Blogs

Have you stopped by our new offices and labs lately?

CMOP headquarters are now located on the Oregon Health & Science University Main Campus in Portland. We are on the 3rd floor of the Hatfield Research Center. I created this multimedia presentation that plays in our lobby on a large flat screen TV and update it weekly with new information.

The Future of Our Salmon 2014 conference is April 23-24 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.  The conference is co-hosted by the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, with CMOP as a sponsor. The conferences goal is to facilitate dialogue between the co-managers of the resource and a broad range of other interested parties in an ongoing quest for a unified vision of salmon restoration in the Columbia River Basin.

Amy Johnson reports that because of CMOP’s sponsorship we have 4 complimentary registrations.  If you are interested in attending the conference, send her an email at johnsamy@ohsu.edu by 12 noon on Thursday, April 17.

Read details about the Future of our Salmon Conference →

CMOP director António Baptista, Ph.D. will be presenting today at the American Indian/Alaska Native Health Lecture Series. The title of his talk is Of Salmon and People, of Environment and Health and will start at 12:00pm in the OHSU University Hospital South, Room 8B60.

He will discuss how estuaries are critical ecosystems whose aggregate services–from filtering pollutants to production of natural resources—are essential for sustainable development at local-to-global scales. Climate change and growing local pressures are changing estuaries, often diminishing their effectiveness as individual and global filters and producers. What happens in China, India, Russia, and Australia will affect the United States and vice versa. At stake is the health of land-ocean ecosystems, but also the health and quality of life of tribal and non-tribal people in the Pacific Northwest and around the world.

His talk offers a vision for a future where objective estuarine science informs sustainability decisions and preventive medicine, locally and globally.

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Kiley Seitz, an OHSU graduate student, gave us a sneak preview of the research poster she is presenting today at the OHSU Institute of Environmental Health research symposium. In the lateral bays of the Columbia Rivestuary lives an invasive snail, Potamopyrgus antipodarum. Elsewhere this snail is known to produces high ammonium concentrations, which can be disruptive to the ecosystem. Seitz will discuss her research to better understand the effect of P. antipodarum on the Columbia River estuarine nitrogen cycle and its relationship with ammonia oxidizing archaea.

Details about the research symposium are at http://bit.ly/1idXeQZ

Earlier this year, CMOP scientist Joseph Needoba taught a course on marine phytoplankton in Antarctica with the Students on Ice Expedition. We spotted him in the video below on a Zodiac excursion to check out a huge iceberg in the Bransfield Strait. Look for Joe at the 2:55 minute point in the video.

OHSU graduate student Pete Kahn traveled to Hawaii last week to present his research findings at the Ocean Sciences Meeting. He gave a poster presentation titled "Ecology And Genetic Analysis Of Katablepharis Cre, A Heterotrophic Flagellate That ‘Blooms’ In The Columbia River Estuary During The Spring."  Several other CMOP scientists presented at the conference. Read more about the research presented →

Photo by Nievita Bueno Watts

Every day CMOP senior research programmer Paul Turner commutes on his electric bicycle from the outskirts of Portland to his office at the OHSU Marquam Hill campus. Rain. Traffic. Road obstacles. Paul documented the nine mile ride with his GoPro and I edited the footage into this short video. Enjoy!

The CMOP Senior Management Team from Oregon Health & Science University, Oregon State University and University of Washington came together on Thursday to discuss exciting opportunities and long-term plans for our NSF Science and Technology Center. "We called it a retreat but we moved forward full-force," said Fred Prahl.

SMT Team from left to right: Yvette Spitz, António Baptista, Nievita Bueno Watts, Fred Prahl, David Martin, Vanessa Green, and Amy Johnson.

Photo by unidentified employee from The Reserve

This selfie was taken while I was on an assignment in Astoria to cover the deployment of the Environmental Sample Processor. The high winds and cold rain were challenging or as the field team reminded me, just another typical day of work at the estuary. 2013 was a tremendous year for CMOP research and education. From performing the first adaptive sampling, to the story of robotic vehicles performing research in an unlikely place, here 's what you may have missed last year.

1. Visiting Scholar Returns to United Arab Emirates
   Nabil Abdel Jabbar, a professor of chemical engineering at American University of Sharjah, spent his sabbatical at CMOP to better understand the computational models and observation network.
    
2. Underwater Robotics Succeed In Unlikely Place
   CMOP puts autonomous underwater vehicles to work in a challenging environment to study how climate change and human stresses affect estuaries and nearby coastal waters.
    
3. CMOP Advances Sampling Strategies of Microbial Communities in Coastal Ecosystems
   CMOP collects autonomous adaptive samples from microbial communities by integrating an Environmental Sample Processor with the SATURN Observation Network.
    
4. CMOP Research to Provide Insight into Biogeochemical Exchange Between Bays and Estuary
   Scientists study the biogeochemical exchange between three bays and the Columbia River estuary to gain scientific insight of how metabolic processes affect the overall health of the estuarine ecosystem.
    
5. Scholarship Enables Graduate Student to Study New Pathways of Carbon Flow Through Aquatic Food Webs
   A scholarship supports Michelle Maier’s research into describing how environmental variables influence microscopic biological communities in river ecosystems.

António Baptista was one of the invited guest speakers at today’s OHSU Tribal Gathering held in the Biomedical Information Communication Center (BICC) BICC Gallery at Oregon Health & Science University. Baptista talked about the importance of salmon to people as the environment is to our health.

The  gathering brought together tribal delegates, OHSU directors and guests at a meeting to identify areas of partnership, needs coordination and collaboration, and technical assistance. The event focused on building and strengthening community partnerships and was sponsored by OHSU Center for Diversity and Inclusion (CDI) and the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board.

Learn more about OHSU Center for Diversity and Inclusion →