Mission

The Wetland Ecosystem Team (WET) mission is to advance scientific knowledge of shallow-water and estuarine coastal wetland ecosystems to better understand natural and anthropogenic sources of their variability and change. We provide the research infrastructure to support graduate students in order for them to contribute to this mission and to collaboratively disseminate this knowledge.

WET includes research faculty, staff and students at the School of Aquatic & Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington who conduct basic and applied research on coastal wetland ecology. We collaborate with researchers and students from related disciplines and divisions (e.g., Marine Affairs, Oceanography, Urban Horticulture) at the University, and as well have strong interdisciplinary ties with Washington State University–Vancouver, Oregon State University, University of New Orleans, Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories, Pt. Reyes Bird Observatory, Philip Williams and Associates, National Marine Fisheries Service-Northwest Fisheries Science Center, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. WET is also integrally involved with the Puget Sound Nearshore Research Project (PSNERP).

WET research is inherently interdisciplinary, befitting the complex physical (e.g., hydrology, geomorphology), chemical (geochemistry) and biological (microbial, meiofauna and macrofauna ecology) interactions that influence the ecosystem goods and services we derive from coastal wetlands. Much of our research is focused on fish (especially anadromous species, such as juvenile Pacific salmon, genus Oncorhynchus) and wildlife associations with wetlands and other estuarine/coastal marine ecosystems. We are by choice field ecologists, and most of our studies involve in situ investigations of organisms and communities in their natural environment, such as marshes, swamps, beaches, mudflats and eelgrass meadows.

We investigate both natural and restored, enhanced and created wetlands, emphasizing ecological and associated land-margin processes that sustain estuarine and coastal ecosystems. Our study sites are concentrated in Puget Sound (Washington State), the Columbia River estuary, coastal Oregon, San Francisco Bay, Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta and other coastal estuaries of the Pacific Northwest region of North America. These studies are supported almost entirely by research grants and contracts, from various federal, state and local government funding sources.

WET research is focused on ecosystem-, community- and habitat-level interactions, with particular emphasis on predator–prey relationships and the sources, organization and flow of organic matter through food webs. Recent research emphasis has stressed integration of such basic interactions to applied issues such as restoration, creation and enhancement of estuarine and coastal wetland ecosystems, ecological approaches to evaluating the success of anthropogenic stressors and manipulations, and the distribution of and ecosystem reponses to non-indigenous species. WET research projects and initiatives fall into following categories: juvenile salmonid dependence on estuarine wetlands; ecological effects of estuarine/marine shoreline modifications; wetland and estuarine food webs; ecological influence of non-indigenous biota (especially zooplankton); application of landscape ecology to understanding anadromous fish use of estuaries, and to restoration of estuarine wetlands; functional assessment of natural and constructed wetlands; integrated wetland processes at local to landscape scales; land-margin ecosystem dynamics; and technological (e.g., GPS, GIS) applications to wetland assessment.