Bike + Kayak + Beer = Seattle Triathlon

Now that I'm on paternity leave I thought I'd catch up on a few posts. On May 10, the entire CommEn Space staff had an "outing," which is a semi-regular day off during which we all go out and do something fun together. This time, we decided to go kayaking on the Sammamish river--I was leery of going farther afield because of Lochlan's imminent arrival, and we were all curious about how this very urban river is fairing after some fairly concerted restoration efforts along it's course through Marymoor Park.

As it happens, the place where we rented the kayaks is near the eastern terminus of the Burke-Gilman trail, so I decided to ride my bike from Ballard/Fremont to Redmond--the entire 27-mile length of the B-G. It was a great ride! It took about an hour and half, and passed through the cities of Seattle, Lake Forest Park, Bothell, Kenmore, Woodinville, and Redmond. Unfortunately our camera was broken and I was unable to photograph some of the more memorable sites (a fork lift moving float planes from the Kenmore Air parking lot into Lake Washington, a bizarre store in Bothell called "Gift Store," a trailer park with docks on the river, etc).

The river itself was great fun to paddle in, and there were some surprisingly challenging "rapids," particularly where the river flows out of Lake Sammamish on its way to Lake Washington. We had a great time teaching Sheila how to kayak, and the inevitable water fight ensued about 20 minutes before we finished.

Afterwards, we met up at the Redhook Brewery in Woodinville (Karsten and I biked there) for grub and brews. It was a great day, and I hope to have the opportunity to do something similar sometime soon.

Monster

RRRROOOOOOAAAARRRRR!!!

More Lochlan Photos

Here are more shots of the newest Seattle Stevenson!

Lochlan James Stevenson

After a remarkably fast labor, Lochlan James Stevenson was born in Seattle on Thursday May 18 at 11:48 am. He weighed in at 8 lbs 14 oz and measured 21 inches in length. He is a healthy baby and busy learning about his family and the outside world. Amy is recovering quickly, and Matt and Liam are doing well too.

Guest Blogging on Evergreen Politics

I was recently invited by fellow non-profit do-gooder Jon Stahl to contribute to the Evergreen Politics blog. So far I've only made one contribution, and I suspect my ability to post anything will be greatly diminished after the baby arrives (ANY DAY NOW!) but I'm looking forward to increasing my participation as the political season heats up.

Impact of Climate Change on Species Ranges

When I worked at the Biological Diversity Lab at Utah State University my boss was advising a PhD student named Josh Lawler, who was studying the habitat relationships of cavity nesting birds in the Uintah mountains of northern Utah (I actually got to assist Josh with his field work for a couple of weeks, but that's another story).

Josh interviewed last week for the Ecologist position on the faculty of the College of Forest Resources at the University of Washington, and I attended his seminar. The talk was absolutely mind-blowing. He is doing cutting-edge research and really breaking new ground methodologically. He talked about two of my all-time favorite topics, global climate change and land use change, all within the context of how these forces of ecological change are impacting biological diversity.

The first half of his talk was devoted to the work heÂ’s done modeling changes to species ranges over the next ~100 years as a result of climate change. He looked at nearly 3,000 species ranges from three taxonomic groups (amphibians, birds, mammals) in the western hemisphere and used the model outputs from 30 General Circulation Models (GCMs) to predict how climate change will alter species ranges. The resolution is 50 km. He ran each of the 3,000 species through each of the 30 GCMs, for a combination of 90,000 *final* model runs. In order to get to those final runs, he reserved 20% of the range of each species, then took the remaining 80% and used random "“forest"” classifiers (nothing to do with real forests) that use model averaging, classification tree models, and machine learning (basically neural networks) to find which models most effectively predicted the reserved 20% based on current climate conditions. The upshot of this work is BIG changes over the next 100 years for all of the species, but particularly for the amphibians. He mapped hotspots of species loss (where species will leave cell to move elsewhere or simply die) and conversely areas of climate "refugia"” where changes are predicted to be less severe. Very interesting work, and I'm looking forward to learning more about it--he only had 20 minutes to present it.

The second half of his talk was on modeling future land use change in the Umpqua River watershed, in the southern Coast Range of Oregon. He's doing this work as part of CLAMS with Norm Johnson and Tom Spees, and they are simulating the impact of different management schemes on forests. Josh used the PATCH model and presented the effects of landscape modification on the Olive-side flycatcher and the Willow flycatcher. This model was also pretty amazing, it uses a hexagonal grid, where the size of the hex is determined by the home range size of the animal. Each species can move, reproduce, or die in each cell. The model incorporates population dynamics, individual animal behavior (i.e., nest site fidelity), sociodemographic changes, vegetation structure, and pattern.

He is now working on linking the CLAMS model with his climate change work in the Northwest, and will soon be producing new species range maps for the entire NW at 1 km resolution.

Pretty exciting and inspiring stuff, and hopefully weÂ’ll have him over here again to talk in much more detail about his work.

Bike to Work Breakfast

I attended the Vulcan Bike to Work Breakfast yesterday morning. It was a great event--lots of high-level support from the politicos and the business community. Several Seattle City Councilors, the King County Executive, the State Transportation Committee Chair, and the Mayor were all present (among others). The emcee for the event was Willie Weir, who was extremely energetic and enthusiastic. Willie did a series of NPR stories about his bicycle adventures around the world and used a couple of examples from those journeys to illustrate why we need to stay focused on making cycling safer, easier, and more appealing. The highlight of the morning for me was hearing the Mayor say "Our goal is to make Seattle the number one city for cycling in America." He finished his remarks by saying "Thank you for helping us save the planet." I hope it translates into action, but it's amazingly refreshing to hear that kind of talk from an elected official.