For too long, sustainability goals and environmental management have failed to consider the human side of conservation — how decisions affect people’s lives, and how human culture, values and equity affect conservation outcomes.

Social science can contribute significantly to advancing and assessing conservation efforts. These are the conclusions of a published April 1 in Science by a team of researchers from 17 British, American and Australian institutions including the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s , the 91Ě˝»¨’s and .

The authors propose a set of social indicators that can be used to gauge how ecosystem management affects four essential factors in human lives: well-being, values, agency (the ability to act purposefully) and inequality. Considering such indicators, they note, serves not only to describe what exists but to define what is important in setting sustainability goals.

Suitable indicators can ensure accountability and overcome a “bias toward easily quantifiable concepts” in the natural sciences that may hinder progress toward those goals. And understanding social and cultural factors is essential to defining sustainability in local contexts: cherished landscape elements such as lawns in American suburbs and badgers in Britain help shape residents’ sense of well-being.

“Evaluating how well we are meeting sustainability goals requires more robust and inclusive indicators of the health of both people and nature,” said co-author , a social scientist at Washington Sea Grant and the Northwest Fisheries Science Center. She and the other authors are members of the (SWIMM) working group, which began convening in 2014 in Seattle to explore the social dimensions of marine and coastal environments.

“We are unique, the only group I know of that consists almost entirely of environmental social scientists working on applied environmental science,” said Sara Breslow, who spearheaded the project and is now a program manager at UW’s

The Science article is the first of five peer-reviewed papers from the SWIMM group to be published. SWIMM-developed indicators of human well-being are already being used in integrated marine management, marine spatial planning and resilience assessments in the Pacific Northwest, thanks to an initiative by Washington Sea Grant and NOAA’s Integrated Ecosystem Assessment Program.

“Culture, values, equity and a sense of self-determination are the known unknowns in conservation management,” said , acting director of conservation biology at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center and another co-author. “The time has come to make them known.”

That knowledge has practical implications; as the paper notes, before undertaking collective ecosystem management, it’s important to know whether local values are conducive to it.

“Without attention to whose well-being is measured and the values that underlie goals, we risk exacerbating inequalities and eroding the connections to nature that motivate people to practice stewardship and care for one another,” Poe added.

Prudent planning means including social scientists from the start, rather than bringing them in later to clean up the damage, argues the paper’s lead author, Christina Hicks of Lancaster University’s .

“With humans altering climate processes and ecosystem functions, it is important that we consider things from a social science as well as natural science perspective,” she said.

“For decades we viewed people and nature as separate and we managed nature by excluding people,” Levin said. “We now know that is a flawed perspective. Nature and people are intertwined.”

This work was funded by Washington Sea Grant and NOAA Fisheries. , a professor of marine and environmental affairs, is another 91Ě˝»¨co-author.

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For more information, contact Poe at mpoe@uw.edu.

Twenty years of work on sea and land to save threatened seabirds from becoming fishing bycatch have won national recognition for Washington Sea Grant’s senior fisheries scientist, , also an affiliate associate professor in the UW’s . The research project he leads, which develops, tests and promotes bird-scaring streamer lines for long-line fishing vessels, this week received the  It went to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Seabird Program, which funds some of Melvin’s research.

Melvin has designed a system using streamers to scare off seabirds that loiter around fishing vessels. The streamers are made of bright orange tubing and hang suspended above the bait lines from lines attached to the mast or other tallest point on a boat. ( of how streamers work)

Melvin, research scientist Troy Guy and other collaborators began by adapting the developed by Japanese fishermen in the 1980s to the conditions facing Pacific Coast long-line fleets. In 1999 they took this strategy to Alaska and proved that paired streamer lines can dramatically reduce, even eliminate, seabird bycatch.

In 2009 Melvin and team traveled farther afield to work with the Japanese tuna fleet off South Africa. After testing multiple streamer and weighted long-line combinations, they found a configuration that, together with setting baited lines at night, eliminated seabird bycatch with virtually no impact on crew labor or fish catches.

In 2012, the committee overseeing the international Agreement for the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels endorsed these measures for all long-line tuna fisheries that encounter these birds. Three of four international tuna commissions adopted parts of them. The branchline design used was developed by fishing master Kazuhiro Yamazaki and won the World Wildlife Fund’s 2011 Smart Gear Award.

Melvin and Guy returned home to adapt what they’d learned in Alaska to the West Coast’s groundfish fleets, starting with tribal fisheries. Through exacting analysis of fishing and habitat ranges, they and their colleagues determined that the sablefish fishery overlapped most with, and thus presented the greatest threat to, the magnificent but endangered short-tailed albatross. Working closely with fishermen partners, they tested and refined their streamer lines for the complex range of boat sizes and gear configurations used on the West Coast.

Their findings led NOAA Fisheries to begin the process of requiring long-line boats 55 feet or longer to deploy streamer lines when they pursue West Coast groundfish; they’re now testing measures for smaller boats. NOAA provides the lines for free through select West Coast marine-supply dealers.

Washington Sea Grant shares the presidential award with NOAA’s West Coast Region and Northwest Fisheries Science Center, Oregon State University, California Sea Grant, Oregon Sea Grant, the Makah, Quinault, and Quileute tribes, and other agencies and industry groups. To read more, visit the

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For more information, contact Melvin at edmelvin@uw.edu and 206-543-9968 or MaryAnn Wagner, Washington Sea Grant communications, at maryannb@uw.edu and 206-616-6353.

For the first time, UW’s and will host the Super Bowl of high school marine studies, the .

The 20 visiting teams have won regional tournaments ranging from Florida’s Spoonbill Bowl to the Alaskan Tsunami Bowl. At the 91Ě˝»¨they’ll face the aptonymous winner of Washington state’s Orca Bowl, the (yes, ORCA), a college-credit high school program based at Everett Community College.

The public is welcome to attend the round-robin and double-elimination contests that begin on Saturday morning, May 3, and finish at midday Sunday. You can warm up with a , but be warned: The questions here tend to be easier than those that will likely be asked at the bowl.

The theme of this year’s bowl is ocean acidification, which will be the focus of quiz questions and science policy presentations required of each team. Volunteers include dozens of 91Ě˝»¨students, faculty and staff in oceanography, fisheries and marine affairs.

This week’s tournament marks the 17^th year of the national competition, but it might not have happened at all if not for Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt. Wracked by budget cuts and sequestration, the federal agencies that previously provided core funding pulled back this time. Schmidt and his wife Wendy stepped in to fill the gap this year, but the National Ocean Sciences Bowl program must now fundraise to keep going.

The bowl has reached this pass just as a clamor is rising from business, government and academe for more and better STEM – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – studies in the schools. At the same time, marine challenges such as ocean acidification, overfishing and climate-induced sea-level rise are gaining new urgency.

These challenges raise another one:  how to instill the passion, curiosity and rigor that science demands in a world of instant gratification and endless distractions? As it does every year, the National Ocean Sciences Bowl offers one answer: by injecting the excitement of competition and the reassurance of comradeship. Or, as Maile Sullivan, the Washington Sea Grant staffer who’s coordinated the bowls, says, “Let’s make it fun!”

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For more information, contact Washington Sea Grant education specialist Maile Sullivan at 206-543-2822 or orcabowl@uw.edu.

Fittingly enough, this two-day class was held as rain poured and the wind raged up to 40 miles per hour. Even more fittingly, it was held at the Makah Tribal Reservation at Neah Bay, at the far corner of the Olympic Peninsula, site of one of the safety program’s most conspicuous successes. In 2012 three Makah fishermen survived a nighttime crash by following the mayday and evacuation procedures they’d learned in a Sea Grant class just one month earlier.

As Makah fisherman Bruce Gonzales says, “It ain’t no joke out on the water. Our emergency room is four, five hours away. If you want to survive, you got to take the class.” Last week he took the Sea Grant safety class for the fourth time; he’s also gotten at-sea first aid and CPR certification.

Federal regulations merely require that skippers get the training, but many deckhands, even entire crews, now sign up. “You can’t just depend on your captain to know it,” says Gonzales. “If something goes wrong, he’s going to be busy.

“There’s a lot of people that think they know it all, but you got to do a refresher course every couple years,” Gonzales adds. “You get a new guy, he thinks he knows everything, but then you ask him, ‘Where are the flares? Where’s the life raft? Where’s the EPIRB [electronic position indicating radio beacon, a marker similar to a GPS signal]? Where’s your survival suit? Where’s the bilge pump, where’s the water coming in? They say, ‘Man, I didn’t know about that!'”

Last week’s 12 students had to locate all these essentials and more onboard, under conditions reproducing the panic and uncertainty of real at-sea emergencies. After classroom preparation they got hands-on practice firing flares, using fire extinguishers and a dewatering pump, and keeping a damaged boat afloat at the local Coast Guard station.

At the harbor they rescued a man overboard, played by Sea Grant marine field agent Steve Harbell, and treated him for hypothermia while coordinating by radio with the Coast Guard played by Sea Grant oil-spill specialist Eric Olsson. They then put out a simulated galley fire, with a smoke machine driving home the importance of staying low to avoid toxic fumes and heat.

Then came the biggest test, not just hands-on but body-in.

The captain called mayday and the crew had to speedily don survival suits and jump into the 44-degree water, which can kill an unprotected swimmer in as little as 15 minutes. As the wind howled, they locked together in a swimming chain and paddled to a life raft that had floated away, clambered aboard, checked for injuries, located emergency supplies and contemplated in the margin of safety these measures would confer in a real crisis.

Washington Sea Grant, the marine research and education program funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and housed in UW’s College of the Environment, has instructed more than 2,000 students in the latest safety and life-saving techniques during the past two decades. For the millions who venture no farther out to sea than the local seafood counter, this training provides more assurance that the salmon, crab, sablefish and other delicacies won’t come at the cost of human tragedy.

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So after the successful summer launch of their waterborne outreach campaign, Washington Sea Grant’s “Pumpout Paddlers” are readying their kayaks for winter paddling. They’ll be delivering hands-free pump-out adapters so boaters have a cleaner, easier way to pump their sewage-holding tanks and avoid what one grateful recreational boater called “the shower that everybody gets someday.”

, based at the 91Ě˝»¨, partners with the to operate . Sea Grant field staff educate boaters and marina operators about the importance of keeping raw onboard sewage out of lakes, straits and Puget Sound, and provide needed tools.

Sea Grant, for example, helps marinas secure federal Clean Vessel Act funding to install and operate pump-out stations. And it distributes threaded pump-out adapters that spare boaters the hassle and potential mess of holding an unsecured rubber hose nozzle as it draws out their boat’s sewage. The threaded adapter screws tightly into a boat’s waste-discharge deck fitting and clamps securely onto the hose leading to the pump-out station, allowing hands-free, spill-free pump-outs.

Each free adapter kit also includes instructions, rubber gloves, and a scannable  code linked to a map of pump-out stations, all contained in a waterproof tube.

Since piloting the program in 2012, Washington Sea Grant has distributed more than 3,000 kits at boat shows, marinas, yacht clubs and other boating venues.

But , Washington Sea Grant’s Port Townsend-based boating program specialist, realized that often the best place to reach boaters is on the water, not ashore, so he and volunteers from Sea Grant and the 91Ě˝»¨Kayak Club took to their kayaks.

This summer the paddlers spread the pump-out gospel together with hundreds of adapter kits and Washington State Boating Manuals, to cruisers, yachts and the occasional schooner anchored off San Juan Island, Fort Flagler and Port Townsend’s Wooden Boat Festival. They discovered that boaters were more receptive to the message and amused by the messenger when they were on the water. At the docks, boat owner tend to be hurried and preoccupied as they tie up, make repairs, or prepare to cast off. Once afloat, however, they tend to relax and see strangers hailing them from kayaks as visitors rather than pests.

Shipboard delivery also serves as a test of the effectiveness of shoreside distribution; about half the boaters the paddlers approached in state marine parks in the San Juans in August had already obtained kits from a display table Washington Sea Grant  set up on the Friday Harbor dock. And it provides extra assurance that the adapter kits get where they’re needed, rather than being left ashore.

“It really is an effective outreach technique,” Barnett concluded after the summer trials.

Buoyed by these results, the Washington Sea Grant’s “Pumpout Paddlers” are now planning winter forays. They’ll cruise South Lake Union during the Seattle Boat Show, Jan. 24-Feb. 2, and look for other opportunities to reach hardy boaters on Lake Washington and Central Puget Sound.

Washington state has 271,000 registered boats and thousands more unregistered small craft. Boaters help fund pump-out stations and equipment such as the adapters through a tax on recreational fishing gear and boat fuel.

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Eric Scigliano is the Washington Sea Grant science writer.