With stay-at-home orders pausing fieldwork, scientists worry about Washington’s threatened species.

By Hannah Weinberger, Crosscut

As the coronavirus pandemic takes tens of thousands of human lives, grinds society to a halt and tears a hole in its financial and social safety nets, the natural world continues to persevere around us. But with the majority of environment-focused scientists, natural resource managers and field technicians who study and maintain the natural world working remotely to flatten the curve, the flow of crucial data yielded by fieldwork has essentially been frozen.
“I think almost everybody that I know, in one way or another, is scrambling to reorganize their fieldwork,” says Department of Natural Resource’s Dr. Teodora Minkova, research and monitoring manager of the Olympic Experimental State Forest. “Inevitably, these projects have been affected.”

There’s concern from within agencies and universities that their ability to monitor the environment is limited, and they aren’t able to perform some important fieldwork.

“The biggest question eventually is when we get back to work, what did we miss or what things have changed? [But right now], it’s really hard to tell,” says Todd Mitchell, environmental director of the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community’s Department of Environmental Protection. “We don’t know at this point. And we’re just hoping for the best.”

The long-term repercussions of both may leave profound impacts on our understanding and conservation of Washington’s natural systems.

Monitoring woes

Manolo Castellote

Dr. Manuel Castellote is a University of Washington researcher affiliated with JISAO and NOAA’s Alaska Fishery Science Center’s Marine Mammal Laboratory. To monitor the health and behavior of cetaceans off the coast of Alaska, Seattle-based acoustic monitoring specialists deploy acoustic recorders in protective underwater housings in the fall that record species of whales and dolphins over several months. ⁠His research guides sustainable development in these high-activity areas. NOAA’s Protected Resources Division permitting development in places like Anchorage or Cook Inlet, including commercial or industrial projects, can reference research to ensure these projects don’t happen when and where they could negatively impact protected species.

“We were requested to postpone all fieldwork until the end of May,” Castellote says. April and May are usually heavy fieldwork months, but now, he can’t access those remote mooring stations to download data or free up memory space to record new data. The longer that the sensors are out in the field, the greater the risk of their being damaged or lost, along with all the data they’ve collected.

“It’s basically creating a gap in our data set, because we can’t continue the sampling, if we cannot service the instrument,” Castellote says.