Treetop research answers questions about global warming November 30, 2007
Posted by willmari in Uncategorized.Tags: College of Forest Resources, cranes, global warming, Pacific Northwest old-growth forests, the University of Washington
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Dangling from a giant crane in the woods of southwest Washington, a team of UW scientists are trying to decipher the ecological riddles found in the tops of centuries-old fir trees.
At the UW’s Wind River Canopy Crane Research Facility, researchers are busy examining the little-understood tree canopies of temperate woods. Located in the heart of the Pinchot National Forest near the Columbia River, the 10,000-acre Wind River Experimental Forest has been the crane’s home since 1995. At 285 feet, the 190-ton structure is the world’s second largest research crane, and is part of the most extensive program of its kind in the world, according the UW Office of News and Information. It’s a joint effort between the Pacific Northwest Research Station, operated by the USDA Forest Service, and the University of Washington, which oversees day-to-day operations.
The crane hoists a metal gondola high into the treetops in a forest full of old-growth Douglas, grand and Pacific silver fir trees, along with Western red cedar and western white pine, some of which grow to heights of 180 to 220 feet. For more photos of the forest, go here. A “crane cam” can also be found here. An even more fascinating video from ScienCentral can be found here.
Although research on trees and temperate forests has been taking place at Wind River for nearly a century, it was only recently that scientists like the UW’s Ken Bible have been able to get reliable, safe access to the tops of the towering firs. Along with research colleague Jerry Franklin, a professor in the College of Forest Resources, Bible has been working on a project to examine pine cone production and photosynthesis in the tree tops.
As seen in this recent article from The Seattle Times, Bible and Franklin are especially interested in the role mature forests have to play in absorbing carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that’s driving global warming. Some of their research indicates that older forests serve as useful sinks for CO2, and may counteract the effects of warming more efficiently than younger, less dense forests.
Furthermore, temperate forests and even firs are not perfectly understood, explained Bible. “We know next to nothing about Douglas fir, and it’s the species we know the most about,” he said in the article.
Their other work has indicated that the 500-year-old forest is more biologically active than previously believed, as shown by the analysis of new branch buds.
But the only way Bible and Franklin can conduct their research is via crane.
“If you want to measure these kinds of things, you need to be able to get up in the tops of the trees and out at the ends of the branches where processes like photosynthesis are really going on,” said Franklin in the Times’ story.
“The canopy crane gives you that ability,” he said.
The hunt for the elusive Northwest dialect, part two November 6, 2007
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I recently wrote about the Pacific Northwest English Project, a two-year study of the Northwest accent by linguists at the UW Phonetics Lab and Portland State University’s Department of Applied Linguistics.Jeffrey Conn, a Portland State linguist working on the study, e-mailed me with some further observations on what his team is attempting to do in their study, which started in September. Click here to read more.
The hunt for the elusive Northwest dialect November 2, 2007
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People in different parts of the United States use different dialects. These regional variations of American English differ in their use of vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation.“Pack ya cah in Havud Yad” (“park your car in Harvard Yard”), is a classic example.Bostonians, New Yorkers, Southerners and people living near the Great Lakes are famous for the way they talk.But people here in the Northwest don’t seem to “have” a dialect.
At least, that’s what I thought. I had long assumed that people in Seattle and Portland simply didn’t have a regional dialect. Since I’m originally from Tennessee, where people talk with strong accents, that assumption was reinforced when I first moved here. I was not alone in my assumption; linguists have placed the West into the same broad category of dialects for years, as it was considered “too young” to have developed its own.
Researchers at the UW are about to challenge that long-held assumption.
In a pilot project funded by the National Science Foundation, linguists at the UW Phonetics Lab will soon begin a two-year study of the elusive “Northwest accent.” Researchers will be interviewing 24 speakers of American English who have been born and raised in the Pacific Northwest between 1900 and 1985. Volunteers will read a list of words and a short story, answer questions about their family’s demographic history and simply converse with researchers.
“We have families living in the Northwest since the states were territories,” said head researcher Alicia Wassink, as quoted in a University Week story on the study last week.
“We’d love to get a random sample of people from places like Ballard, Queen Anne, the Central Area and Yesler Terrace, as well family members from different generations so we can examine if and how dialects are changing over time,” she said. “We are looking for a temporal snapshot of dialect evolution.”
The project is a continuation of more informal research that’s been conducted over the past several years, as reported in this article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (check out their snazzy linguistics map of the U.S.).
Some of the preliminary research into Northwest dialects included “Pacific Northwest Vowels: A Seattle Neighborhood Dialect Study,” a paper written in 2005 by Jennifer Ingle, then a graduate student in linguistics at the UW. Ingle studied the way people in her Ballard neighborhood pronounced their vowels.
Ingle found that native Northwesters use a so-called “creaky voice” (rather similar to former President Bill Clinton’s folksy accent, minus the twang), emphasize the “s” sound in certain words, merge vowels together (the difference between “caught” and “cot,” for instance) and often “front” the vowel” their vowels (pronouncing “move” as “mi-oove”).
The UW researchers will do more than just look at how people say certain words. Their work will focus on vocabulary (similar to the age-old analysis of “coke” vs. “pop”) and subtle grammatical differences.
As a self-confessed word and language nut, I can’t wait to literally hear about their findings.
For more information, check out Do you Speak American?, a 2005 PBS documentary series on American dialects, especially this page on what might distinguish a Northwest dialect. You can also go here to listen to a radio interview with Ingle on KUOW.
