aerial view of Western's campus at night, with golden lights surrounded by dark trees

Meet The Backyard Buoys (and find out why they are important)

by Jennifer Nerad

WWU Communications

(From left) Brielle Biehn, Sam Kastner, and Tilali Scanlan pose with a Sofar Spotter Buoy, one of the small ocean buoys deployed in the Backyard Buoys program.

WWU Assistant Professor of Environmental Science Sam Kastner and Western students Brielle Biehn (MACS ‘25) and Tilali Scanlan (M.A. ENVS) recently attended a Backyard Buoys project meeting in La Push, Wash., hosted by the Quileute Nation. 

The meeting brought together scientists and community members from the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and the Pacific Islands to discuss how community-stewarded wave data can be used to promote maritime safety and environmental education. Biehn and Scanlan are involved in this project in support of their capstone and thesis research, respectively, and Kastner runs WWU's Environmental Hydrodynamics Lab.

Backyard Buoys is an organization that helps Indigenous and coastal communities deploy affordable and easy-to-use ocean buoys that gather wave data (height, period, direction, surface temperature, and more) and offer tools to simplify that data. This information can complement existing knowledge, inform coastal communities about hazard protection, and support "blue economies," a term that refers to groups that rely on marine resources for food security and their economies and ways of life. 

Backyard Buoys was funded by the National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator Program’s Networked Blue Economy Track in 2021.

Sam Kastner, Tilali Scanlan, Brielle Biehn, and Emma Chong, a student at the Northern Marianas College in Saipan, take a walk along a sandy beach during a break from the Backyard Buoys meeting in La Push.