Life at OSU

A new study of long-term snow monitoring sites in the western United States found declines in snowpack at more than 90 percent of those sites – and one-third of the declines were deemed significant.

Wildfire scientists, land managers and policy leaders from across the West will convene in Portland on March 1-2 to consider steps to reduce the impacts of catastrophic fire in Western states, and a limited number of seats are available to the public on March 2.

A paper published last December by an Oregon State University scientist became one of the mostly widely shared science papers since 2011, according to the science communications company Altmetric, and has inspired private contributions to support further research.

In the midst of an unseasonably warm winter in the Pacific Northwest, a  comparison of four publicly available climate projections has shown broad agreement that the region will become considerably warmer in the next century if greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere rise to the highest levels projected in the the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “business-as-usual” scenario.

Researchers who confirmed in recent years that salmon use the Earth’s geomagnetic field to guide their long-distance migrations have found that the fish also use the field for a much simpler and smaller-scale migration: When the young emerge from gravel nests to reach surface waters.

Hatchery-raised chinook salmon sort themselves into surface- and bottom-oriented groups in their rearing tanks. This behavior might be due in part to the fish’s genes, according to an OSU study.