This video produced by Facebook, Degrees of Separation, shows how they did it.

In 2011, the researchers netted a dazzling array of fish from the Cuyuni River in Guyana, some never before seen by scientists. The challenge: how to make sense of the bounty. The answer: reach out to colleagues through the Internet.

Sidlauskas and his graduate student, Whitcomb Bronaugh, took photos of the fish and posted them to Facebook. Within 24 hours, they had identifications from dozens of colleagues around the world.

Illustration by Mary Susan Weldon

A changing changing climate in the Pacific Northwest will challenge the Willamette River watershed. The river is lined with cities and towns that are home to more than two-thirds of Oregon’s 3.8 million residents, and the valley’s population is expected to double by 2050, bringing additional stress to a system that has already seen more than 160 years of land-use change.

The river that provided food and transportation to native people for more than 9,000 years and helped to propel Euro-American settlers in the 1800s has undergone a transformation:
• Less than 40 percent of the river’s length is forested today, compared to 87 percent in 1850. Length of river channels in the mainstem has decreased by 25 percent, and wetlands throughout the valley have decreased 95 percent.
• Cities, industries and farms withdraw an average of more than 37,000 cubic feet of water every day from the Willamette. More than 80 miles of small tributary streams that historically flowed year-round now go dry in a moderately dry summer.
• The Willamette basin supports 35 native fish species but now contains an additional 31 non-native species.
• The Pacific Northwest’s climate is uncertain. Air surface temperatures are projected to increase by 0.2-1°F per decade, and precipitation timing and amounts may change, potentially leading to larger water withdrawals and increasing stress on some fish species.

While these trends seem dire, I and many other scientists have a vision of a restored, more resilient Willamette River. The rich and complex river channels witnessed by Lewis and Clark and other explorers in this region will not return, but rather, through deliberate design, we can see a more ecologically sound and livable future in the valley.

Getting there will require solid information about the distributions and habitats of native aquatic species, cold-water refuges, floodplain-inundation extents and opportunities for river and floodplain restoration. Researchers at Oregon State University, the University of Oregon, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and other agencies are providing the basis for the future.

Meanwhile, restoration initiatives are already under way. The Special Investments Partnership of the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board and the Willamette River Initiative of the Meyer Memorial Trust have partnered to conserve and restore floodplain forests and channel complexity in the Willamette River mainstem. State and federal agencies are conserving habitats and restoring altered habitats in response to the Willamette River Biological Opinion, Wildlife Mitigation Agreement and other programs. Watershed councils are addressing ecological conditions along the mainstem and the smaller tributaries where their previous efforts have focused. The Willamette Partnership and Clean Water Services have developed systems for carbon-credit and thermal-credit trading that could involve reforestation of riparian areas and floodplains. Cities and industries are exploring options to mitigate for thermal effects of water use and treatment practices. A diverse array of citizens’ groups, ranging from farmers to urban residents to industrial coalitions, are developing grass-roots programs to identify conservation opportunities and find ways to make them happen.

These programs build hope that the trends in resource loss observed in the Willamette River over the last 160 years may be reversed. The decisions we make today in our communities will shape the future of the Willamette River and the cities, farms and forests that depend on this river of change.

Listen to a TerraTalk podcast with Vanessa Petro

It’s on the Oregon state flag and a symbol for Oregon State University: the North American beaver (Castor canadensis). But how much do you really know about these semi-aquatic mammals? Likely, not a lot.

Vanessa Petro and Austin Bushkol have released 38 beavers in the Alsea River. (Photo courtesy of Vanessa Petro)

It turns out that not even scientists have a firm grasp on beaver ecology, despite the animal’s prominence in the Northwest. As a master’s student at Oregon State, Vanessa Petro is making a splash with her work on beaver relocation and habitat restoration in the Alsea River. Research throughout the United States has shown that beaver dams create important habitat niches for various species of animals, an important one being Coho salmon, which are declining along the West Coast.

In her project, Petro is capturing “nuisance” beavers and relocating them to sites where computer models predict that they will thrive, build dams and create beneficial Coho habitat. “A nuisance beaver is an individual or multiple individuals that are actually causing damage beyond a landowner’s level of tolerance,” Petro says. “Damage being: blocking culverts, building dams that are flooding out sections of their property, chewing, or felling valuable trees.”

Vanessa Petro follows beavers through transmitters placed on their tails. The tails are largely adipose (fatty) tissue, which is not harmed by the device. (Photo courtesy of Vanessa Petro)

This winter, Petro and her team have relocated 38 of these “nuisance” beavers and are monitoring their locations to understand survival, movement and habitat preferences. Prior to release, the researchers equip each beaver with a tail-mounted transmitter roughly the size of a cell phone, which helps locate and track the animals in their new environment. Petro and her team check on the beavers weekly, looking for activities that include building dams.

Petro says this is her favorite part of the project. “Every time I check on a beaver, I find it so interesting to see what they’re up to,” she says. “It’s a mystery to me, and every time I go out there, I find another piece of the puzzle that will help solve the mystery itself down the road.”

As the project continues, Petro says the goal of the work is not simply to relocate beavers but to understand how to do it effectively. With time, this project will fill important gaps in beaver ecology and potentially reduce human-wildlife conflict due to “nuisance” beavers.

For more information on Petro’s research, listen to the TerraTalk Podcast available above or on the Oregon State University iTunes-U channel.

For Epps and his research team, these elephants were a rare sighting on the border of the Idodi-Pawaka Wildlife Management Area and Ruaha National Park. (Photo courtesy of Clinton Epps)

The focus of their two-year study was animal migration patterns in a country that is larger than Texas and Oklahoma combined and whose rising human population has forced wildlife into a diminishing network of reserves. With no fences, the elephants, giraffes, antelope, lions and other species ignore human boundaries as they travel from one reserve to another. As farm fields encroach on habitat and roads create barriers to travel corridors, wildlife struggles to maintain a foothold.

Epps was focusing on patterns of elephant movement between reserves. Despite all the time spent in the field, he and his team saw the seven-ton animals outside these designated areas only once. But the evidence they did find — dung, tracks in the dirt — would prove to help them and other researchers understand where elephants are traveling and whether or not the human competition for space is fragmenting the elephant population.

“I was interested in connectivity and movement between reserves as a general research topic, and this was a landscape where that work was needed,” says Epps. He and Gwin now work at Oregon State University where Epps is an assistant professor in Fisheries and Wildlife and Gwin is a research associate in Agricultural and Research Economics.

Elephant Connections

As a Ph.D. student at U.C. Berkeley, Epps had studied bighorn sheep movements in California’s Mojave Desert. In Africa, he could apply his knowledge to a new system. His goal is to better understand animal migration pathways with the hope of guarding them from human encroachment. Today, he and Rachel Crowhurst, an OSU graduate student, are doing this by analyzing animal tracks and DNA from fecal matter.

Clinton Epps, right, OSU professor of fisheries and wildlife, works with Alphonce Msigwa to collect dung samples for DNA analysis. (Photo courtesy of Clinton Epps)

Drawing on his knowledge of bighorn sheep, Epps analyzed elephant tracking data to map out specific corridors of movement. Although elephants are elusive during the day, the scientists’ analysis shows that the animals still appear to be traveling somewhat freely between the reserves. While some environmental factors such as steep slopes influence elephant travel choices, human activity appears to be the most significant constraint.

“Elephants are a good indicator species,” he says. “Species that are the best predictors at this scale are generalists and most sensitive to human activity.”

Based on the data received from the elephant study, scientists now have a better understanding of the distribution of many major mammal species in central Tanzania.

A History of Humanity

“These are places where there have been people, we think, as long as people have been around,” Epps says. But in recent times, the number of inhabitants has grown exponentially, increasing strain on an already tense relationship between humans and nature. In 1955, there were nine million people in Tanzania. By 2008, the population had skyrocketed to 42.5 million, with agriculture overtaking the grasslands.

In the mid 1900s, humans were forced out of the areas currently designated as reserves. Epps says that during his studies, he regularly comes across human artifacts. “I think this is something conservationists tend to oversimplify. These reserves have not always been free of human occupation,” Epps says. “What has changed, I think, is the sheer density of the human population and the intensity of that footprint.”

From Tent to Lab Bench

As he was completing his field data collection in Tanzania, Epps was hired at OSU. With financial support from the university and from the National Science Foundation, he has begun analyzing DNA from fecal matter to determine the specific corridors of elephant movement.

By combining elephant tracks with the information gathered from DNA samples, Epps has been contrasting long-term and modern-day elephant movement patterns in the presence of human constraints. In addition, the information from the DNA is giving valuable insight into the diversity, or lack thereof, among the elephant gene pools.

“There’s not much genetic structure on the scale of Tanzania, which tells you that there have been elephants moving all over the place (through corridors),” Epps says. Limited genetic structure implies that distinct populations didn’t exist within areas now established as reserves, suggesting the animals historically have been interbreeding throughout the country.

Giraffes and Antelope

In 2011, Crowhurst spent five months of intensive studies on other large mammal movement in Tanzania, including giraffes and two species of antelope. Together, their data will help give a better picture of animal connectivity in Tanzania and raise the possibility of preserving corridors and reducing conflicts between humans and wildlife.

In Ruaha National Park, Clinton Epps collected dung samples from a herd of grazing elands. (Photo courtesy of Clinton Epps)

“By comparing connectivity patterns across a range of species, we can implement management schemes that will have a higher probability of maintaining or enhancing connectivity for most wildlife species,” Crowhurst says.

While the results are helping identify areas at risk, time is running out in some locations. For example, Epps and collaborating scientists were able to identify a highway crossing that provides elephants with critical access between reserves, connectivity they need to associate with other elephant populations. “It’s possible that this spot is the remaining link between gene flow for this whole area,” Epps says.

Now that this possible bottleneck has been identified, Epps and Crowhurst hope that accommodations can be made to sustain these wildlife movements. Since most land is privately owned, the government will need to work with landowners to achieve a balance between wildlife and people. For elephants, a species that is slowly recovering from the ivory trade and is battling human expansion, the effects of this barrier are unpredictable.

Back in a lab at OSU, Epps and Crowhurst continue to examine data from their samples and their tracking records. Together they are slowly mapping the diverse Tanzania landscape and helping ensure that despite human expansion, some of it will remain wild.

A descendant of the King Island community, OSU anthropologist Deanna Kingston leads a team documenting the island's natural and cultural history. (Photo courtesy of Deanna Kingston)

King Island, a two-and-a-half-mile long garrison of rock jutting up out of the Bering Sea, is now uninhabited. But Native Americans lived there for centuries and created a rich culture that still survives among the King Island community on the mainland. Kingston is interviewing native elders from the community as part of a National Science Foundation-funded effort to document the cultural ecology, biogeography and the traditional ecological knowledge of the island.

“All I was looking for was just a list of names,” she told an audience May 2 at Oregon State University’s Center for the Humanities, “but whenever they talked about a particular name they told a story about it.”

An anthropologist, Kingston saw those stories as research questions.

“We’re going with the assumption that if they created folklore about it, that bird must have been important in some way to the people,“ she said. “Why it is important is the question I want to answer.”

Crested and least auklets, King Island (Photo: Kim Nelson)

To help her, Kingston brought in Kim Nelson, an ornithologist with the OSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. Nelson was excited because the King Island colonies of auklets, murres and kittiwakes had not been previously studied. “It’s a significant colony,” she said. “It has hundreds of thousands of birds. Nobody has done any research on the island.”

Most of the academic literature concerning the island’s wildlife has to do with the walrus and seals that the islanders hunted. But the stories that Kingston documented showed that the migrating seabirds living on the island from spring to fall also played a large part in the lives of the inhabitants.

Spring brings seabirds and a welcome respite from a diet of marine mammals. King Islands ate both the meat and the eggs of birds. So happy were the islanders to see the first arrival, the snowbird, that stories about them credit the birds with creating people.

Similarly, cormorants, the last birds to leave in the fall, also feature prominently in King Island stories.
Kingston and Nelson documented these stories along with the native bird names and colony place names and created a guide to the birds of King Island.

Kingston is conducting a similar effort on the island’s flora with OSU biologist Jesse Ford. She hopes to include fisheries and marine mammals if funding will allow.

Kim Nelson is co-author of an online book, Guide to the Birds of King Island (Photo courtesy of Kim Nelson)

For Nelson, the experience changed how she will work in the future. Nelson told the audience that involvement with local indigenous peoples will be part of her approach to new study sites from now on. “Ornithologists hunted for Marbled Murrelet nests for a hundred years,” she said. It wasn’t until after they were located in coastal old-growth forests that scientists found artwork by local Indians showing the birds nesting in trees, not the offshore cliffs where ornithologists had been looking.

“They knew,” she said, “but nobody bothered to ask them.”

Finally someone is bothering to ask.

On May 13, 2011, Kingston and Nelson gave a talk on their King Island research at the Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Ecosystem Sustainability Conference at OSU.