SMEA director Dr. Nives Dolšak and Dr. Eduardo Gallo Cajiao, a David H. Smith Postdoctoral Fellow at SMEA, along with a team of  scholars from Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the U.S., consider what the pending ‘Pandemic Treaty’ should incorporate  regarding the prevention of pandemics from the wildlife trade. Prevention of pandemics should focus on prevention at source, which means that zoonotic spillovers need to be avoided as globalization creates challenges for outbreak containment. 

SMEA David H. Smith Postdoctoral Fellow, Eduardo Gallo-Cajiao, has been nominated as a technical expert to the Intergovernmental Task Force to Address Illegal Hunting, Taking, and Trade of Migratory Birds in the East Asian-Australasian Flyway under the UN Convention on Migratory Species. This appointment is on the back of Eduardo’s contribution to the understanding of hunting of migratory shorebirds and international governance for conserving migratory shorebirds in the Asia-Pacific region. 

SMEA faculty continue to contribute to the scholarship of marine and environmental affairs. In 2022, we published two books and over 30 articles in prestigious environmental, marine, and interdisciplinary journals. Many of these were co-authored with our students and our postdoctoral scholars. Below is a collection of these works. Faculty names are in bold; names of students and postdoctoral scholars trained by our faculty are underlined. 

Molly Daly, SMEA second-year student, Dr. Eduardo Gallo-Cajiao, a Smith Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at SMEA, and Nives Dolšak, SMEA faculty, presented their research at the 2022 Annual meeting of the Pacific Northwest Political Science Association in Walla Walla. Molly presented preliminary findings of the project entitled “Evaluation of Multi-level Governance of Shorebird Management and Conservation in Puget Sound,” a capstone project with Elley Donnelly, SMEA second-year student, Drs. 

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 to SMEA Postdoctoral Scholar Adam Hayes for receiving the 2020 Best Dissertation Honorable Mention from the Public Management Research Association. Hayes’s dissertation, entitled Four Essays on Decentralized Markets in Management and Policy, empirically examines the information brokers in creating and facilitating markets to achieve policy goals. Dr. Hayes examines municipal bond markets and fishing quota markets to analyze these dynamics. 

The organizers of a conference on marine environmental DNA (eDNA), held at Rockefeller University in New York City in November recently released a report urging U.S. government agencies monitoring fisheries, endangered species, and environmental impacts to leverage the DNA present in the ocean. As Science reported in its article, “In the ocean, the DNA trail goes cold after about 24 hours, meaning that any species that shows up in analysis can’t be too far off. 

SMEA Research Associate Ramon Gallego and co-authors from the University of Auckland published a paper in the Journal of Biogeography titled “On the need to consider multiphasic sensitivity of marine organisms to climate change: a case study of the Antarctic acorn barnacle.” In the paper the authors present the first study in which species distribution models (SDMs) have been simultaneously developed for both the larval and adult stages of the same organism, highlighting the importance of considering such effects on both larval and adult life stages. 

Congratulations to SMEA Professor Eddie Allison, Research Associate Nathan Bennett, Affiliate Assistant Professor Yoshitaka Ota and their co-authors on their latest article “Committing to socially responsible seafood” published in Science. The article discusses a comprehensive framework for social responsibility developed by the authors that responds to a need for alignment around a shared, transdisciplinary approach. Their framework, which is informed by practical experience from organizations and experts that work in the seafood sector and is supported by a strong legal and policy basis for implementation, comprises three components: (i) protecting human rights and dignity and respecting access to resources, (ii) ensuring equality and equitable opportunities to benefit, and (iii) improving food and livelihood security. 

Research Associate Stacia Dreyer, SMEA Alum Hilary Polis, and former SMEA Professor Lekelia Jenkins recently published an article about tidal energy in Energy Research and Social Science. In the article, they assess acceptability and support for tidal energy, as well as perceived benefits and risks of tidal energy and climate change beliefs in Washington State. They also highlight how environmental psychology can contribute to a larger body of literature on life-cycle development for emergent renewable energy technologies.