Oregon State is a leading research university located in one of the safest, smartest, greenest small cities in the nation. Situated 90 miles south of Portland, and an hour from the Cascades or the Pacific Coast, Corvallis is the perfect home base for exploring Oregon’s natural wonders.
Oregon State University has always been a place with a purpose — making a positive difference in quality of life, natural resources and economic prosperity in Oregon and beyond. Through discovery, innovation and application, we are meeting challenges, solving problems and turning ideas into reality.
Founded in 1868, Oregon State is the state’s Land Grant university and is one of only two universities in the U.S. to have Sea Grant, Space Grant and Sun Grant designations. Oregon State is also the only university in Oregon to hold both the Carnegie Foundation’s top designation for research institutions and its prestigious Community Engagement classification.
As Oregon’s leading public research university, with $281 million in external funding in the 2012 fiscal year, Oregon State’s impact reaches across the state and beyond. With 12 colleges, 15 Agricultural Experiment Stations, 35 county Extension offices, the Hatfield Marine Sciences Center in Newport and OSU-Cascades in Bend, Oregon State has a presence in every one of Oregon’s 36 counties, with a statewide economic footprint of $2.06 billion.
A combination of factors – pollution, disease and overfishing – is harming corals but scientists have found clues to effective treatment by studying corals’ microbiome.
Facial expressions may be a universal language. Where does that leave people with facial paralysis?
Icerko Lýdia via Wikimedia Commons
Could sea levels really rise by several metres this century. Probably not, although this century’s greenhouse emissions could potentially set the stage for large rises in centuries to come.
What’s the harm?
Aspirin via www.shutterstock.com.
Should conservationists ‘sell’ the value of nature by focusing on the ecosystem services nature provides people? Surveys show this may be the wrong tack.
Samal, Philippines: protected area to manage fish recovery.
Rare
The combination of local fishing rights with adjacent marine reserves creates incentives to avoid overfishing and could improve nearshore, small-scale fisheries around the world.
One more California wildfire from last year: getting more dangerous and more expensive.
usfsregion5/flickr
The US West – suffering one of the most damaging wildfire seasons this decade – needs to break with current practices to avert more costly and dangerous wildfires in the future.
Humpback whale populations have leapt on both Australia’s east and west coasts.
Ari S. Friedlaender (under NMFS permit)
Chalk it up as a rare conservation win: humpback whales have bounced back so strongly since the whaling era that there is no longer a need to include them on Australia’s official threatened species list.
The pope’s encyclical on ecology addresses all individuals who want to live with integrity – and their ability to take personal actions on global problems.
Positive findings get more attention than negative findings.
Puzzle via www.shutterstock.com.
An iconic North American migration is in jeopardy. The monarch butterfly migrates back and forth from Mexico to Canada every year, its orange and black sails peppering blue skies. In the past 20 years…
Young Steller sea lions in Prince William Sound, Alaska. NMFS Permit 14336.
Markus Horning
A decade ago, we set out to unravel deep ocean crime scenes we weren’t even sure existed. The crime? Endangered Steller sea lions were rapidly disappearing in parts of Alaska. Their numbers dropped by…
Will what lies beneath still be there once we’ve finished with it?
PublicDomainPictures
The deep sea is the largest habitat on earth and incredibly important to humans, but it faces many threats – from increased human exploitation to the effects of climate change. As this exploitation expands…
American wolves show us how important large predators are for conservation.
Doug McLaughlin
We know that introduced predators such as foxes and cats are one of the greatest threats to Australia’s wildlife, but what is the best way to control them? Many Australian ecologists argue dingoes are…
Getting information out of the IAEA: hard.
Andreas.Roever
When we agree to send our young men and women to war, we expect the reasons why to be made clear. At least some of us will want to subject that explanation to scrutiny at the time, and often even more…
Salmon use the earth’s magnetic field to get out to sea.
Thomas Bjorkan/Flickr
Salmon use Earth’s magnetic field to create a large-scale mental map which they follow to find suitable feeding grounds, a study published today in Current Biology has found. The salmon are born in rivers…
Baby salmon: TomTom not required.
Tom Quinn and Richard Bell
How does a young animal find its way to an unfamiliar location hundreds or thousands of kilometres from where it was born? A reasonable idea might be to find an older, experienced migrant and follow. This…
We are losing our large carnivores. In ecosystems around the world, the decline of large predators such as lions, bears, dingoes, wolves, and otters is changing landscapes, from the tropics to the Arctic…
Sendai, Japan after the 2011 tsunami: imagine nature’s destruction at the push of a button.
US Navy
The words “environmentalism” and “military” are not typically found in the same sentence. Yet ideas about our vulnerability to environmental change are directly linked to military plans for a third world…