Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
This place-based collaborative effort to understand, anticipate, and prepare for ocean changes affecting natural and human systems owes its success to how oceanographic, ecological, and social scientists and tribal community partners co-designed and co-produced the project. The goal was to provide an assessment of coupled social-ecological vulnerability to effects from ocean acidification based on new social science and a synthesis of existing data and model projections relevant to the Olympic Coast, its biological resources, and its inhabitants. The team outlined eight objectives to guide the project, developing areas of strong integration, including drawing from Indigenous knowledge to inform social science understanding, and drawing on these two systems of knowledge for guiding selection of species of focus for biological risk assessment, with feedback to community preparation and adaptation actions. Dr. Newton will focus on ecological elements of the risk assessment but stress its utility in the context of the social science.
The Environmental Speaker Series is free and open to the public. Talks are held each Thursday at 4:30pm in Academic Instructional Center West, room 204. Join us at WWU or online on Zoom!
This place-based collaborative effort to understand, anticipate, and prepare for ocean changes affecting natural and human systems owes its success to how oceanographic, ecological, and social scientists and tribal community partners co-designed and co-produced the project. The goal was to provide an assessment of coupled social-ecological vulnerability to effects from ocean acidification based on new social science and a synthesis of existing data and model projections relevant to the Olympic Coast, its biological resources, and its inhabitants. The team outlined eight objectives to guide the project, developing areas of strong integration, including drawing from Indigenous knowledge to inform social science understanding, and drawing on these two systems of knowledge for guiding selection of species of focus for biological risk assessment, with feedback to community preparation and adaptation actions. Dr. Newton will focus on ecological elements of the risk assessment but stress its utility in the context of the social science.
The Environmental Speaker Series is free and open to the public. Talks are held each Thursday at 4:30pm in Academic Instructional Center West, room 204. Join us at WWU or online on Zoom!
