About PERS

PERS 2005, March 18-20
Charleston, Oregon

Scaling Up from Site-Specific Studies to Regional Understanding

Steve Rumrill,
PERS 2005 Meeting Organizer
steve.rumrill@state.or

Mark your calendars! The PERS 2005 annual meeting will be held in Charleston, OR at the Oregon Institute for Marine Biology campus, Friday through Sunday, March 18-20, 2005. Papers appropriate to that theme will be grouped into one session. As always, we encourage submission of oral and poster presentations on a wide array of estuarine or coastal topics, including ecology, natural history, fisheries, environmental toxicology, physics, chemistry, economics, history, culture, etc.

Seagrass ecology is likely to be another major theme. One session at PERS may be a mini-symposium on seagrass research with a 1-day workshop on west coast seagrass issues held immediately preceding or following the annual meeting.

Note that the meeting date is significantly earlier in the year than recent PERS' meetings. It was specifically selected in response to requests at the last meeting that we hold our annual meeting in conjunction with Spring break to make it easier for faculty and graduate students to attend. Thus, we expect a rousing turnout from our members in academia, as well as the usual great attendance from our members in public agencies and private practice.

For further meeting details meeting go to www.pers-erf.org

Notes From the Webmaster

Jeannie Gilbert, PERS Webmaster
webmaster@pers-erf.org

WWW.PERS-ERF.ORG is up and running! PERS has a new website hosted on a commercial ISP. We've created a new look for the website, with links from the home page to pages with current and back issues of the newsletter, announcements about new PERS meetings, programs of past PERS meetings, our By-Laws and Constitution, and contact information for the PERS officers. T

his web site now includes a photo gallery currently containing Greg Hood's images from Skagit Marsh (WA) and Ted DeWitt's photos of the Yaquina River estuary. We invite all PERS members to donate photos to the gallery. Gallery photos are available for copying provided that the artist and website are acknowledged.

We hope to expand the features of the website to include scientific and educational materials, such as regionally-relevant topical bibliographies, curricula from estuarine and coastal science courses, more information about our member's projects plus, more information for students and prospective members to see what we are all about. We have lots of room to expand the website, so all ideas will be entertained. We welcome contributions of materials to the website and suggestions for improvements (or corrections).

Please contact me (webmaster@ pers-erf.org), Aimee Kinney (aimee.t.kinney@nws02.usace.army.mil, Amy Sewell (pers_sec.treas@ pers-erf.org), or Ted DeWitt (dewitt. ted@epa.gov) with comments or suggestions.

PERS 2004 Meeting Awards

Amy Sewell,
PERS Secretary/Treasurer
pers-sec.treas@erf.org

We want to thank all of the graduate and undergraduate students who gave oral presentations or presented posters at our annual meeting in Port Townsend last April. As usual, the judges had a hard time distributing the awards. For the first time ever, we had a tie for the Heinle Award (best graduate student presentation). Congratulations to all of our student award recipients!

Graduate Student Awards:

The Heinle Award

First place tie: Danielle Heatwole:
The influence of habitat on arthropod assemblages in tidally restricted and natural Puget Sound salt marshes and Amanda Babson: Dissolved oxygen variability as determined by a box model tracer in Puget Sound. Both won $500 towards travel to the next ERF conference.
Second place: Neil Banas:
Tidal mixing rates and residence times from data and modeling for Willapa Bay, Washington. $100 gift certificate and membership to ERF.
Third place: Alexandra von Saunder:
Juvenile salmonid foraging associated with rehabilitated habitats in two highly industrialized northwest estuaries. $50 gift certificate and an ERF membership.

Undergraduate Student Awards

First place: Jonathan Kellogg.
Correlations of Puget Sound temperature and salinity with climatic factors, 1992-2003. $250 gift certificate and membership to ERF.
Second place: Teegan Boruch- McDonough
Increased diversity of free-living bacteria in the euphotic zone and bacterial proteorhodopsin presence in Puget Sound, Washington, a $100 gift certificate and a membership to ERF.
Third place: Cheryl Williams.
Genetic characterization of Synechococcus in Puget Sound. $50 gift certificate and an ERF membership.