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Garden Club Scholarship: Emily Howe
Emily Russell Howe
School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences
University of Washington
Box 355020
Seattle, Washington
98195
Office: (206) 221-6885
Email: ehowe2@u.washington.edu
To receive this award reaffirms the adage that the apple never falls far from the tree. In fact, my grandmother was awarded the first Garden Club of America conservation award for her efforts to protect wetlands and curb pesticide use in Massachusetts. Her husband, and my grandfather, likewise devoted his life to the natural world, studying mollusks at Woods Hole Oceanographic, Harvard, and Boston University. Today, I mesh the two together examining ecosystem connectivity via the food web support of bent-nosed clams (Macoma
nasuta) and blue mussels (Mytilus edulis) in coastal wetlands and estuarine systems.
I grew up in Seattle, Washington where I had the fortune of having two parents who relished the outdoors. Endless hiking, camping, and sailing trips exposed me to landscapes I found incredible and intriguing. Childhood recreation eventually gave way to more formal study and appreciation. I received my B.A. in Environmental Studies and Biology from Middlebury College in Vermont, and my M.S. at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington. Currently, I am working towards a Ph.D. at the University of Washington, examining how river influence affects food web connectivity across adjacent ecosystems.
I am drawn to the connectivity of ecosystems and the porosity of seemingly rigid boundaries and borders. My field experiences have immersed me in some of the most uninhabitable and undesirable habitats known; eastern Washington’s barren “scablands”, and the formidable wetland mudflats of Puget Sound and San Francisco Bay river mouths. Centuries of human industry and “reclamation” efforts have reduced these habitats to mere fragments of their once extensive range. Watching and working my way through a piecework of dikes, levees, fence lines, crop circles, and decimated rangeland, I wondered how these scraps of an ecosystem manage to function. Amazingly, it appears that despite confinement to remnant coulees and rocky lithosols, the dusty dry shrub- steppe defies acres of wheat fields, miles of barbed-wire fences, and crossing upon crossing of gravel road to support a wealth of life, even offering its few resources to migrating Sandhill cranes making their way up the Pacific flyway. Hundreds of miles, and a different climate away, levees, dams, and riprap threaten to harden the fluid seam between the river and the sea, yet the Skagit and San Francisco Bay estuaries continue to provide safe harbor and abundant resources to a myriad of crustacean, bird, fish, and mammalian species. I worry that as the connectivity between ecosystems and habitats diminishes, the resilience of these fragile systems creeps towards its functional limit; a limit to which we are teetering dangerously close.
I am curious to examine the delicate, yet fundamental ecological interactions that occur with the crossing of boundaries and ecotones. Sustainable use and conservation of not only estuarine ecosystems, but also terrestrial, aquatic, and marine, requires specific knowledge pertaining to the essential pieces and forms of connectivity between major adjoining systems. One area in which I hope to study these relationships occurs along the estuarine transition zone. My interest with estuaries has grown throughout the course of my time at the University of Washington. Working in restoration sites as well as ancient marshes in San Francisco Bay, I have become more convinced that in order to effectively conserve functional estuaries, it is essential to understand the scale of key relationships and movement patterns before our flexibility runs out.
Emily working at a field site.
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