Brandon Russell
PISCO Mooring Technician

Brandon completed his Bachelor of Science degree in 2007 from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada with a specificity in fisheries biology and algal ecology.  He spent the next seven years at the University of British Columbia’s Open Water Research Station as part of a research program studying energetics and nutrition associated with foraging and diving physiology of Steller sea lions, Northern fur seals, and Pacific white-sided dolphins.  He joined the Alaska SeaLife Center in 2015, beginning with the Pacific walrus monitoring project and migrating to the Arctic Seals (PHOCAS) project as the SeaLife Center's project manager, examining energetics and body condition of ice-dependent seals to help better-understand physiological constraints of these habitat-threatened arctic species.  He joined PISCO as the Offshore Mooring Technician in 2019 and is in charge of maintaining an array of moorings off of Strawberry Hill, Oregon. These moorings are part of a long-term monitoring program, ongoing since 1999, that seeks to increase our understanding of oceanographic processes in the inner shelf region and its linkages to larger-scale oceanographic processes. These moorings span a depth range of 15-70 m and collect data on a variety of parameters including current profiles, dissolved oxygen (DO), temperature, conductivity, fluorescence, pH, pCO2, and others. 

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Brittany Poirson
pisco research technician

I am the intertidal research specialist and lab manager for the PISCO consortium. I assist in planning, deployment, and monitoring of our intertidal projects on the Oregon coast, and I coordinate between research groups at Oregon State, UCSC, Stanford, and UCSB to ensure PISCO grant benchmarks are being met.

Our research in the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem aims to assess the changes in intertidal processes over temporal and spatial scales. Our projects are diverse, and range from monitoring pulses of recruitment in mussels and barnacles throughout the year, to assessing the rate of sea star predation on mussels in the low intertidal, to examining the role of compensatory predators in shaping intertidal communities. 

I manage the volunteer efforts in our lab as well. If you have questions about our research or are interested in volunteering, please email me at poirsonb@oregonstate.edu

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Laurel Field
NSF SSWS technician

I am the STARS (Sea Star Tragedy and Recovery Study) grant technician. The collaborative research funded by the STARS grant aims to understand mechanisms of resistance and resilience to system-wide loss of Pisaster ochraceus in the rocky intertidal community from Oregon to Southern California. To quantify the direct and indirect ecological consequences of the SSWS epidemic, fourteen field experiments at fifteen core study sites test the effects of compensatory predation, mussel recruitment, mussel growth, recruitment facilitation, and resilience of predator populations to disturbance. Experiments are monitored monthly by researchers at Oregon State University, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Santa Barbara. An additional 19 ancillary field sites, interspersed between core study sites, are monitored yearly. The research will culminate in the development of a spatially-explicit metacommunity model to understand how the mechanisms quantified by field experiments give rise to documented spatial patterns in community structure since wasting. I coordinate and lead monthly sampling trips to Northern California field sites, joined by UC Santa Cruz collaborators in the summer months and spend the rest of my time working our Oregon field sites with the rest of our team.

I am available to answer questions about our lab's SSWS research in both Oregon and Northern California as well as questions about our CADFW permits. My email is: fieldla@oregonstate.edu

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Chantelle Macadams
adamsch@oregonstate.edu she/her/hers

I am a seasonal technician but have been a staple of the Lubchenco-Menge lab group since April 2019. I started in the lab by working on grant-funded research exploring the role of small predators on mussel coverage in Summer 2019. Since then, I have worked as a student worker and seasonal technician, assisting with all of PISCO's ongoing projects and monitoring. I graduated Oregon State University with my BSc. in Zoology in Spring 2020 and have continued to be involved and interested in the work done in this lab.

I also manage our undergraduate researchers and offer peer mentorship to OSU undergraduates as a recent OSU student. Not only am I passionate about our changing rocky intertidal ecosystem, I strive to create an inclusive and welcoming environment for historically excluded identities in our lab. Creating an accessible and compassionate research environment is one of my highest tenets as a scientist.