Researchers explore environmental change in presentation Wednesday in Forks
Published 12:01 am Tuesday, May 31, 2016
FORKS — Two University of Oregon researchers will discuss environmental change on the Olympic Peninsula when they speak during an Evening Talk at the Olympic Natural Resources Center on Wednesday.
“Environmental Change on the Olympic Peninsula: Views from the Ice Age to the Present from an Ecologist and from a Cartographer” will begin at 7 p.m. in the Hemlock Forest Room at the ONRC, 1455 S. Forks Ave. Refreshments will be served and visitors are urged to bring desserts for a potluck.
Dan Gavin, a professor of geography, studies past environments through the lens of information contained in lake sediments, addressing questions of the rate at which forests change when faced with changing climate and fire.
James Meacham is a senior research associate and executive director of the InfoGraphics Lab in the geography department.
His primary focus is on map and atlas design and data visualization. He is a co-author of the Atlas of Yellowstone (2012) and is currently working on the creation of the Atlas of Wildlife Migration: Wyoming’s Ungulates.
“Changing climate and increased fire has a lot of us nervous about how natural areas will cope into the future,” Frank Hanson of the ONRC said in a news release.
“One important perspective in this concern is to examine how environments responded to past climate changes.”
In the 20,000 years since the glacial maximum, the Olympic Peninsula has experienced some abrupt warming events and even time periods with summers warmer than today, researchers say.
Gavin will describe research he has conducted on the Olympic Peninsula using lake sediments that preserve a detailed history of these events.
Another perspective is a spatial view from synthesizing a broad array of information into maps to show how places differ in their change over time.
With the view toward developing an Atlas of the Olympic Peninsula, Meacham will show some of his current work on mapping landscapes, wildlife and other phenomena.
Evening Talks at ONRC is funded through the Rosmond Forestry Education Fund. For more information, contact Hanson at 360-374-4556 or fsh2@uw.edu.
