SMEA affiliate professor Dr. Amber Himes-Cornell and alumna Kathryn (Katy) Dalton, along with co-authors Juan Francisco Lechuga Sánchez and Rebecca Metzner of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization collaborated to publish a review on the enabling conditions necessary to ensure successful establishment of territorial use rights for fisheries (TURFs). Allocating or recognizing fishing tenure rights via TURFs can lead to a wide array of social, economic, and ecological responses, both positive and negative. 

The documentary short They Keep Quiet So We Make Noise was accepted to the Melbourne Short Film Festival and nominated for the Best Short Documentary Film Award. The work is the directorial debut of SMEA alum Marlena Skrobe ’20, a filmmaker and plastic pollution researcher. The film allowed Marlena to merge her research tools with her storytelling skills and her commitment to identify, expose, and help solve global environmental injustice perpetuated in global plastic recycling. 

A study by Arizona State University, the University of Washington and other institutions examined the impacts of seafood mislabeling on the marine environment, including population health, the effectiveness of fishery management, and marine habitats and ecosystems. Co-author and SMEA Professor Sunny Jardine helped to design a statistical analysis to compare the product on the label with the one that was actually consumed. 

SMEA alumni Guillermo Gomez, Samantha Farquhar, Henry Bell, Eric Laschever, and Stacy Hall collaborated on a paper exploring “a critical link between canned tuna – which is commonly fished with the aid of hundreds of thousands of Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs) drifting in the ocean – and the legal and marketing concept of Illegal, Unreported or Unregulated (IUU) fishing”. The article published in Coastal Management documents “how a transparent registration and tracking process can better align market and regulatory forces to reduce unsustainable FAD practices. 

A team of SMEA community members recently were published by Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences. Congratulations are in order for Ramón Gallego, former SMEA postdoc, who led this paper with Emily Jacobs-Palmer, former SMEA postdoc, and Kelly Cribari, SMEA alumna, who was the Research Assistant, as a student on this project. The paper entitled Environmental DNA metabarcoding reveals winners and users of global change in coastal waters uses DNA sequences from water samples in the Salish Sea to forecast future ecological communities. 

 
Congratulations are in order for SMEA capstone alums Katy Dalton, Marlena Skrobe, Henry Bell, Benjamin Kantner, and Dave Berndtson, SMEA Professor Patrick Christie, and their Brazilian collaborators, including Dr. Leopoldo Gerhardinger, on their newly published paper “Marine-Related Learning Networks: Shifting the Paradigm Toward Collaborative Ocean Governance” published in Frontiers in Marine Science. The paper is a result of the first internationally-focused SMEA capstone, and the collaboration helps solidify connections between SMEA and Brazilian capstone counterparts who are fostering large and impactful learning networks there. 

Recent SMEA Graduates Elise Lasky, Emily Buckner, and Henry Bell have been awarded the Washington Sea Grant Hershman Fellowship for 2020-2021. This fellowship places highly motivated, qualified individuals with marine and coastal host offices throughout Washington, providing fellows with a unique perspective on building marine policy and allowing them to share their academic expertise with the host offices.
This year’s host offices include the Washington State Department of Ecology, the Pacific Northwest Crab Research Group and the Port of Seattle. 

Congratulations to recent SMEA graduate Katy Dalton and soon to graduate Megan McKeown who were selected as Sea Grant John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellows for 2021. The 2021 finalists will become the 42nd class of the John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship program. The 74 finalists represent 27 of the 34 Sea Grant programs.
Knauss finalists are chosen through a competitive process that includes several rounds of review at both the state Sea Grant program and national levels. 

A new tool through the University of Washington Sustainable Fisheries initiative compiles information about where to find seafood using a map to easily track down local, sustainable catch for delivery or direct sales. An article about the initiative in Forbes explains “The goal of the map is to support small seafood businesses by making their transition to direct sales just a little bit easier”. 

Check out these recent publications from SMEA faculty, staff and alumni!
A halo of reduced dinoflagellate abundances in and around eelgrass beds was published by SMEA staff member Emily Jacobs-Palmer, alumna Kelly Cribari, Associate Professor Ryan Kelly, and colleagues in collaboration with the Washington Department of Natural Resources. The findings suggest that eelgrass seems to knock down (sometimes toxic) dinoflagellate populations at a distance.