Category Archives: Natural Resources Policy Fellow

Don’t Tread on Me: A post about tidepools!

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It’s 7 AM on my day off, and somehow I am already out of bed and driving north on Highway 101. The radio is staticky on this part of the coast and all that’s coming in clear is the bombastic finale to some sort of romantic classical piece. I pull off the narrow, two-lane highway at the Tolovana Park exit in the city of Cannon Beach and keep heading north on Hemlock Street. The road curves extravagantly. As I brake to round a bend, the magnificent Haystack Rock suddenly comes into view.

The music on the radio now feels appropriate. Two hundred and forty feet tall, shaped like the pope’s hat and encircled with squawking seabirds, Haystack Rock is a commanding presence on this long sandy beach. The rock itself is nesting habitat for about a dozen species of seabirds, and the foot of the rock is composed of turquoise tide pools that provide a home for countless marine organisms. Thousands of people from all over the country and even the world flock to Haystack Rock every summer. And that’s why I’m here. As a volunteer interpreter, my job is to educate the hordes of summer crowds and also to protect the marine garden and wildlife sanctuary from them.

I’m better at the former than the latter, to be honest. Having spent many hours scrambling over tidepool rocks, picking up snails and starfish, and, yes, even poking sea anemones, it feels hypocritical to dissuade others from these activities. But the Haystack Rock tidepools are visited by tens of thousandsof people every summer, unlike the deserted tidepool spots I’ve visited in southern Oregon. Haystack Rock is visible for miles and easily accessed from the beach– it had no chance of being kept secret.

Luckily I don’t spend too much time in the role of ‘enforcer.’ In the last six weeks or so, I’ve also started writing the program’s weekly nature blog entries. After a couple of hours on the beach, I head to Cannon Beach City Hall, where the group is headquartered, and use staff notes to write up a summary of what the animals of the Rock have been up to during the past week. You can check out the blog here: http://hrapnatureblog.blogspot.com. Lately I’ve been focusing on one, relatively common animal—so far I’ve chosen the brown pelican, hermit crab, and aggregating anemone— and highlighting how surprisingly special and complex it is.

I’ve worked and volunteered at a number of environmental education programs over the years, but the Haystack Rock Awareness Program is perhaps the most impressive I’ve ever been involved with. Born from a grassroots effort to protect the tide pools and nesting habitat, this program puts interpreters—some paid, many volunteer— out on the beach at every low tide during the summer. The group operates out of a clever truck and trailer operation on the beach, where they store signs, binoculars, scopes, and pamphlets. Interpreters roam the tidepools pointing out animals, aiming scopes at birds’ nests, answering questions, and discouraging visitors from trampling the barnacles and anemones on the rocks.

TEP, where I am carrying out my fellowship, also began as part of a grass roots community effort. Recently, I’ve been helping TEP write a report for its 20th Anniversary celebration, which means I’ve been learning a lot about how the organization got started. It’s really encouraging to be involved with not one but two organizations that came into being via the sheer willpower of concerned citizens. Encouraging enough to get me out of bed before 7 AM on a day I’m not working (the coffee and bagels at the Sleepy Monk Café help too.)

More information about the Haystack Rock Awareness Program can be found here:http://www.ci.cannon-beach.or.us/~Natural/HRAP/hrap-program.html

Closing Remarks

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It’s hard to believe that this will be my last blogpost as a Malouf Scholar. The past year has been amazing, and would not have been possible without the support of Oregon Sea Grant. I have completed my graduate research, compiled the findings, and graduated from Portland State University this summer. Through my research I proposed and tested a method to overcome institutional barriers and build cross-sector communication capacity between decision makers and scientists that mutually benefits those involved while promoting their respective roles in society. Preserving and protecting critical coastal and marine resources becomes ever more important as climatic, land use, and socio-demographic shifts occur. Doing so will require effective and efficient policy and management schemes that include the best available science, i.e., evidence-based decisions. My research engaged decision makers and scientists to begin a collaborative approach to extract, design, and integrate relevant information into evidence-based policy and management practices. This integrated approach maximizes use of information to prevent, and in some cases reverse, the negative effects of human practices.
Though, I want to emphasize that this work has been just the start in a long and sustained process. Further workshops, dedicated interactions, and the stimulus from funding agencies should all be used to sustain the connection between decision-makers and scientists. A clear linkage between decision makers and scientists, electronic networks, decision support tools, and ecological models can all support long-term engagement as well.
Increasing communication between scientists and decision makers results in an impressive return on monetary investments, generating greater value for research dollars spent by developing more effective research. By enhancing social capital through communication, decision makers can better protect natural capital. Since there are real economic and ecological costs associated with continued consumption of finite resources, the interactions established during my research (and ideally beyond) should be a high priority for decision-makers and scientists alike.
While I have recently accepted a Natural Resource Policy Fellowship with Oregon Sea Grant at the Governor’s Natural Resources Office (and my attention will naturally shift to this program’s requirements), I intend to continue to follow-up with the work I have done with evidence-based decision making. Fortunately, there is a strong desire in the Governor’s Natural Resources Office to do just that! I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to continue these efforts, and embrace new ones in my role, as well as continue to work with the amazing caliber of people at Oregon Sea Grant. As I move on to this next stage, and pass along the torch to the next cohort of Malouf Scholars, I look forward to reading about what fascinating and promising research they conduct! Stay tuned everyone!

CIFA Conference

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This November 11-12, the Council of Infrastructure Finance Authorities (CIFA) is holding their annual national conference in Portland, and the Oregon Infrastructure Finance Authority is doing their best to support this effort.  Specifically, I am helping to organize an Oregon-focused plenary session for the conference, as well as a tour of some of the sustainable infrastructure that exists around Portland.

For the plenary session that will take place on Wednesday November 12 at 9 am, we will be bringing together a number of excellent speakers to present the work they’ve been involved with in regards to the impending Cascadia Earthquake. Jay Wilson (Chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Committee), Josh Bruce (Director of the Oregon Partnership for Disaster Resilience), and others will talk about the infrastructure issues associated with this predicted earthquake and discuss what lessons other infrastructure professionals from around the country can learn from the work taking place in Oregon.

For the sustainable infrastructure tour taking place immediately after the plenary from 10 am – 1 pm, we will be making three stops: the Portland Building, Portland State University, and the Pearl District’s Brewery Blocks. The Portland Building houses both the Portland Water Bureau and the Bureau of Environmental Services. We will hear presentations from both of those agencies before heading up to the top of the Portland Building to check out its Eco-roof. At Portland State University, we will explore the campus’s storm water infrastructure. Finally, in the Pearl District’s Brewery Blocks, we will get a tour from Gerdling Edlen, the firm that designed this Eco-district. On top of getting to see the nation’s first condominium to receive LEED Gold Certification, tour attendees will also get to experience some local Portland culture by getting to explore the Brewery Blocks.

The 2014 CIFA Conference is being held at the Hilton Double Tree. Click here for more information about the conference.

Field Trip

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On a recent sunny day, not long after my fellowship began, I found myself waist-deep in a pit of pondwater by the side of the highway.  It was a good place to be. I was spending the day—three days, in fact—at the Miami wetlands restoration site, about fifteen minutes north of the city of Tillamook and just east of Highway 101. Over the past few years, TEP has been working to transform this site from an unused property riddled with ditches and dominated by invasive weeds to a lush wetland. We—me; Scott, TEP’s project manager; Tracy, an environmental consultant; and Katherine, a botanist working for The Nature Conservancy— were there to check up on the willows, elderberry, spruce, alder, cottonwood, twinberry, slough sedge, and other native species that TEP had planted the previous winter and several years before. Although the site is by no means free of invasives—reed canary grass, for example, swayed above my head at many of the sites we surveyed, even when I wasn’t sunk in a hole—TEP’s restoration work is giving native species a chance to take over and turn things around.

This isn’t part of my typical day as a Sea Grant Natural Resources Policy fellow at the Tillamook Estuaries Partnership in Garibaldi. Usually, I’m in the office, working on the update and revision of the Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan. What does that look like exactly on a day-to-day basis? Well, that’s something I’m still figuring out. The original CCMP came out in 1999, so the first step is to gather as much existing information as I can about what has happened in the intervening 15 years. That means combing through TEP’s internal documents, talking to staff, and reaching out to the dozens of agencies that TEP partners with.

But it’s fun to get out of the office, and also really valuable to see some of the projects I’ll be writing about. Hopefully I was of some help—I don’t have the plant ID skills that Scott, Katherine, and Tracy have, so I assigned myself the role of pack mule, quadrat-assembler, and picture-taker.  I also made a pretty fantastic human flag pole, if I do say so myself.

Whatever help I was, I certainly learned a lot. I can now identify dozens of plants I would have only vaguely recognized before. I also learned that I have a wicked allergy to reed canary grass. Two tabs of Claritin later, my head cleared enough for me to think about the distinction between working in a ‘wetland’ rather than working in an ‘estuary.’ Despite the “E” in “TEP”, most of this organization’s habitat restoration projects take place on the banks of rivers, in marshes, and in wetlands. It’s not false advertising—those kinds of habitats are vital to the health of the estuary. Because of my experience working in mudflats, my understanding of estuaries before joining TEP was pretty literal: they are bodies of water where ocean water and freshwater meet and mix. But for those interested in protecting them, estuaries are inseparable from the rivers that feed into them and the marshy margins that surround them. Estuarine health is wetland health is riparian health is watershed health.

Or, anyway, that’s what I told myself as I was I scrambling out of that mucky, waist-deep hole. Thank goodness it’s there.

 

SRGP Workshops

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This week, the IFA’s Seismic Rehabilitation Grant Program (SRGP) will be starting a series of workshops aimed at helping Oregon residents maneuver through the Benefit-Cost Analysis tool that is used by communities to receive SRGP funding.   Coming up, there will be workshops in Aloha, Salem, Grants Pass, Gresham, and Pendleton.

For more information about these workshops, click here: http://www.oregon4biz.com/calendar.php?site=IFA&site_category=general

For more information about the SRGP, click here: http://www.orinfrastructure.org/Learn-About-Infrastructure-Programs/Seismic-Rehab-Program/

January at the IFA

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To get 2014 started, I’m beginning to take a look at the Agora Investment Platform.

In April of 2011, the Meyer Memorial Trust (MMT) set out to understand what it could do to make a difference in economic development. After six months of secondary research and conversations with nearly 100 economic development practitioners from across Oregon, MMT Fellow Kipp Baratoff learned that economic development was exceedingly complex, especially in rural Oregon. As an outcome from these conversations, he created a nomenclature (here to view image) designed to categorize the different system requirements of economic development that lead to economic vitality. In October of 2011, MMT, in partnership with Oregon Governor Kitzhaber’s Regional Solution Center and the Mid-Columbia Economic Development District (MCEDD), piloted this nomenclature in the MCEDD region to identify opportunities for investment.

By January 2012, conversations with approximately another 100 individuals in the MCEDD representing over 45 organizations had produced a list of over 100 community prioritized opportunities and an expressed interest by the community and capital providers outside the region for a “tool” to replicate the work to include a larger audience. Between January and April 2012, the MCEDD community and a broad range of capital providers came together to assess the precise need for, level of interest in, and cost of a web application, which later was dubbed the “Investment Platform for Economic Development” (IPED) or “Agora.”

In basic terms, Agora is a social media tool that connects potenial funders and capital providers with community development projects. As part of my responsibilities with the IFA, I am examining the Agora Investment Platform in order to think of ways to improve the tool. I am also helping to develop a training workshop to teach IFA staff members to use the website.

For more updates on the Agora Investment Platform, stay tuned for my next blog.

 

 

4th Quarter Report

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Well, my time at OEM has come to an end. I was extremely lucky to work on so many interesting projects throughout this past year.  From meeting with Congresswoman Bonamici to presenting at the OAPA conference to helping with the NOAA/DLCD Coastal Community Resilience Network pilot project, I have learned so much this past year.  I want to thank everyone at OEM for their support.

However, I will be continuing to work with OBDD in 2014.  This past month, we held the first SRGP committee meeting since the SRGP had been moved from OEM to OBDD.  Jay Wilson, Chairman of OSSPAC, spoke at the beginning of the meeting and explained the importance of the SRGP relative to other statewide seismic efforts.  He explained that the work being done by the SRGP committee is vital to reaching the safety goals that the State of Oregon has in mind.  For more information on how the SRGP helps make Oregon a safer place, check out my next blog post.

JTMD Task Force Meeting

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On November 14,  the Governor’s Japan Tsunami Marine Debris (JTMD) Task Force  held a meeting at OEM.  At the meeting, there were presentations by Chris Havel (Oregon Parks & Recreation Department),  Nir Barnea (Marine Debris Coordinator for NOAA), Gus Gates (Surfrider Foundation), Katie Gauthier (Senator Jeff Merkely’s District Aid), Gabriela Goldfarb (Governor Kitzhaber’s Natural Resources Advisor), and others.  The meeting was led by Dave Stuckey, who is the Director of OEM and the Chair of the JTMD Task Force.

The major take-away of the day came from Gus Gates.  While we should of course be concerned with JTMD, we also have to realize that there are bigger issues at play here.  JTMD is just a small part of the general marine debris problem, and marine debris is just a small part of the general problem of over-consumption.  We need policies and plans in place to reduce waste in general; the JTMD issue just contributes to that conversation.

Dave Stuckey also pointed out that we need to think about this issue relative to the Cascadia Subduction Zone event we are expecting to occur here in Pacific Northwest sometime in the near future.  We need to learn from how the Japanese responded to the 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami, and we need to plan for the impacts that these types of events produce.  The JTMD discussion can contribute to natural hazard mitigation plans.

For more information about  this meeting, click here: http://www.oregon.gov/OMD/OEM/public_information/JTMD_PPT_11-14-13.pdf.

October Summary – Oregon Coastal Community Resilience Networks

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This past month, I had the opportunity to continue helping the Oregon Partnership for Disaster Resilience (OPDR) with two projects focused on building resilience networks for Oregon’s coastal communities.  The first was the North Coast Community Network Pilot Project.  As I’ve explained in previous blogs, the purpose of this this DLCD-led NOAA funded project is to help build a resilience network for communities on Oregon’s north coast.  Specifically, we are focusing on the cities of Seaside, Cannon Beach, and Gearhart, as well as Clatsop County.  This past month, we held a technical work group meeting at the DLCD office  in Salem to discuss the results of our public outreach.  Mostly, the conversation focused on how we should think about the edits made to the USAID benchmarks as a result of input by local residents.  We also discussed the role that interactive mapping will play in this project.  Our hope is that we can build a website that allows local residents to input their own information onto a map so that other residents can be aware of potential hazards.  The next step of this project is to create specific measures that would allow us to analyze whether the communities are meeting their benchmark goals.

I also helped OPDR with a workshop pertaining to a South Coast Socio-Economic Resilience Network they are working on.  The purpose of this Ford Family Foundation funded project is to create a resilience network amongst the local businesses on Oregon’s southern coast.  This past month, we held a meeting at the Culinary Institute in Coos Bay to engage local business owners.  OPDR invited a number of speakers to join a panel discussion about the natural hazards that face the area, and they led a workshop to get feedback from the business owners.  In the end, this project hopes to focus on socio-economic gaps that many times are forgotten by planners who are working to create resilience networks.

I also organized a meeting for the Oregon Sea Grant Marine Debris Coordination Group.  This time, we asked a number of external partners to join us: Kim Lippert (OEM), Nir Barnea (NOAA), Alicia Lyman-Holt (Hinsdale Wave Center), and Mary Donohue (Hawaii Sea Grant).  A lot of great projects were discussed, and a number of new connections were made.  For example, Kim Lippert’s work as OEM’s Public Information Officer seems to be a great fit for a number of Sea Grant partners.   As a result of this meeting, some of her work will be promoted through the Sea Grant. Another meeting is tentatively scheduled for January.

There is a lot coming up next month.  Stay tuned.