FAST Online Image Gallery

For the past three summers, Biology professor Eric DeChaine has researched the impact of historic climate change on plant species in order to better understand how the current changing climate patterns will affect biodiversity. DeChaine's research involves paddling down some of Alaska's wildest rivers, from the mountains to the ice-choked Arctic sea, collecting specimens as he goes. These are photos from his journeys.

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Internationally renowned Bay Area artist David Ireland’s “Bigger Big Chair” was installed on Sept. 19 at WWU as part of the university’s Outdoor Sculpture Collection. The sculpture, made of coated steel plate, measures 8 feet high and 12 feet long. It was installed on Fairhaven Ridge between the Buchanan Towers residence hall and Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies.

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A small group of Western Washington University professors traveled to Kenya in August 2008 to develop a different kind of "study abroad" course to take students to Africa, where they will apply classroom concepts to help serve the needs of girls orphaned by AIDS.

The goal for this international project is to use service learning to provide international experiences for WWU students and faculty that go beyond the typical study abroad programs; this initial visit by the WWU faculty team will clear the way for a full student-faculty service-learning experience in 2009.

Traveling to Kenya were Timothy Costello, director of the Center for Service Learning at Western, and executive director of the Slum Doctor Programme; Shearlean Duke, associate professor and chair of the Department of Journalism; Kristi Tyran, associate professor of management, and Mary Sass, assistant professor of management.

While they were there, the group visited the Amboseli National Park, at which all of the animal photos were taken.

For more information, visit http://news.wwu.edu/go/doc/1538/219802/.

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Geology Professor Doug Clark is working, along with colleagues from the UW and a number of Canadian universities, to conduct climate-change reasearch atop B.C.'s Mount Waddington. Clark spent part of last summer doing research using ice coring and ground-penetrating radar on a broad, flat expanse of ice called the Combatant Col; the ice, nearly 600 feet thick, holds climate data for the past 1,000 years. This summer, Clark hopes to return and retrieve a sample core from the surface to the bedrock beneath.

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Geology master's student Angela Diefenbach has pioneered a new method of monitoring active volcanoes using a technique called photogrammetry. For more on her study and its potentially life-saving uses, see FAST Online.

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Like much of the Pacific Northwest, Sweden’s extraction of its timber resources has been a boon for its economy, but has imperiled many of its native fish populations because of habitat loss; reversing the environmental damage on these key watersheds caused by more than a hundred years of intensive logging is the goal of a research project involving Western Washington University assistant professor James Helfield. Helfield began working on the project on the Vindel and Pite rivers in Northern Sweden in 2002 as a postdoctoral researcher. He left Sweden in June 2005 to join the faculty at WWU’s Huxley College of the Environment, but has continued to crunch the data obtained by more than two years of field work, and will return in September 2008 to continue the project.

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Huxley's John McLaughlin spent two winters conducting a carnivore survey of the North Cascades. Using a motion-activated camera system, he recorded the activities of creatures in the sampling areas; these photos show some of that activity.

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Western Washington University faculty member John McLaughlin has received a $45,000 grant from the National Park Service to conduct a butterfly census of the North Cascades National Park and the Mount Rainier National Park over the next two years. McLaughlin, an associate professor of Environmental Science at WWU's Huxley College of the Environment, said a species inventory is especially important now because butterflies are an important indicator of climate change. They are extremely sensitive to dips or changes in the climate, he said, meaning that abnormally high temperatures or low snowpack levels can cause extinction in certain areas.

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Andrew Bunn, an assistant professor in Western Washington University's Huxley College of the Environment, is turning to the world's longest-lived organisms--the bristlecone pine--for signs of how the world's climate has changed in the past. Because of the trees' longevity, core samples taken from them are extremely useful in reconstructing the temperature and climate data for periods long before modern data began to be tabulated. Bunn is working with a team of paleoclimatologists from the University of Arizona and with undergraduate students from WWU to study the trees in their natural habitat--high atop California's White Mountains at roughly 11,000 feet above sea level.

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The Bering Sea produces a catch worth $1 billion annually--half of all the seafood taken in the United States each year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Western Washington University faculty member David Shull, an assistant professor of Environmental Science at WWU's Huxley College of the Environment, is researching how climate change and global warming are affecting the prodigious sea. Shull's project is funded by a four-year, $367,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. Last spring marked the first series of data and sample collecting, which is done aboard the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy. Shull will be on the Healy twice this year, for a 40-day cruise in April and May and for a 30-day cruise in June and July.

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Last spring, when WWU seniors Jessica Bell and Casey Henson were looking at options for their senior internships, they knew they wanted to choose projects where they would work firsthand with people in need – and placing themselves squarely in the middle of East Africa’s HIV/AIDS pandemic certainly fulfilled that goal.

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Western Washington University Associate Sociology Professor Mick Cunningham is researching how years of conflict in Northern Ireland has reshaped the country's cultural perceptions of its families.

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