. But understanding mountain forests — which cover a significant percent of Earth’s surface — is becoming critical to investigations of climate-change dynamics. “I’m looking at how this research fits into the bigger picture of soil CO2 flux and global warming,” says Wyckoff. “At least 60 percent of Earth’s terrestrial carbon is held in the soil. It’s a huge part of the puzzle.”

Erin Wyckoff, Drew Smith and Brian Wilson (left to right) work together to configure a datalogger that records environmental information in Watershed 1 at the Andrews Forest. (Photo: Lina DiGregorio)

One typical workday in early August, Smith could be seen tapping away at his laptop as he crouched among ferns at the base of the creek bed, reprogramming a custom-fabricated circuit board — the “hub” of the integrated system. Dwarfed by Douglas fir, lulled by the burble of the crystalline stream, dappled by shadows and filtered sunlight, the electrical engineering major from Bozeman, Montana, pored over some 800 lines of computer code while Wilson and Wyckoff trekked the trails, positioning and repositioning the sensors in search of sweet spots that picked up signals. The crackle and pop of their handheld emergency radios broke the forest’s stillness as they communicated back and forth under the green canopy.

The team moved on. After scaling a nearby slope with the speed and agility of a mountain goat, Wyckoff turned her attention to the Andrews’ prized auto-sampler, a state-of-the-art machine that measures carbon flux in soil. The environmental science major from Gresham, Oregon, programmed the “brains” of the machine to work without wires. Instead of tramping across sensitive undergrowth to download data from probes that record moisture, decomposition, soil chemistry and other data, scientists will be able to tap readings remotely through handheld computers such as a BlackBerry or Palm Pilot.

Wilson’s task was to upgrade the Andrews’ air-sensing system, to gather vertical temperature and pressure profiles continuously and in real time. On a clear blue day, the environmental science major who grew up in Portland pumped helium into a bright orange plastic “blimp” the size of a minivan. With paperclips, he attached 10 sensors at intervals along the rope tethering the big balloon to the forest floor. Eventually, he will replace the rope with a fiber-optic temperature-sensing cable to more accurately measure the cold-air drainage that flows down the watershed each evening after the sun goes down.

Once researchers develop robust sensor networks that operate without wires and batteries, they will see a bump in efficiency, a drop in blisters and sweat and a decline in disturbance to the fragile forest ecosystem. With data more readily accessible, the mysteries of mountain forests will be easier to unravel.

Funding Note: The students’ work was made possible by a National Science Foundation REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) supplement to an ongoing interdisciplinary project involving the colleges of Forestry, Engineering and Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences.

Along the way, Goodman lived in Tokyo for an academic year, collaborated with OSU faculty members and set the stage for graduate work in computational linguistics. Not bad for a young man who taught himself computer programming at home, as he explains it, “just by messing around.”

The problem he tackled for his senior project stems from a fundamental difference between Japanese and English. “The Japanese language is different from English in the way pronouns — words such as he, she or they — are used. They exist in the language, but their use is less common than in English,” says Goodman. Instead, subjects in a Japanese sentence usually refer to the last proper noun mentioned in a conversation. This practice can make it hard for people, whose primary language is English, to keep track of whom or what is being discussed. In order to address this problem, Goodman has created a software solution that he calls Co-reference Resolution. The goal is to point a translation system to the subject in scanned Japanese text, increasing translation accuracy.

Goodman had help in bridging two disciplines: computer science and linguistics. His adviser in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Alan Fern, specializes in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Providing linguistics expertise was Setsuko Nakajima, a Japanese language specialist in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.

Writing the software code might seem daunting enough, but the biggest challenge to Goodman’s research was getting access to annotated articles in Japanese. “To get all the articles I needed to be able to create the program and make sure it works,” he says, “would cost about $1,200 to $1,500.” Fortunately, a search for expertise on the science and development of translation systems led Goodman to a specialist in natural language processing at New York University who shared copies of scanned Japanese articles that his students had already analyzed to determine the subjects of each sentence. Using those articles, Goodman was able to focus on writing his software code.

“Doing this project has forced me to think long and hard about linguistic analysis and processing in a language that’s not my mother tongue, and has exposed me to the challenges and obstacles and ways to overcome them,” says Goodman.

Over the past year, he conducted his research and programming while taking a full load of courses. He credits his hardworking attitude to his parents who own a floor covering business in Florence. Watching them, Goodman learned that commitment and perseverance can lead to success.

Goodman plans to complete his project over the summer and enter a master’s degree program in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington.

Now, the OSU senior and Honors College student from Beaverton, Oregon, is working her way toward a bachelor’s in physics, and she still has that same love for weather. Since she first learned about hurricanes, she has dreamed of studying these raging, destructive forces of nature.

For scientists, hurricanes are physics in action. So with support from a Research Experience for Undergraduates grant from the National Science Foundation, Johnson has been learning about atmospheric radiation, heat transfer and other phenomena, in addition to picking up some advanced mathematics. And she has refined her focus from the continental-scale forces that create storms to the boundaries of a single cloud, where dust, moisture and air currents collide.

“I wanted to learn how clouds form,” says Johnson, “and how the particles they form on affect cloud properties.” So under guidance from Associate Professor Cynthia Twohy in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, she has been getting an intimate look at the seeds on which clouds grow.

Her project is part of a federal research program known as the Rain in Cumulus over the Ocean experiment, or RICO. The goal is to understand the forces that create sub-tropical cumulus clouds, one of the globe’s most prevalent cloud types and a factor in the Earth’s energy balance and climate. Twohy is a principal scientist in RICO.

In a lab bathed in green light, Johnson inserts particle samples into a transmission electron microscope. “An instrument (mounted on an airplane) gathers particles from clouds, evaporating most, if not all, the water along the way” and depositing them on delicate membranes known as grids, she says.

The microscope’s X-ray beam reveals sea salt crystals and dust grains. Black balls of carbon are among the smallest. These particles of soot come from forest fires and fossil fuel combustion. Sulfuric acid is a common component, says Johnson, but it is so volatile that it tends to boil away under the beam.

“Kim’s research will determine whether clouds forming on these particles are different from clean marine clouds,” says Twohy. “This will help us learn how pollution affects cloud properties, one of the largest uncertainties in understanding climate change.”

By combining information about chemical composition with data on trajectory, temperature, wind speed and altitude, scientists can determine the source of the particles. Johnson is excited about her work because she is learning first-hand how the origin of an air mass affects cloud formation and why some clouds generate more rain than others.

“We’re finding that some air trajectories reaching the site are influenced by dust from Africa or pollution from North America or Europe,” Twohy adds.

Johnson’s research has changed the way she looks at the sky. “Clouds look so clean and white, and people think of them as just drops of water. But there’s so much more going on in them. The surface area and size of these particles affects how much water can condense and whether or not rain can form,” she says.

When she is done with a four-hour stint in the lab and isn’t working as a teaching assistant in a physics class, Johnson spends time with friends and family. She has plans for a winter wedding and intends to study meteorology next fall at the University of Arizona, where she aims to get back to her childhood dream of studying hurricanes.

The ocean shimmers to the curved rim of the Earth. Pressing her face against the jetliner window, Dawn Wright scans the azure expanse for a glimpse of her destination, a tiny volcanic archipelago that is barely a blip in the vast South Pacific. At 5,000 miles from Wright’s office at Oregon State University, American Samoa is closer to New Zealand than to Hawaii.

The year was 2001, and the geosciences professor was on her way to the outer reaches of Oceania to study a marine sanctuary with funding from the National Science Foundation’s POWRE (Professional Opportunities for Women in Research & Education) program. Using state-of-the-art sonar equipment mounted on a small survey boat, she and a team of oceanographers from the University of South Florida “pinged” clusters of sound beams into the crystalline waters of Fagatele Bay. The beams, fanning out from the echo-sounder, would hit the seafloor and bounce back. How fast depended on depth. These acoustic readings produced the sanctuary’s first precise seafloor map.

The mapping, though, was just one facet of the mission. As an international innovator in marine GIS — geographic information systems — the OSU professor was laying the groundwork for a sweeping storehouse of data about Samoa’s sanctuary. Science and policy-making are severely stymied, Wright points out, when data are skimpy and scattered as they are on this distant shore.

Despite Samoa’s unique isolation, it is not alone in its dearth of data. Wright sees this small tropical atoll, in fact, as a microcosm of a global deficit in comprehensive ocean information. The answer, she says, is a new era in ocean data management built on the “seamless merging” of data into a Web-based clearinghouse. But towering hurdles stand in the way. For one thing, ocean systems are immense and mostly hidden. For another, they span multiple dimensions of time and space. In ceaseless flux, their chemical, biological, physical and socioeconomic facets overlap and interact to create one of science’s most intractable puzzles.

“The three-dimensional nature of the marine domain, the temporal dynamics of marine processes and the hierarchical interconnectedness of marine systems grossly increase the complexity of developing and applying geospatial solutions to marine management questions,” Wright cautions in the 2005 book, Place Matters, which she co-edited with Astrid Scholz of Ecotrust.

Approximating Nature

In American Samoa, the need for data is acute. As the most remote of the U.S.’s 13 national marine sanctuaries, Fagatele Bay sees far fewer scientists than its sister sites, such as the Florida Keys and California’s Monterey Bay. Yet even here on the fringes of human habitation, in what might appear to be a pristine paradise, the marine ecosystem is in trouble. A voracious, coral-eating starfish species, the crown-of-thorns (Acanthaster planci alamea), ravaged the reef in the 1970s, killing 90 percent of the coral. It was this disaster, in fact, that spurred the site’s designation as a sanctuary. The bay’s tentative recovery suffered a setback in 1992 when Hurricane Val unleashed monstrous seas that scoured the reef, obliterating huge sections. Then in 1993-94, El Niño bathed Samoa in abnormally hot water for several months, bleaching out the reef’s pinks, reds, lavenders and yellows, leaving it bereft of color.

Rich and fragile ecosystems like Fagatele Bay can recover. But their return to health may be thwarted, scientists warn, by human actions. Pollution, development, over-fishing, dredging and shipping all impinge on the ocean’s regenerative processes. “One of the greatest threats currently facing Fagatele Bay, as well as much of Samoa’s coastal waters, is the depletion of fish stocks by the illegal use of gill netting, spearfishing, poison and dynamite,” Wright wrote in her 2002 book, Undersea with GIS. “In addition, the sanctuary staff is concerned about the potential for algal blooms with subsequent incidents of hypoxia (low oxygen) due to unchecked sewage outflow ‘upstream’ from the bay.”

Efforts to stop harmful practices are hindered by data gaps. Making the first-ever bathymetric (underwater) map of the Samoan sanctuary was a critical step in filling that gap. Wright has since led teams of scientists for subsequent studies funded by NSF and NOAA to map wider and deeper swaths of the area, and to collect photos and videos. Their discoveries include nine small underwater volcanoes, a dozen new fish species and several creatures previously unknown in Samoa, strange and startling animals such as the six-foot black-blotched stingray and the doughboy starfish (also known as a “lounge pillow”).

In the intervening years, Wright has relentlessly pushed her bigger vision: a revolution in data management across oceanography, geography and geology. The status quo — piecemeal, nonstandardized, fragmented data collections strewn among disparate agencies across disciplines and jurisdictions — simply isn’t adequate to address the global crisis in ocean health, Wright says.

A Web-based repository would capture data that describe the dimensions of time and space, from geologic time to real time, from the ooze of a million millennia to the vents and volcanoes that are bubbling and erupting right now, from the sunlit surfaces to the lightless depths. It would capture patterns and interactions, chains of predation, paths of migration. Winds, currents, tides, waves. Satellite signals, acoustic soundings, sediment cores, ice cores. Whale beachings, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, off-shore drilling.

When woven into an electronic tapestry, the clearinghouse would give scientists, resource managers, fishermen and conservationists fingertip access to simulated ocean systems from anywhere on earth.

A Mother’s Mantra

That these intricate, interlocking events and systems exist in 320 million cubic miles of saltwater sloshing across 70 percent of the planet doesn’t daunt Dawn Wright. That they take place within the constant flux of fluid, the never-ending heave, roll, pitch, yaw and swell that have been the undoing of many a landlubber, doesn’t spawn intimidation in her heart, but determination.

Wright’s intrepid spirit took hold early. Her sun-drenched Maui childhood, body surfing and boogie boarding in the frothy breakers, was wrapped in a relentless, sky’s-the-limit mantra from her mother, Jeanne, who taught speech at the University of Hawaii. “You can be anything you want to be,” she would tell her daughter, over and over.

At age 8, transfixed by the televised moon walk, Dawn briefly mulled a space career. But another TV experience tipped the scales toward ocean science: “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.” “I was riveted,” she says. And, as the waves surged relentlessly around her island home, she spent many afternoons reading deep-sea adventure stories. Captain Nemo, Robinson Crusoe, Long John Silver: these were the characters that filled her imagination. So no one was surprised when little Dawn switched dreams, from astronomy to oceanography.

She didn’t realize then that soaring miles above the Earth in a space capsule bears an eerie resemblance to sinking fathoms beneath the sea in a submersible. Both explorations take place in cramped, pressurized chambers launched into dark, inhospitable places where only advanced technologies can sustain human life. In 1991, as the first woman of color to dive in the three-person autonomous craft ALVIN, Wright watched as the filtered sunlight faded to total blackness outside her porthole and felt a kinship with the space travelers of her girlhood daydreams.

“When you go down in a submersible, it feels very much like being an astronaut,” she says. “You’re going through this alien world, but it’s inner space instead of outer space. It has that wild, exploratory feeling.”

With reefs dying and fisheries collapsing across the globe, a profound sense of urgency propels Wright’s energies, which have expanded from deepwater geology to near-shore ecology. Accurate predictions — and sound policy — about the “great blue engine” that powers the planet depend, she says, on getting the data right.

In the modern university, the academic and spiritual quests for understanding appear to be in conflict: the rational versus the mystical. The natural versus the supernatural. The intellectual versus the intuitive. Mind versus heart.

But these are false dichotomies, according to OSU English Professor Chris Anderson. The quest of the scholar, he argues, is the quest of the believer: the unraveling of life’s mysteries. And that quest begins in the same place: in story.

“Ideas emerge from experience,” he says. “Ideas are a result of reflection on the stories of our lives.”

Stories are as human as flesh and bone, Anderson posits in his 2004 book, Teaching as Believing: Faith in the University. In fact, the narrative of his own spiritual journey, which led him to take the vows of a Catholic deacon in middle age, forms the starting point for his treatise. He describes the setting of his re-conversion to Christianity, the bluff beyond Mt. Angel Abbey and Seminary in Oregon where he taught literature one sabbatical year, a time in his life when he was battling depression and burdened with disillusionment. He tells of walking along a “rutted road and then a path through the blackberry hummocks and dry grasses to an oak grove” where he often read and watched birds. “Sometimes,” he writes, “a downy woodpecker was going about its work in the branches. Chickadees bickered and fluted lower down.” One autumn day in this life-filled place, as he read Anglican theologian Andrew Louth’s Discerning the Mystery, Anderson suddenly understood how experience, faith and thought converge in the human search for truth. He still remembers “how the oak trees broke up the light” and “the smell of the dry grass” at that crystallizing moment — the moment he discerned that experience, as embodied in myth, allegory, poetry, parable, fairy tale, novel and scripture, is the locus of truth. The interpretations that arise from stories are our attempt to tap the truth within them. But only in the experiences themselves, experiences that bump up directly against life’s enigmas, does truth truly reside, he realized.

This insight, that “mystery gives rise to story gives rise to thought, in the words of theorist Paul Ricouer, is the pivot on which Anderson’s arguments turn.

The great literature of Western civilization includes the Judeo-Christian creation story, Genesis, and the first book of the New Testament, the Gospel of Mark. Noting that the Bible is “80 percent narrative,” Anderson stresses the open-endedness of these ancient tales. Like other classic works that Anderson’s students grapple with in his intro courses — Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Shakespeare’s Hamlet — the Bible tells raw, “naked” stories of struggle, loss, triumph, redemption. What those stories mean is left to the reader. Their many possible interpretations can be explored and debated within the community of a college class. Such critical reading is, after all, what universities are for, says Anderson. But stories embody truths that can’t finally be divorced from the words, the tales, themselves.

“In the end, the answer is that life is a mystery,” Anderson writes. “All that is durable is the search itself.”

Under the rosy glow of deep-red lights, a panel of tasters swirl, sniff and sip mystery beers from dark-red glasses. On rating sheets, they note hints of lemon, straw, tea, smoke, malt, soy, sulfide, even dirty sweat socks. The palate and the patience to parse these subtleties are qualities revered by craft brewers who, after all, rely on a discerning public to appreciate — and buy — their products.

But for some consumers, all this careful swirling and mouth swishing is for naught. That’s because marketing can be at least as important as masterful brewing in beer-drinkers’ choices, an OSU study found. Clever ad campaigns aimed at strategic niches can vault so-so beers to top-selling ranks, says Professor Tom Shellhammer, a fermentation scientist in the OSU Department of Food Science and Technology.

“Instead of finely adjusting the dials on flavor, aroma, foam and appearance, brewers might do as well or better by turning the levers to market their brand,” Shellhammer says.

The study was launched a few years ago when Widmer Brothers, Oregon’s biggest microbrewery, wanted a deeper understanding of the aromas and flavors favored by craft beer drinkers. So they hired an OSU team — master brewer Shellhammer, food sensory specialist Mina McDaniel and marketing professor Ulrich Orth of the College of Business — to investigate the qualities of its existing beers and several competing brands. They were also vetting a new Widmer brew still under development. The study was designed to overlay the likes and dislikes of regular beer drinkers on the judgments of trained tasters, a first for Widmer.

“OSU’s Sensory Science Laboratory allowed us to put actual consumer preferences together with technical taste attributes,” says Sebastian Pastore, Widmer’s vice president of brewing operations. “We were able to statistically link taste preferences of 300 consumers, whose demographics we specified, to the judgments of a trained panel of tasters. That was something we hadn’t done before.”

Besides discovering that some beers’ taste ratings failed to jibe with their popularity, the study turned up a strong consumer preference for a certain flavor array. Beers that rated high in “esters” — fruity compounds formed when acid reacts with alcohol — got the best marks from consumers. When mixed with malty and hoppy aromas and a bit of sweetness, estery beers were a hit with drinkers. On the flip side, certain other flavors bombed. Dimethyl sulfide (DMS), an organic compound containing sulfur, was a statistical loser among the consumers.

The OSU findings helped steer the crafting of Widmer’s new beer, both from a scientific and a marketing standpoint, according to Pastore. The result was Drop Top Amber Ale, a gold medalist at the 2004 Great American Beer Festival. Echoes of the OSU study show up on the Drop Top Web page in descriptors like “fruity aroma,” “honey malt” and a “touch of milk sugar.” And the marketing? The Drop Top bottle sports a wind-in-the-ears dog on a hip-and-breezy label. Promotional gear includes a dog collar with silver tags.

Drop Top hit the market like a greyhound hitting the racetrack.

“Widmer told us it was the most successful introduction of a new product they’d ever had,” Shellhammer reports.

Have you ever tried to imagine how the Willamette Valley will look when your grandchildren are grown?

Now you can go beyond imagining.

Three visions of the valley’s future are laid out in the Willamette Basin Explorer, which is part of a new family of Web sites called Oregon Explorer. Curious about the quality-of-life consequences of staying the current policy course? What if we loosened urban growth boundaries and relaxed zoning regulations? Instead, what if we made conservation our priority?

Critical questions like these can be explored quickly and easily at OSU’s digital library of natural resources, launched in June. Through Oregon Explorer, users can access the rich base of information that exists for Oregon’s diverse basins and ecoregions. The Willamette Basin Explorer, for instance, offers a graphic, full-color preview of three alternate scenarios created with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) maps. The impact of today’s land-use decisions on urban, rural, agricultural, forestry and natural lands shifts dramatically from one scenario to the next. Each map shows how today’s policies might play out on 2050’s landscape.

“Oregon Explorer empowers users to share information about natural resource issues and solutions,” says Janine Salwasser, Oregon Explorer co-manager at OSU Libraries. “This state-of-the-art digital library gives citizens, policy-makers, students and educators a place to come together for shared understanding and problem solving.”

Users can also venture to the North Coast and the Umpqua Basin portals. As Oregon Explorer unfolds it will encompass all of the state’s 15 major water basins. Another portal called the Wildfire Risk Explorer takes you to a rich trove of GIS data and local planning tools for fire prevention. Future portals will focus on land use, wildlife, wetlands, sustainable agriculture and climate change.

The site is a toolbox, too. Interactive maps let you zoom in and out as you explore a watershed or search for restoration opportunities. GIS tools let you create custom maps for use in presentations and reports by layering multiple data sets. A statistics reporting tool helps you generate charts, graphs and tables.

“Information about the status and trends of natural resources is invaluable to decision-makers but difficult to access because it is collected in diverse formats and housed in disparate locations,” notes Salwasser. “Oregon Explorer changes all that.”

Faces and voices bring life to this multimedia, place-based digital library, which was developed jointly by the OSU Libraries and OUS Institute for Natural Resources in partnership with the University of Oregon, Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, Oregon Department of Administrative Services and Edge Design. Photos, videos, satellite images, digital documents and engaging articles are also part of the mix.

“We want Oregon Explorer to be the ‘go-to’ place for natural resources information,” says program co-manager Jimmy Kagan of the Institute for Natural Resources.

Educating tomorrow’s electrical engineers has come to this: Teamwork, creativity and ownership are as important as the principles of theory and design. All get rolled into a box that first-year Oregon State University students receive in their introduction to the field. Inside are circuit and charger boards, wheels, a steel roller ball and assorted electrical components. Batteries and instructions are not included. Working in teams, students must put the parts together, learning leadership and problem-solving skills as they go.

These “TekBots” are far more than clever machines. They are the students’ companions through four years of lectures and labs. From course to course, year to year, students transform their TekBots with advanced electrical engineering concepts. Don Heer, director of the TekBots program, calls them a “platform for learning,” because they give students a strong base for their educational journey.

“The TekBots provide context and connectivity between topics,” says Terri Fiez, director of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “They give students the big picture.” Success arrives, she adds, when students get excited about an upcoming course that will help them solve a problem or add a new feature to their TekBot.

“It’s their own robot,” adds Heer. “They put their own money, their own time into it. It’s their personal expression of what they’ve done. It embodies their knowledge.”

Some students develop a fondness for their bot, giving it a name, such as Billy or Toby. Katy Humble called hers FlutterBot. The 2005 OSU graduate added motor-controlled wings and decorated them with lights. Her parents, Larry and Dona Nixon of Yachats, have put FlutterBot on the mantle like a trophy.

In 2000, Tektronix, the Beaverton, Oregon, high-tech manufacturer, gave OSU a $500,000 grant to start the program. Humble was part of the first corps of undergraduates hired to develop the kits. She worked as a teaching assistant, building her confidence as she gave classroom presentations and helped her peers solve problems.

“TekBots is all about debugging something that doesn’t work. It’s a constant problem in industry,” says Humble, who credits her TekBots experience with helping her to land a job with Intel in Hillsboro, Oregon. Today, she continues to mentor students with her employer’s full support.

Over the years, the students’ bots have taken on personalities. There was one that could balance on two wheels, like the Segway Human Transporter. Another morphed into a four-legged walking creature with individual motors controlling each appendage. And then there was the giant TekBot that grew to the size of a wheelbarrow.

And it is a program run substantially by students, Heer adds. “All of the labs have been made by undergraduates. All of the materials have been designed by undergraduates. All of the ‘TAing’ for the fundamental TekBots courses is done by undergraduates. It creates a culture where they are helping each other.”

The National Science Foundation and high-tech firms have supported the program, and OSU has sold kits to other universities, including Texas A&M, Rochester Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins, Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Fukuoka Institute of Technology in Japan.

The program has also fostered personal relationships. Katy Humble met her husband-to-be Ben while she was assembling TekBots kits. They married in 2006 and live in Beaverton, where Ben works for Tektronix.

“We say that TekBots brings people together,” laughs Ben. “That is really true for us.”

The next time you sip a glass of spring water, consider this: Before it got to your lips, that water was soaking through soil, creeping along basalt crevices or flowing through porous volcanic rock. It nurtured microbes, carried dissolved minerals and may have spread the byproducts of human activities. Its pivotal role in the environment has made groundwater a headline topic in human health, waste management and water supplies for growing communities.

One number — 924 million — indicates how vital groundwater is to Oregon. That’s the number of gallons that the U.S. Geological Survey estimates were pumped from Oregon’s aquifers on an average day in 2000. More than 80 percent went to agriculture, most for irrigation.

Large as that number is, it barely begins to tell the story. It is in the subsurface — difficult to see or measure — where the groundwater drama unfolds, and where water availability and purity are subject to the vagaries of geology. Here, uncertainty is a fact of life. And that’s where OSU mathematicians are focusing their efforts to improve the models — equations translated into software code — that help water managers predict the behavior of this unseen resource.

“We really don’t know what’s in the subsurface, and we never will know,” says Malgorzata Peszynska, associate professor in the Department of Mathematics. “You can run seismic waves through it and get a relative idea of how one layer is related to another layer. You can drill observation wells and collect data, but you still don’t know.”

Born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, Peszynska has been working to improve subsurface models for almost two decades. Her love of math goes back to her youth. Undaunted by the teacher who told her there was no future in mathematics for a woman, she received a Ph.D. in the subject at the University of Augsburg in Germany. Her dissertation focused on mathematical techniques for describing liquid flow through porous materials.

In 1994, an invitation to work with one of the field’s leading lights, Jim Douglas Jr. at Purdue, brought her to the United States. Before joining the OSU math department in 2003, she conducted research with Mary F. Wheeler at one of the nation’s leading centers for subsurface modeling, the Institute for Computational Engineering and Science at the University of Texas.

Now, with grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, she is working with students, postdoctoral researcher Son-Young Yi and co-principle investigator and math department chair Ralph Showalter to refine mathematical methods and develop new approaches for simulating groundwater flow.

The researchers are focusing on numerical and computer models. It goes without saying that these sets of equations are complex. They include terms for the velocity of water movement, the porosity and permeability of rock layers and the pressure exerted by water percolating into an aquifer from mountain ridges and other high places.

By simulating water flow through these systems, models can provide insight into how much water is available for human uses and other purposes, but complexity carries a cost. It can add days or weeks to computing time, even on today’s fast computers, such as OSU’s 73-dual-processor SWARM machine in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

So the research team’s goal is to develop techniques that can achieve higher accuracy and run in less time. One approach is to simplify details that, in the final analysis, are marginal. That is, they don’t make the model significantly more accurate. The result is what researchers call an “upscaled” model.

“For example,” Peszynska says, “in fractured materials (bedrock), we know there are periodic structures separating blocks of clay (or other impervious materials). Instead of trying to simulate the flow at this scale, we try to come up with an upscaled model of this kind of phenomenon.” The goal is a solution that is close to the original model but does not require as much computational power.

Another goal is to link models that operate at one level — water movement through sand grains, for example — to those that work over a broader scale, such as an entire watershed from mountain ridge to valley floor.

“The use of models that are suitable for laboratory experiments to describe processes on the scale of a watershed will bring any computer to its knees,” says Showalter. “We’re trying to connect information at the microscale to the big picture, and for that we need new mathematical systems that at least give the computers a chance.”

Other OSU faculty members are working on related problems. In the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, Dorthe Wildenschild conducts experiments to understand how fluids behave in the spaces between sand grains. She and Ph.D. student Mark Porter use high-performance X-ray tomography at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois to see how air mixes with drops of oil and water in such tight quarters. The speed of these interactions is a critical factor in treating groundwater contaminated by toxic chemicals.

Meanwhile, the speed of model simulation is a factor in the research. “We fly out to Chicago and do the pore-scale experiments in three to four days,” says Wildenschild. “It takes Porter several months to run an equivalent simulation at that small scale on the high-performance computer (SWARM) here on campus.”

In the same department, Brian Wood has worked with Peszynska, Showalter, Enrique Thomann and Ed Waymire in math to characterize groundwater flow in porous materials. Wood focuses on the application of upscaling to the subsurface and to engineered porous systems such as chemical reactors, bioreactors in wastewater plants and sand filters used to clean drinking water. Wildenschild, Wood and other OSU engineers are also collaborating with scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Lab in Richland, Washington.

The OSU research couldn’t come at a better time. The need for better models is growing, says Michael Campana, a hydrogeologist and director of OSU’s Institute for Water and Watersheds. Officials who manage water supplies in places such as Oregon’s Klamath, Umatilla and Willamette basins, need to predict availability as demand grows and climate conditions change.

Models are useful approximations of the real world, says Campana, but “uncertainty can stem from the data or from imperfections in the model. It’s a real problem, and it’s getting worse. People are using models to look further into the future. Water managers are increasingly asking what a changing climate will mean for their water resources in 50 years or more. If we give them a number and tell them it could be 30 percent more or less, that’s not good enough.”

Optimism and a can-do attitude attracted the OSU Rural Studies Program, the Ford Institute for Community Building and the University of Oregon to take a closer look at indicators of rural health in the Coquille Valley. (Photo: Patrick Satterfield)

In late April, lush vegetation hems the Coquille Valley in hues of emerald and chartreuse and the forest-greens of Douglas fir. The fertile earth, alive with new growth, suggests vitality and prosperity.

On Main Street, the truth is more complicated than that.

Like so many rural Oregon communities, the small towns snuggled against timbered hills in this southwest Oregon valley have seen their economic base shrink alarmingly. Two-thirds of their once-thriving dairy farms have gone out of business in recent decades. New forest policies have forced small timber outfits up and down the river to adapt or die. And, with the Pacific Ocean breaking just 15 miles to the west, collapsing fisheries have harmed yet another vital economic sector here.

Yet the three neighboring communities of Coquille, Myrtle Point and Powers, dotted along the Coquille River southeast of Coos Bay, have faced these downturns in farming, fishing and logging with remarkable optimism, says Tom Gallagher, director of the Ford Institute for Community Building. So they stood out when the institute was trying to find places ripe for renaissance. The communities also impressed graduate students in OSU’s Rural Studies Program, who visited the valley as part of a seminar on rural sustainability, jointly offered with the University of Oregon. Like Gallagher, the students were struck by the fiercely determined, forward-looking leadership there.

“They have great passion and enthusiasm,” says Laura Rose Misaras, a Coquille native and a student in the inter-university seminar, which grew out of an OSU research project funded by the Ford Institute.

The valley’s diverse, energetic leadership helps immunize it against curmudgeons. That’s the term Gallagher gives to residents who’ve dug in to a dying way of life. Sarcasm and incivility can be their shields against an uncertain future. When curmudgeons run things, communities are poor candidates for change, says Gallagher, who was a leadership development specialist with OSU Extension before joining the Ford Institute, an initiative of the Roseburg-based Ford Family Foundation. The leadership training and small grants that the institute offers to rural communities in Oregon and Northern California’s Siskiyou County are reserved for places like the Coquille Valley, places that embody the institute’s core values of civility, tradition, creative change, hope and action.

“We’re just a catalyst for change, a convener,” says Gallagher, who lent his expertise to the OSU-UO seminar. “If local people hunker down, we can’t help them. They have to believe in their future. They have to own it.”

Collective Vision

The graduate students took this bottom-up philosophy as a mandate. Their experiential course, taught last fall by professors Bruce Weber and Brent Steele (OSU) and Michael Hibbard (UO), is emblematic of the OSU Sustainable Rural Communities Initiative, which Weber coordinates. In partnerships with local leaders statewide, Weber and his colleagues exchange ideas and expertise. Their goal: improved environmental, economic and social well-being in rural communities. When the students set out to identify “indicators” of the Coquille Valley’s well-being, they were guided by Weber’s oft-spoken words: “Well-being is universal, but it is also a locally defined concept. You have to learn from local people what well-being means to them.”

So, as their guiding framework, they used the community’s collective vision, which is embodied in an official grassroots statement of pride and progress. They also took a field trip to the valley, where they met local leaders and saw such assets as the state-of-the-art water filtration system, the regional bank headquarters, the logging museum and the OSU Extension offices.

The seminar required the fledgling social scientists to find indicators of the “triple bottom line” — economic, environmental and social well-being — as well as institutional health. They studied the history of the indicators movement and scoured case studies from across the U.S. (Sustainable Seattle and Missoula Measures, for example) and from around the globe (Zurich, Hong Kong, New Zealand).

Then, one snowy night in late November, distilling all possible indicators through the filter of the Coquille Valley’s goals and values, the four groups, one for each indicator, presented their recommendations to Gallagher and Rita Conrad, director of the Oregon Progress Board. The slick roads prevented invited leaders from Coquille from attending.

“Well-being is universal, but it is also a locally defined concept. You have to learn from local people what well-being means to them.”

Bruce Weber

“After doing an analysis of the Coquille Valley’s vision statement and meeting with the residents, we narrowed the field of possible indicators to five general areas, based on local values: youth retention, friendliness/neighborliness, housing costs/affordability, civic participation/volunteerism and commute time,” said Nora Cronin, a master’s student from Chicago, who led the social indicators group. Conceding that measuring qualities such as neighborliness would be tough, given their subjectivity, the group suggested surveys to measure such indicators as summer work opportunities for youth, civic participation levels, housing costs divided by a local “affordability” factor, and “return migration” figures — that is, how many young people come back to live in the community after college or trade school.

Not surprisingly, the students’ recommendations included such commonly used indicators as median household income, unemployment rates and educational attainment. But novel indicators outnumbered the old standbys. These included: number of young residents trained for locally available jobs; growth in nonextraction jobs; volunteerism in schools and nonprofits; client satisfaction with local agencies; involvement in such organizations as food banks and art associations; and level of church collaboration with the wider community.

In the end, the project was a three-way learning loop. The students, the community and the Ford Institute all gained insights from one another. Gallagher, who is developing a master list of critical rural indicators for the institute, says the students’ applied research validated his own work. It also gave him leads for new indicators and prompted him to add institutional indicators (such as “perception of local schools”) to his mix.

“The seminar,” he says, “confirmed that we were on the right track.”

Air flowing through mountain valleys carries clues about forest health. New monitoring and analytical methods may also improve understanding of the global carbon cycle. (Illustration: Christina Ullman)

Under a blue sky in mid-March, an Oregon State University research team left Corvallis to collect data in a valley deep in Oregon’s western Cascades. The two-hour ride to the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest gave the technicians and graduate students time to catch up before arriving at the facility’s headquarters near Blue River. They would need their energy for what lay ahead.

Their destination was a place known on the Andrews map as watershed 1. Its 60-degree slopes reach almost 1,500 feet from valley floor to ridge. Equipped with lunches, laptops and emergency radios, computer modeler Dave Conklin, technician and graduate student Adam Kennedy and other members of the team drove to the top of the watershed and descended into the forest through dark thickets of ferns, downed wood and moss covered rocks. Once they found the six temperature sensors (known as “HOBOs”) that had been set in a line down the mountain, they checked each HOBO’s battery and downloaded three months worth of data. At lower elevations, graduate student Claire Phillips collected data in soil plots that had been wired and plumbed to monitor temperature, moisture, root growth and CO₂ production. Despite the cool temperatures, this was sweaty science, a cycle of rigorous bushwacking followed by meticulous routine.

It was a typical day at the office for Andrews Forest researchers. Over the years, scientists here have hoisted themselves with climbing ropes high into the tree canopy, launched tons of soil and rock down a “debris flow flume” and spent sleepless nights observing boulder-tossing floods and recording wildlife behavior. Their results (described in the OSU Press book, The Hidden Forest, by Jon Luoma) have recast the national debate over old-growth forests, northern spotted owls, storm-generated erosion and other aspects of forest management. In watershed 1, they hope to create a new way to monitor mountain forests, which play a poorly understood but important role in the carbon cycle and climate system.

Since 2003, with support from a National Science Foundation grant, OSU scientists have been sampling the air in this watershed and in a neighboring valley. The latter is home to 450-year-old stands of Douglas fir and hemlock. In contrast, watershed 1 was clearcut in the mid-1960s to test the long-term effects of tree removal on ecosystem processes. Its young fir, hemlock and red alder already reach 80 to 120 feet high.

OSU oceanographer Jack Barth and colleague Patricia Wheeler discovered a Jet Stream “wobble” that may be responsible for changes in wind patterns and ocean productivity. What’s behind the phenomenon is unclear. (Photo: Jim Folts)

In his 32 years as a crab fisherman off the central Oregon coast, Al Pazar has pulled up a lot of strange things in his pots: wolf eels, skates, huge starfish, fossilized rocks, octopi, fish that rarely stray south of Alaska, and others that prefer the warm subtropical waters off Mexico. But until July 2002, he had never yanked up a pot full of dead Dungeness crabs.

“At that moment,” he says, “I was absolutely shocked.”

At first Pazar blamed himself, figuring he had done something wrong in baiting or placing his pots, though he couldn’t come up with a rational cause. By the time he pulled up a second pot of dead Dungeness, his shock gave way to anger. His thought? Someone must have soaked a forest in herbicides and the toxin had floated down the Alsea River and out to sea, poisoning one of his favorite crabbing spots.

By the end of the day, Pazar’s anger had been replaced by recognition that something was happening out there. He admits a feeling of fear as he contemplated his livelihood. Dungeness crabs, he says, are the lifeblood of Oregon’s fishing industry. Coastal communities already rocked by closures and restricted seasons for salmon and groundfish would blow away in the Pacific wind without the economic stability provided by the tasty Dungeness.

That night, Pazar called state officials to report his find.

The System Shifts

For eons, ocean conditions have literally changed with the wind, but in the last decade, marine scientists have seen extraordinary shifts off the West Coast. From a powerful El Niño in 1997-98 that warmed near-shore waters and starved the marine food web to the “super-charged” upwelling event of 2006 that nearly choked the system with blooms of plankton, the waters off Oregon have become a unique laboratory drawing international attention.

The central Oregon coast has been plagued by hypoxia, or extremely low levels of oxygen in the water, for each of the last five years. The die-off of bottom-dwelling creatures Pazar first experienced in 2002 has continued each summer, with last year’s episode the largest yet.

At the 2007 national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Oregon State University Professor Jack Barth told the assembled scientists that these changes are consistent with global warming models. “But,” he said, “it’s still too early to say what we’ve experienced is the result of climate change. There are a lot of natural cycles out there that we don’t fully understand.

“On the other hand,” Barth added, “we’ve never before seen such dramatic change in such rapid fashion.”

A physical oceanographer in OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Barth has specialized in the California Current, a complex system that extends from Oregon to Baja. Reaching more than 600 miles offshore, it comprises surface waters that flow south, deep water that flows north and meandering eddies that have puzzled researchers for decades.

The bountiful Pacific provides us with salmon, halibut and tuna from the “upper trophic” level of a biological food web that is maintained through complex physical oceanic and atmospheric processes. The key ingredient in this recipe for productivity is the wind. But the process for fueling this dynamic begins with another Oregon staple — rain.

When Oregon rivers rise during winter rains, they leach iron from surrounding rocks and transport it to the ocean where it fertilizes the marine food system. OSU oceanographer Zanna Chase and her colleagues have sampled water from Oregon rivers in the winter and found iron levels roughly 1,000 times higher than in samples of seawater. This river-born iron gets pushed out onto the continental shelf, which acts as a “capacitor,” Chase says, storing the element for the upwelling season.

“Oregon has more rain, more rivers and a wider continental shelf to store the iron than California. That explains why our stretch of ocean is so much more biologically productive than theirs. Our productivity isn’t limited by a lack of iron, whereas the waters off central and southern California are iron-starved by comparison,” Chase explains.

Scientists who study marine food webs may look at Oregon with a sense of iron-envy. A lack of iron in many parts of the world’s oceans, particularly in the open seas, is a limiting factor in biological productivity. Still, experiments “fertilizing” the seas with iron have met with mixed results.

In Oregon, such additions are hardly necessary. When north winds begin blowing in the spring, they drive the surface water offshore, a process that pulls deep nutrient-rich water to the surface near the coast. Thus the season of “upwelling” begins with fertilization of the upper water column. In the presence of sunlight, nutrients trigger blooms of microscopic plant life (phytoplankton), which in turn are eaten by a variety of miniscule animals (zooplankton), which are consumed by sardines, herring and candlefish. Waiting in line are the higher echelon predators, including salmon and tuna.

As the phytoplankton and zooplankton die, their remains sink to the bottom and provide additional fertilizer for the ocean system to replenish itself. Sometimes, however, that system can break down.

When Things Go Haywire

In 1997-98, a powerful El Niño raised water temperatures along the West Coast. Nutrient levels decreased, biological production dropped, and species from zooplankton to salmon either disappeared, were drastically cut back or moved from their typical habitats. The El Niño capped what had been a series of years through the 1990s characterized by warm waters and weak upwelling.

That “warm-water regime” ended abruptly in 1998, and the California Current shifted into another extreme. For the next four years the waters off the West Coast were much colder than usual. Upwelling was strong, biological productivity was healthy, and salmon runs began rebounding. At the end of 2002, an unprecedented surge of cold, nutrient-rich sub-Arctic water flowed southward into the region.

“It triggered massive phytoplankton production in surface waters,” Barth says, “and as the organisms decayed and sank to the bottom, they sucked the oxygen out of the lower water column. That was our first experience with hypoxia leading to die-offs of crabs and other marine life.”

In that pivotal year of 2002, OSU was leading a four-institution research effort called the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans, or PISCO, that was funded primarily by the Packard and Moore foundations and OSU alumnus Robert Lundeen to look at near-shore processes. Barth and OSU colleagues Jane Lubchenco, Bruce Menge and Francis Chan (Department of Zoology) came to the same realization that Pazar had — something was happening out there.

With the flexibility of private funding, they assembled an interdisciplinary team to closely monitor the physical conditions of the hypoxic zone in a region that extends into the Pacific from Lincoln City to Florence along the central Oregon coast. The researchers used moorings and ship-based instruments to record measurements of temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen and water chemistry. They used satellite images to look at the ocean’s “skin,” or surface, to analyze the blooms of phytoplankton. Technology was an ally.

During the next two years the research team identified milder hypoxic events, and the scientists felt they were beginning to understand how the system worked. And then in 2005, things went haywire once again. The winds that trigger spring upwelling were late in arriving by a month. Near-shore waters were 2 degrees warmer than usual, and chlorophyll levels in the surf zone went down by 50 percent.

“It was the lowest ‘wind stress’ for favorable upwelling in the region in at least 20 years,” Barth says. “The winds eventually picked up and upwelling began, but it was too late for some species that depended on those nutrients. The lesson we learned is that it isn’t just the direction and strength of the wind that matters; timing is critical, too.”

Their focus on the wind led to two key discoveries. The first was that wind patterns have been shifting over the past few years. Two decades ago, for example, it was typical to see two to five days in a row of persistent winds, followed by a similar period of calm. During the past decade, however, those oscillations have been on the order of 20 to 40 days, Barth says.

“Wild fluctuations in the timing and intensity of the winds that drive the system are wreaking havoc with the historically rich ocean ecosystems off the West Coast.”
Jane Lubchenco

These longer wind patterns can lead to a major delay in upwelling, as in 2005, or a “super-charged” upwelling, as happened in 2006. Last year, the upwelling winds were so favorable that the system became choked, according to Chan. Phytoplankton blooms were everywhere. And eventually, the organisms had to sink to the bottom, where their decay led to the largest hypoxic event the West Coast had yet seen. Some 3,000 square kilometers of the continental shelf along the Oregon coast were affected.

“It was literally too much of a good thing,” Chan says. “And one of the most eye-opening aspects was how long it lasted. We used to think we knew how fast hypoxia dissipated — until last year. The winds just didn’t have a southern component, so we got all upwelling and no downwelling. The pool of low-oxygen water just kept growing and growing, and it took weeks for it to flush itself out.”

The multi-week wind patterns had struck again, leading the researchers to confirm their second discovery. Barth and a colleague, OSU Distinguished Professor Patricia Wheeler, had led a recently completed National Science Foundation study off central Oregon that identified a “wobble” in the Jet Stream that they suspected was leading to these new longer wind patterns. This high-altitude air stream circles the globe and flows toward the West Coast of the United States. In recent years, Barth says, its path has begun shifting, and when it migrates slightly to the south, it delays the upwelling. A shift to the north may lead to stronger upwelling and potentially severe hypoxic events, as well. Barth and his team are working to confirm evidence that in 2006 it migrated north and led to one of the strongest upwelling events they have seen — and the largest hypoxic event, as well.

Why the wobble?

“That’s one reason we need to continue studying our oceans and atmosphere,” Barth says. “We don’t have all the answers yet.”

More Eyes and Ears

Al Pazar isn’t convinced that the ocean is broken. In each of the years following hypoxic events, the chairman of the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission has returned to his crabbing grounds and enjoyed strong harvests. He says there is much we don’t know about the ocean’s natural cycles and points to the surprising return of sardines to Oregon, where they have mostly been absent for the past 75 years.

“I don’t believe all the doom and gloom I see in the press,” Pazar says. “I’ve fished through all of the ‘dead zones,’ and had better-than-average years after each one. Crabs aren’t stupid. They have legs. And they’ll use them to get the hell out of there if they can.”

Then he paused. And sighed.

“There is still a lot we don’t know,” he admits. “Do you know that the state of Oregon doesn’t even have a crab biologist? We need to study the Dungeness and see where they go and how they respond when this stuff happens.”

The OSU researchers agree and say scientific observations need to be expanded well beyond Dungeness crab. Since West Coast conditions turned extreme a decade ago, sea birds have died, salmon runs have yo-yoed up and down, mussel and barnacle juvenile recruitment has suffered, and the entire system of ocean productivity seemingly changes from year to year.

“The ocean may be losing its ability to replenish itself, to re-cleanse itself. There is real potential we may push it too far before we realize what we’re doing.”

Jack Barth

More than the marine food web is at stake. The Pacific Ocean plays a major role in balancing the Earth’s carbon dioxide, says OSU oceanographer Burke Hales.

“The ocean off Oregon alone annually negates the effects of about 100 million tanks of gasoline feeding greenhouse gas discharges into the air,” Hales says. “Phytoplankton blooms draw the CO₂ out of the atmosphere and consume it, then sink to the bottom and die. We think they are transported to the deep ocean, in which case the carbon dioxide will stay there for a thousand years.

“But if they decompose on the shelf,” he adds, “the CO₂ will just return to the atmosphere, and we don’t have the carbon ‘sink’ we think we do.”

The bottom line, Barth says, is that Oregon needs a coordinated, comprehensive ocean observing system instead of a piecemeal approach. He and colleague Kipp Shearman operate three undersea gliders that cost $100,000 apiece. “We need 10 to cover the near-shore from Brookings to Astoria,” he says.

The gliders complement moorings, buoys, satellites and ships, Barth says, but the state needs more instruments, more coordination and more human resources to keep its collective eyes and ears on the ocean. The beneficiaries will be commercial and recreational fishermen, boating enthusiasts, Coast Guard rescue teams, coastal residents and others, he adds.

OSU is uniquely positioned to lead the effort. Scientists in four OSU colleges conduct marine research, and the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences alone competed successfully for $24.3 million in research grants in FY2006. Marine science facilities at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport include two research ships, the Wecoma and the Elakha. The Corvallis campus hosts the world’s largest tsunami wave tank and a premier marine supercomputing network. In a regional project, Oregon Sea Grant is working with Sea Grant programs in California and Washington on a first-ever marine resource management plan for the West Coast.

If the dramatic changes continue in our section of the Pacific Ocean, those assets will become invaluable.

“Wild fluctuations in the timing and intensity of the winds that drive the system are wreaking havoc with the historically rich ocean ecosystems off the West Coast,” Jane Lubchenco said at the 2007 AAAS meeting. “As climate continues to change, these arrhythmias may become more erratic. Improved monitoring and understanding of the connection between temperatures, winds, upwelling and ecosystem responses will greatly facilitate capacity to manage those parts of the system we can control.”

“We’re seeing more and more ecosystem effects,” Barth adds. “As the system swings from one extreme to another, it may become less resilient. The ocean may be losing its ability to replenish itself, to re-cleanse itself. There is real potential we may push it too far before we realize what we’re doing.

“And the only way to prevent that,” he argues, “is by observing what is happening out there. When the world wanted to understand El Niño, it put a massive array of instruments on the equator. If we put the same amount of resources and will into studying our coastal ocean’s productivity and carbon, we can make real progress.”

Often getting up before sunrise to attack the hills rimming Corvallis, Professor Melinda Manore has overcome injuries from a skiing mishap and a car accident in her quest to stay active. Exercise, she says, keeps her mentally and physically fit. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

The mixed messages blare at every grocery checkout: supermodels smiling seductively from magazines that push chocolate-cake recipes and weight-loss tips on the same page. No wonder millions of American females struggle with food and body image, laments OSU Professor Melinda Manore.

The health of women across the age and activity spectrums — from teenage Olympic athletes to middle-aged pre-diabetics to elderly arthritis sufferers — is at the heart of Manore’s research in the dual sciences of nutrition and exercise. The broad question that drives her is, “How can we be healthy women and be happy with our bodies?” For answers, she looks at levels both micro and macro: chemical (micronutrients, hormones), physical (bone density, metabolic efficiency), motivational (lifestyle changes, food choices), even societal (family habits, media messages).

“Thirty years ago, if you saw a glamorous woman on a magazine cover, it was a head shot,” she says. “Now, it’s full-body — with nothing on. These young girls see these photos and think they should look like that, too.”

When she began her career a quarter-century ago, only a handful of researchers were investigating the linkages between eating and exercising. Back then, the two fields were rarely paired. So in 1984, the year she earned her Ph.D. in nutrition at OSU with a minor in exercise science, she was at the forefront of a movement. As obesity and diabetes galloped across America over the next couple of decades, the need for more research became acute. Investigating the interactions of food and movement has, at last, come into its own as a discipline.

“There’s been this whole turnaround,” she says. “Finally, we’ve gotten together.”

Besides coauthoring four top-selling textbooks, publishing 100-plus papers and articles in refereed journals, and holding the associate editorship of the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health and Fitness Journal from 1998 to 2006, Manore works with Oregon Health and Science University’s Department of Medicine through an OSU-OHSU research exchange.

Good Vibrations

Manore’s studies span vastly different demographics: from elite speed skaters to self-professed couch potatoes; from limber gymnasts to stiff-limbed grandmothers; from athletes with eating disorders to Hispanics with diabetes.

Some of her most notable research is in the “female athlete triad” — how the synergy of sports, hormones and bone growth affects the health of girls and women. The 2002 Winter Olympics were, for Manore and one of her graduate students — Nanna Meyer, a former racer on the Swiss National Ski Team — a rare chance to study this all-important triad in top winter sport athletes. Meyer headed to Salt Lake City, legendary for its dry powder, to compare the bone densities of skiers, bobsledders and skaters against those of ordinary college women. It turned out that all the athletes who rocket down icy mountains at breakneck speeds — whether on skis, boards or sleds — had denser bones than the control subjects.

This first-ever bone study among winter athletes — a collaboration among Manore, Meyer and University of Utah researcher Janet Shaw — suggests that winter sports provide beneficial “loading patterns:” physical forces that stress the skeleton in ways that promote mineral growth. These bone-loading patterns include “mechanical loading” (impact from jumping or pounding) and “vibration loading” (stress from vibrating).

The sliding sports (luge, bobsleigh, skeleton) topped all events for whole-body bone density, the data revealed. It might seem improbable that a luger could build a better set of bones than a speed skater. One rips down the ice, toes-first, while lying flat on her back. The other attacks the ice on her feet, pumping and gliding, pumping and gliding. But the research team wasn’t all that surprised.

“Recent work on animals,” the researchers wrote in the September 2004 issue of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, “has shown that vibration loading, imposing low-magnitude, high-frequency mechanical signals, can increase bone formation.” The Utah Olympics study, along with ongoing studies in OSU’s Biomechanics Laboratory, have added important human-subject evidence to the research base on skeletal vibration.

Hormones are the third prong of the triad. That’s because when young women’s diets are dangerously low in calories, menstruation can stop. “Hormone production goes flat, just as if the women were starving,” Manore explains. “You see this all the time in third-world countries; when there’s not enough food, the women stop menstruating. It’s a protective effect so they don’t get pregnant, because they can’t sustain a child if there’s no food.”

This hormonal shutdown can, along with poor energy and dietary nutrient intakes, suppress bone growth. In developed countries like the U.S., food abundance is a greater problem than shortage. Here, the girls and women most vulnerable to “ammenorhea” (no periods) are typically those who take extreme measures to shed pounds: strenuous dieters, disordered eaters, gymnasts, dancers and other athletes driven to extreme thinness. Over five or six years, a young woman can end up with “bones that look like an old woman’s,” reports Manore, who served on the International Olympic Committee for Gymnastics from 1996 to 2000. “So now, you have a 20-year-old with a hip fracture — or worse. It’s an issue for coaches; it’s an issue for parents. When a girl gets into eating disorders, I’m sorry, but you can lose her.”

Some protection against skeletal damage is provided by intense, bone-loading exercise, the Utah study suggests. In the short term, denser bones mean fewer fractures. In the long term, they fend off postmenopausal osteoporosis.

Getting enough of the B-vitamins, which are important for energy metabolism and blood formation, is another pitfall for women. Healthy levels of vitamin B-6 and riboflavin — essential nutrients found in the so-called “B-complex” — can succumb to the quest for a svelte physique. As with the female triad, athletes who shun calories are at risk, as are those who avoid meat or dairy foods, Manore and former doctoral student Kathleen Woolf reported in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism in October 2006. For her doctoral research Woolf, who is now at Arizona State University, examined the B-vitamin status and requirements of older active women with rheumatoid arthritis, a disease that compounds the risk of B-vitamin deficiency in later years.

The deep complexity of the exercise/nutrition/health dynamic was highlighted yet again in a 2006 OSU study centered on a compound unfamiliar to most Americans: homocysteine. Its cousin, cholesterol, has become a household word. Fretting over one’s ratio of LDL-cholesterol to HDL-cholesterol is practically a national pastime. Yet few Americans are versed in homocysteine, even though the compound was discovered decades ago, and scientists have long since linked high levels to cardiovascular disease.

Scientists are still unraveling homocysteine’s secrets. Manore and her Ph.D. student Lanae Joubert have found that blood levels vary in surprising ways. For example, it appears that some types of exercise, especially high-intensity exercise like running a marathon, increase blood levels of homocysteine, while others do not. Joubert’s research was designed to decipher how physical activity and diet interact to alter blood homocysteine levels. She wanted to find out, too, if individuals who exercise hard need more B-vitamins, which help to keep blood homocysteine low.

“Being physically active does not necessarily equate to a healthier nutritional status,” the OSU researchers warn in the international journal. Active individuals may, they caution, lack essential nutrients right along with sedentary people — a deficit that “may influence homocysteine levels independent of the amount, intensity or type of exercise.”

Zealot for Health

Watching people make unhealthy lifestyle choices clearly pains Manore. From her previous office in Milam Hall, she had a direct view of the elevator. “I cannot tell you how many people, including students, used that elevator instead of walking up the stairs,” she reports. “I wanted to put up a big sign: ‘for disabled and delivery only.’ Or, because it was a really creaky old elevator, ‘use at your own risk.’”

As she tells this story, the frustration in her voice leaves no doubt: For her, healthy living goes deeper than professional interest. Hard work, whole foods and fresh air are in her blood. She was raised on a farm in the shadow of the Rockies. Getting up with the roosters to help gather eggs in the 5,000-chicken barn was her task as far back as she can remember. On the family’s Montana acreage, the lowing of cows, the bleating of sheep and the clucking of hens were the sounds of self-sufficiency. “Where I grew up, you raised your own food, you baked your own bread, you churned your own butter,” she says. “You didn’t go to the store. You didn’t eat out. Everything you did for activity — skiing, hiking, riding horses, gardening — was outdoors.”

Manore’s salt-of-the-earth Montana girlhood is intact even today. Her salad bowls and pasta platters brim with the tomatoes, peppers and basil she grows in her Corvallis garden. Her kitchen is a lab, of sorts, where she experiments with maximizing the fiber content in her home-baked muffins and with cooking dishes that typically veer in creative (but always nutritious) directions. And she panics when the grainy breads baked weekly by her husband are getting low. Her approach toward commercial bread — toward any processed food, in fact — is to leave it in the supermarket along with those airbrushed magazine covers. She’s careful, however, to avoid sounding extreme.

“I’m not the food police,” she insists. “I like chocolate and desserts, just like anyone else. I just think you need to eat them in moderation.”

Making healthy choices doesn’t need to mean self-deprivation and sacrifice, Manore argues. Rather, those choices can become preferences. You might find that you prefer the grilled chicken on whole wheat instead of the double-stack cheeseburger. You might enjoy a hike in the forest over a trek through the mall. “Instead of forcing you to give up your favorite things,” she says, “a healthy lifestyle can become your favorite thing.”

Bridging the gap between scientists and the public — between laboratories and living rooms, kitchens, playgrounds, malls, parks, workplaces — is Manore’s main focus these days. With her doctoral students, she is studying ordinary people facing ordinary problems: middle-aged moms who care for young children and elder parents but forget to care for themselves; Hispanic pre-diabetics in need of culturally appropriate interventions; active 40-something women whose nutrient status is poor despite regular exercise; elderly arthritis sufferers, some active, some not.

“The question is, How do you change your lifestyle for the rest of your life?” Manore says. “You don’t have to become a marathon runner. You just have to start moving more and making better food selections.”

• Melinda Manore’s Web page
• Department of Nutrition and Exercise Sciences
• College of Health and Human Sciences
• OSU Extension Nutrition Education Program
• OSU Foundation
• International Olympic Committee
• U.S. Department of Agriculture
• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
• Poor athletic performance may be linked to vitamin B deficiency (OSU news release 11-15-06)

Ocean conditions play

Bill Peterson, a federal biologist at the Hatfield Center, says one reason may be the appearance of northern copepod species during these cold-water events. Copepods, a type of zooplankton, are a primary prey for herring, anchovies and other salmon staples. Peterson says cold-water copepod species are lipid-rich, and those extra nutrients are important to salmon survival.

“Only the healthy salmon can survive that first winter at sea, and the extra fats provided by northern copepods may make the difference,” Peterson adds. Peterson has a courtesy appointment with OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences (COAS).

OSU geneticist Michael Banks of the Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station is leading a project to identify the origins of salmon caught off the Oregon coast. In 2006, he and colleagues worked with commercial fishermen to study genetic material from more than 2,000 Chinook salmon. Pinpointing the river basin of origin with high accuracy, the scientists validated their results by linking genetic identification with coded tags in all cases.

“Now that we can identify where the salmon are from, the next step is to learn how the distribution of fish is related to oceanographic data,” Banks says.

Banks and colleagues from COAS, Sea Grant and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are evaluating data (temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen and chlorophyll) from OSU undersea gliders. They hope to learn how salmon are distributed throughout the ocean so that fishery managers can avoid shutting down the entire region to protect a single run of fish, like those from the Klamath River.

Gray whales have roamed

2006 was a banner year for the whales and whale watching on the central Oregon coast. In kelp beds a mere quarter-mile out from Depoe Bay, 45-foot-long gray whales frolicked away the summer, feeding head-down, their tail flukes extended high above water. It was in stark contrast to the previous year, when the tell-tale spouts were rarely seen from lookouts along Oregon’s Highway 101.

OSU graduate student Carrie Newell has discovered that the difference may stem from the relative abundance of tiny shrimp-like zooplankton called mysids, a gray whale delicacy. In 2006, the mysids took advantage of the super-charged upwelling to feast on phytoplankton blooms. These half-inch, opaque crustaceans, which look like small shrimp, form clusters or “swarms” up to 20 feet thick in shallow waters.

Find a handful of gray whales in the neighborhood, and chances are that a mysid swarm is down below.

A biological oceanographer, Newell began investigating the connection between whale abundance and the mysids in 1999. The scientific literature suggests that whales in the Northwest feed on mud-dwelling amphipods, yet the kelp beds that attracted the whales were anchored in rock.

So Newell donned her scuba gear and dropped into the chilly waters of the Pacific Ocean to take a look.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “There were mysids everywhere. It seemed obvious the whales were feeding on them, but I had to be sure.”

Her solution? Take samples of whale excrement and search for remnants of mysids, a process nearly as disgusting, though not as simple, as it sounds.

“Well, you don’t want to get too close,” she says with a laugh, “and it dissipates quickly. But I did get a number of samples that proved my hypothesis, that whales were eating mysids, and lots of them. It’s probably their favorite food.”

So during the delayed upwelling season of 2005, mysid swarms were scarce. She could tell something was amiss by the behavior of some of her well-known whale friends.

“Rambo came into the area three different times in 2005 to check things out,” Newell says, “but there wasn’t any food and he cruised on out. Cutter stayed five days; Stretch hung around for a couple of days, then left. And that was about it. There just weren’t many whales that year.”

But in 2006, when the biological productivity off Oregon exploded, the gray whales returned for the mysid buffet and brought new whales with them. Most stayed for several weeks, and one named Eagle Eye spent more than 120 days in the same vicinity.

Newell is expanding her research to look at mysid densities and whether their movements are related to tidal changes. She is continuing to determine the relationship between physical factors, mysid biomass and gray whale residency.

To help pay for her studies, Newell began her own whale-watching business in Depoe Bay, Whale Research Excursions. She has spent the last several years studying Oregon’s summer resident gray whales, which she can identify individually by their unique markings.

She passes along her findings to the classes she teaches at Lane Community College, and to clients aboard her whale-watching cruises, who sometimes help her with the research.

“I love sharing what I do with others,” Newell says. “It makes people happy to see whales in their natural environment and, for some people, it is a life-changing experience. I’m translating what I’ve learned at OSU directly to the general public, and they turn around and spread that to others.”