location: Pacific Northwest

location: Pacific Northwest

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How a 160-year-old pelt piqued new findings on Indigenous ‘woolly dog’ breed
- Researchers from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History recently studied and analyzed a 160-year-old pelt of an extinct woolly dog, part of a breed that Indigenous Coast Salish communities cared for for thousands of years.
- For the first time, the study sequenced the woolly dog’s genomes to analyze the species’ ancestry and genetics and the factors contributing to its sudden disappearance at the end of the 19th century.
- Based on the genetic data, they estimated that woolly dogs biologically evolved from other breeds about 5,000 years ago.
- Researchers say numerous socio-cultural factors are likely responsible for the species’ disappearance. Chief among them were the impacts of European colonization.

NASA satellites reveal restoration power of beavers
- A new partnership between NASA and researchers is measuring the impact of beavers reintroduced to landscapes in Idaho.
- Beavers are one of the world’s most powerful ecosystem engineers, building new habitats by slowing water flow and reducing flooding, while also boosting biodiversity.
- Beavers are all the more important in an age of rapid climate change, as they produce wetter and more resilient habitats, even in the face of wildfires.
- “NASA is interested in how satellite Earth observations can be used for natural resource management,” a member of the space agency’s Ecological Conservation Program tells Mongabay.

Virtual fences can benefit both ranchers and wildlife
- Virtual fencing manages livestock using GPS-linked collars to train animals to stay within a set boundary, similar to an invisible dog fence.
- Coupled with the removal of existing barbed-wire fencing, it could open up whole landscapes for wildlife by removing injurious barriers for migratory herds, reducing mortality from fence strikes for numerous bird species, and protecting sensitive habitats from trampling by cattle.
- Virtual fences are easily moved with a tap on an app, and can be used to improve pasture management through rotational grazing, reduce wildfire risk, and other benefits.
- These systems are cheaper than building and maintaining physical fences, and are already in use in the U.S., U.K., Australia and Norway.

How do you study one of the world’s rarest whales?
- Researcher Dana Wright is one of a handful of scientists studying one of the world’s rarest creatures, the North Pacific right whale.
- With about 500 individuals remaining, and its eastern population that swims off the coast of North America totaling perhaps 30 individuals, it’s so rare that in a decade of research, she has yet to see a living individual of the population, though her colleagues have.
- How does one study a creature that’s so hard to document? With tools like bioacoustics, for example, and Wright has listened to tens of thousands of hours of recordings to aid the conservation of these endangered animals.
- The team continues to develop new approaches to solving the mystery of these whales’ migratory patterns and biology with a goal of identifying — and then protecting — the location of their winter calving grounds.

Tribe and partners light up a forest to restore landscape in California
- The Karuk Tribe partnered with the U.S. Forest Service and other stakeholders to reintroduce traditional burning to help restore forests in the Klamath Mountains.
- The four-year-old project aims to prevent wildfires and make overgrown forests in Northern California look more like they did thousands of years ago when the Tribe stewarded them.
- So far, the project’s successes have been encouraging, however, the Tribe and Forest Service have encountered hurdles in their relationship and have had difficulty agreeing on different fire techniques.
- The project hopes to make burning a seasonal and sustainable part of ecosystem management.

‘Monument trees’ underpin Alaska Native cultural resilience: they must be protected (commentary)
- Access to ancient cedar trees for cultural purposes is key to Southeast Alaska Native peoples, both for their heritage and community resilience.
- Carving and weaving traditions require straight-grained, slow-growth red and yellow cedar trees 450 years and older with few branches or defects. These rare forest giants are referred to as ‘monument trees,’ and many are contained in the Tongass National Forest.
- Despite its significance, the Tongass continues to be threatened by forest management pressures, climate change, and political shifts: more than 1 million acres of forest have been clearcut since it was declared a national forest.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

When Chinook salmon is off the menu, other prey will do for endangered orcas
- A new study has found that endangered southern resident killer whales mainly consume endangered Chinook salmon, but will broaden their diet when this species isn’t available.
- The researchers obtained data through prey and fecal waste collected from resident killer whales over a 13-year period.
- Efforts to reinstate Chinook salmon populations through hatchery efforts can play an important role in supporting resident killer whale populations, although these programs need to be carefully managed to ensure that stocks are diverse, the study suggests.

Indigenous peoples unite in fight to heal the Salish Sea
- Indigenous communities on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border have called for a moratorium on a proposed port terminal in British Columbia and for a cumulative environmental assessment to be carried out.
- The communities fear an increase in ship traffic will be the final nail in the coffin of a local orca population that is already under severe stress.
- The Lummi Nation, on the U.S. side of the border, faced a similar fight in 2016, when they succeeded in blocking the construction of a coal port in Washington state.

Pod-cast: New app streams whale songs for web users in real time
- Researchers have developed a web application to enable citizen scientists to listen for the sounds of a population of killer whales off North America’s northeast Pacific coast in real time.
- A network of underwater microphones will stream sounds from under the sea to citizen scientists, who can then report any unusual noises and help decode orca language.
- The researchers have found that human listeners can readily detect unusual sounds amid a stream of underwater noise, and their participation can complement machine-learning algorithms being developed.

Mongabay discusses technology’s role in conservation at Seattle event [VIDEO]
- A team from Mongabay discussed new applications of technology for conservation with representatives of Seattle Audubon and Acate Amazon Conservation during an event at Seattle Central College, Washington.
- In this video recording, the panelists discuss topics ranging from bioacoustics to remote sensing and AI and answer questions from the audience.

Earth Day founding organizer calls for end to plastic pollution
- Denis Hayes was the principal national organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970, and he took the event to the international stage in 1990.
- Earth Day 2018 is slated for April 22 and focuses on plastic pollution, so Mongabay asked him about this event and what else is on the mind of this key leader of the international environmental movement.
- Earth Day is said to be the most widely observed secular holiday in the world, with activities happening in most countries around the world.
- Hayes is also active in sustainability issues in the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S. and his work is housed in one of the greenest office buildings in the world.

As Northwest salmon economy teeters on brink, Trump gives it a push
- Northwest salmon fisheries are in trouble, impacted by warming oceans and overdeveloped, dammed and silted spawning rivers and streams.
- Pre-contact indigenous groups in the region once organized their societies around sustainable fishing tribal agreements that worked. More recently, under past presidential administrations, Canadian, US and tribal authorities came together to save the declining salmon fisheries.
- Especially successful have been federally funded local, state and tribal programs, administered by NOAA, that protect and restore Northwest spawning streams — an investment in habitat and healthy local economies.
- Trump’s 2018 budget would cut all those programs, though for now Congress has restored them. However, politicians and regulators are concerned that Trump’s abandonment of Northwest fisheries and local economies will persist through his administration.

Scientists say frozen methane deposits off the coast of the US Pacific Northwest might be melting
- Researchers found methane plumes to be significantly more common at a critical depth where it was projected frozen deposits would start to melt due to rising ocean temperatures.
- Current environmental issues in Washington and Oregon that are already impacting local wildlife and fisheries could be exacerbated by the release of more methane.
- Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than CO2, but much of the methane in the plumes is consumed by marine microbes that turn it into CO2, contributing to ocean acidification.

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