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Financial support for young adults can strengthen family ties

By Hope Belli Tinney, WSU News

When parents support their children financially well past the point that they themselves became financially independent, the resulting parent-child relationship is:

A. Fraught with tension and resentment.
B. Detrimental to the child’s leap into adulthood.
C. Closer and more loving than before.

While individual results may vary, Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson, a sociologist at Washington State University, has looked hard at the data from more than 11,000 surveys of young people ages 18 to 34 and says the answer is a qualified C.

“What parents are doing today is different than what parents were doing 20 or 30 years ago,” she said. Baby boomers might remember putting themselves through college, or supporting themselves with their first full-time job, but that isn’t the world their children have inherited. Continue story →

Fish carcass tossing helps track food chain nutrients

Black bear
Grizzly bears and black bears feed on naturally spawning salmon and distribute nutrients into the forest. Photo by U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

By Bob Hoffmann, College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences

A slender, dark-haired woman in her forties shoulders a backpack loaded with dead fish as she hikes a long, rocky trail to a mountain stream in southern Idaho. Arriving on the bank, she drops the pack and starts winging fish carcasses into the water.

This is science. And this is Laura Felicetti, a research scientist in the lab of Charles Robbins, professor in the School of the Environment and School of Biological Sciences at Washington State University. Felicetti is a member of a team that’s trying to quantify the success of nutrient replacement in an area where dams have stopped salmon and steelhead from migrating.

Nutrient-poor soil

Soils in Idaho’s Boise-Payette-Weiser sub-basin are nutrient poor, according to Katy Kavanagh, a University of Idaho forest ecology professor and a collaborator on the project. One reason is that natural processes in this ecosystem poorly incorporate atmospheric nitrogen into the soil in a form that is usable to plants. Also, the region’s dry summers and cold winters are not favorable to decomposition, so dead trees are slow to decay and make their nutrients available to other plants.  Continue story →