Coastal Fellow 2013-2014 Winter Update

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Greetings Sea Grant Scholar followers and contributors!

I am now officially in my last 6 months as a NOAA Coastal Management Fellow with the Washington Department of Ecology. Soon, the soft shoreline stabilization guidance document I have produced as a central part of my project will be published by the WA Dept of Ecology’s SEA program.  I will be sure to post a link once it is available to the public.

I now have the opportunity to plan for outreach and training on soft shoreline protection policies for local planners and will be presenting on this topic at the Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference in May.

In a couple of weeks I will be attending the Social Coast Forum and the annual NOAA Coastal Fellows meeting in Charleston S.C. where I will be catching up with my colleagues and learning about social science in marine management.

I am looking forward to my last six months as a fellow with opportunities to get out and work with Puget Sound local governments to help them implement policies and regulations for healthier shorelines!

I also wanted to congratulate Jenny Thompson who recently completed her year as a Knauss Fellow in Washington D.C.! Great work and all the best to her and her future! :)

Cheers,

Kelsey

Opportunities

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At the end of this week, my year as a Knauss Fellow will be over. For the fellowship, I worked as a Policy Analyst in the Office of Policy at NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA Fisheries).

In this post, I wanted to focus on sharing some of the opportunities available to me as a fellow. I am including an assortment of links covering a range of topics, as there may be materials that are of interest to some of you. This post focuses on work I contributed to through my office and some of the events that I was able to attend. In an upcoming post, I will include links to some additional events, reports, etc. that you might find useful.

NOAA Role

In terms of my role in the Office of Policy, here are some of the activities I was involved in:

  • Organized 3 breakout sessions for a national workshop to further evaluation and regional implementation of electronic technologies for fishery-dependent data collection
  • Helped develop, revise, and incorporate comments into a new NOAA Fisheries guidance document and national policy on electronic monitoring and reporting
  • Served as rapporteur and drafted proceedings for a session on fishery sustainability at Managing Our Nation’s Fisheries 3, a national conference resulting in 128 findings applicable to fishery and ecosystem policy, regulation, and Magnuson-Stevens Act reauthorization
  • Maintain a portfolio of policies, spanning multiple NOAA Fisheries offices. NOAA Fisheries’ policies and procedures can be accessed from the Policy Directive System page.
  • Assisted in drafting, editing, and reviewing Congressional testimony
  • Provided secretariat support to the Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee (MAFAC, a Federal Advisory Committee to the Secretary of Commerce on all living marine resource matters) and the NOAA Fisheries Leadership Council

Outside of my role at NOAA Fisheries, there were many other opportunities I was able to take part in or attend. (Note to future fellows: attend as many events as possible!) I am still amazed at the array of events in DC that are open to the public, if you just have (or make) the time.

Senate and House Hearings on Fisheries Management

During the fellowship year, I attended two hearings in the U.S. Senate and one in the House of Representatives.

Senate and House hearings are typically streamed and, after the hearings, webcasts are made available. Additionally, written testimony from panelists is posted the day of the hearing.

Council Coordination Committee Meeting

Shortly after I started my fellowship, the Council Coordination Committee (CCC) met in Silver Spring and I was able to sit in on quite a bit of the two-day meeting. The CCC is made up of top leadership from each of the eight Regional Fishery Management Councils. Attending their meeting was a great way to be exposed to some of the similarities and differences in the issues facing each of the regions.

Capitol Hill Ocean Week 2013

Capitol Hill Ocean Week (CHOW), hosted by the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, focuses on high priority ocean and coastal issues. The CHOW website includes videos and presentations from the 2013 event.

Consortium for Ocean Leadership’s 2013 Public Policy Forum – Economies of a Changing Ocean

Among the speakers at this event were U.S. Senators, U.S. Representatives and, of particular note to Oregon State readers, Mark Abbott and George Waldbusser served on a panel focused on ocean acidification. The website for the event includes videos.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions. As I mentioned, more links will be coming…

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.

 

 

Oregon Sea Grant Adopts Idahoan

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My name is Zachary L. Penney, and I am representing Oregon Sea Grant as a 2014 Knauss Marine Policy Legislative Fellow in Washington, DC. I am a recent graduate of the University of Idaho (December 2013), where I completed my Ph.D. in Natural Resources with a primary emphasis in fisheries biology and management. Although I label myself as an Idahoan, I am also Nimiipuu (Nez Perce Tribe), who historically occupied areas in central Idaho, western Montana, southeastern Washington, and northeastern Oregon. So despite the boundary between Idaho and Oregon, I have undeniable ancestral ties to the state of Oregon.

After being selected as a Knauss finalist, I traveled to Silver Springs, MD during the first week of November 2013, also known as placement week. As a legislative fellow, I spent the majority of my time traveling into Washington, D.C. (via Metro) and running around our nation’s capital. Coming from rural Idaho, the Metro system was a completely new and, at times, a stressful experience for me. However, after a few days of trial and error, I quickly became a metro expert. Believe me when I say that using the metro is far less stressful than trying to drive downtown Washington D.C.

During the final few days of placement week I spent the majority of my time interviewing with the staff of senators and house representatives. In total, I interviewed with 17 different offices and committees, which at times felt quite a bit like speed-dating. Admittedly, I must confess that before my interviews I thought that I already knew what offices would fit my skill set best. This couldn’t have been further from the truth. After my interviews it quickly became apparent that there was more to selecting an office than which one best fit my background or degree. I found that finding an office that would provide a positive work environment in addition to professional development was also very important. In the end I selected to serve in the office of U.S. Representative Jared Huffman, who represents the 2nd district of California, which lies along Oregon’s southern border.

I officially begin my Knauss fellowship on February 3rd, 2014 and am currently looking for a place to rent in the Washington, D.C. area. Considering that 2014 is an election year, I expect that the political atmosphere will be charged, which should provide an interesting experience during my fellowship.

 

.  knauss-zachary-penney-2014

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This post has been a long time in the making.  No matter how hard I try to stay on top of things early in the quarter, November and December always end up being a bit of a whirlwind.  I have (finally!) finished the quarter, and I have moved on to regular 40 hour work weeks.  It almost feels like vacation.

This quarter was a particularly busy one.  In addition to my classes, I was presenting my research at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, a weeklong conference in San Francisco that gathers more than 20,000 researchers from a range of fields. The conference very inconveniently occurs during finals week, but it’s an incredible opportunity to interact with fellow scientists and to learn more about the work being conducted in the field.

A bit of background: I am an MS candidate at Oregon State University and one of three Robert E. Malouf scholars for 2014.  I work with Dr. Merrick Haller in the Coastal and Ocean Engineering group on the effects of offshore Wave Energy Converter (WEC) arrays on the nearshore wave field. This research is part of a large and multidisciplinary effort to understand the potential environmental impacts of WEC devices.  The Malouf Fellowship allows me to be more active in the scientific community through conferences such as AGU and the Marine Energy Technology Symposium (METS) (where I will be presenting my research in April 2014) and it has given me insight into other Sea Grant related work being done at a more local level.  I am very grateful for the support of the Oregon Sea Grant and for the opportunity to be part of the Sea Grant community.

More specifically, my research focuses on how the presence of WEC arrays changes the waves at the shoreline, and the potential impacts of these changes on nearshore processes.  WEC devices extract energy from the waves, which results in a low energy area behind the devices, referred to as the WEC shadow.  The extraction of energy results in a reduction in wave height and a change in wave direction in the WEC shadow.  Wave height and direction are important parameters in nearshore processes, and are especially important in the generation of rip currents and longshore currents that drive sediment transport.  Coastal erosion is a serious problem on certain parts of the Oregon coast.  Could the deployment of offshore WEC arrays increase erosion in vulnerable areas? Could it result in the generation of rip currents that pose serious risks for swimmers and beach users?  If so, where?  It is important to understand the potential impacts of WEC arrays in order to choose the best size, design, and location for arrays before they are deployed.

To address these issues, I am using the numerical model SWAN to simulate the changes on the wave field resulting from each individual device.  The past few months I have spent developing a technique for representing the WEC arrays in the model, and then applying this technique on an idealized coastline to make a few general conclusions about the effects of WEC arrays on the nearshore zone.  In the upcoming months, I will be using this same technique to simulate arrays at two permitted wave energy test sites off the coast of Newport, the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center (NNMREC) North Energy Test Site (NETS) and the South Energy Test Site (SETS), using high resolution bathymetry and directional wave spectra from a 2011 hindcast.  This will allow us to gain insight into the effects of WEC arrays on a more realistic coastline, and to see how the deployment of a WEC array could potentially affect the nearshore environment and communities in the Newport area.

I am happy with the progress I’ve made in the past few months, and I’m really excited to continue.  At the moment, though, I am very ready to enjoy winter break.  Happy 2014!

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.

I have reached the point where I know exactly what I don’t know.

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This being my first blog post, I thought it would be appropriate to start with a little about me. I’m originally from Massachusetts, but find myself in the beautiful state of Oregon working towards a Masters of Environmental Management. I am a candidate at Portland State University under the excellent guidance of my advisor, Dr. Elise Granek. I came back to school after some time working in the solar energy industry in order to better understand how best to bring scientific knowledge into policy action. In doing so, I study coastal ecosystem services knowledge gaps in the policy and management community in Oregon. My research will form a framework for connecting data needs of coastal policy makers and managers with scientific research with matching interests in the near future and long-term. I hope this will provide a methodology for effectively connecting the scientific community with policy makers and managers in other coastal states. I suspect that due to its strong focus on outreach in the marine environment, I was fortunate to be awarded the Robert E. Malouf Marine Studies Scholarship for this work! I look forward to applying my background and education to a career in coastal and marine policy creation and management implementation.
That being said, I’m a year into my work and I’ve hit what seems to be the most critical time, analysis! Since last May I have been interviewing and focus grouping various decision makers on the Oregon coast and have collected a significant amount of qualitative data to work with. Aided by the vast knowledge of Amy Lubitow PhD, an environmental sociology associate professor at Portland State University, and Max Nielsen-Pincus PhD, an environmental public policy and management associate professor at Portland State University, as well as the use of advanced qualitative data analysis software, I will be coding data and evaluating the emergent themes of ecosystem service priorities and research needs in coastal Oregon public policy and management.
Conducting the interviews and focus group research for this project was a learning experience in itself. Every person I spoke with had a unique perspective on marine policy and management practices. Since I was relatively new to this form of data collection, it seemed that the more interviews and focus groups I conducted the better I became at digging deeper into those perspectives. Unfortunately, that also meant that the audio files recording these qualitative data interactions became progressively longer as the project progressed. This made transcribing the data a much more significant task than I ever realized! The length of time required for the transcriptions was longer than I had anticipated, but what’s a master’s thesis without a glitch in the originally planned timeframe?
Now that the transcriptions are finally complete and I have read through them, I am feeling very good about the data that has been collected. The questions are all asked, and the data is all there, now the key is matching qualitative data with questions to come to some conclusions. In short, I am at the stage now where I know exactly what it is I don’t know; but I’m moving in the direction of knowing. This seems to be the most exciting and daunting my project has been since inception.
Where do I go from here? Well, the exact answer to this question depends on the data analysis. Coding and analysis of the data will determine the kinds of scientific informational needs that exist on the coast. From there the synthesis session will, simply put, be planned according to identified needs in order to reach out to the scientific and decision making communities to be the basis for a more iterative process of interactions. However, this is actually not quite as simple as it may sound. There remains a significant amount of work to achieve in a short period of time, but first things first: Analysis!

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.

A new hat

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A few weeks ago I went to a small luncheon in Corvallis; it was there that I received, as a gift, a new hat.  It’s a blue baseball cap with the words “Oregon Sea Grant” across the front.  As you know, baseball caps are particularly well suited to a number of uses: (1) Baseball playing, (2)  Keeping the sun out of one’s eyes , and (3) Keeping the rain off of one’s face.  Tomorrow when I head out on the ocean my brand new Oregon Sea Grant baseball cap is going to take a beating… and I won’t be playing baseball.

My name is Michelle Fournet.  I’m a PhD student in Oregon State University’s department of Fisheries and Wildlife, and a proud recipient of a 2013 Robert E. Malouf Fellowship.  My lab, the Oregon State Research Collective for Applied Acoustics, or ORCAA for short, uses sound (acoustics) to study marine organisms.  My research in particular is centered around the cetacean species that inhabit Oregon’s near coastal oceans.  The order Cetacea includes whales, dolphins, and porpoise- and we have many of them here in Oregon.  How many exactly? We’re not yet sure.

Part of my PhD research is aimed at identifying what cetacean species regularly use Oregon’ near coastal ocean, and when they seem to be here.  To answer this question I’m taking a two prong approach that, at first glance, sounds a lot simpler than it really is:  I’m going to look for them and I’m going to listen for them.

I’m conducting visual surveys along Oregon’s continental shelf with a team of observers, binoculars, float coats, and cameras.  We’re hopping on board with other labs as they take cruises to collect biological and oceanographic data out of Newport Oregon.  We perch ourselves on the bow of OSU’s R/V Elakha and spot whales, dolphins, and porpoise whenever the vessel is underway- rain or shine, wind and waves, if the boat goes out we try and get on it!  We’re using a line transect sampling protocol and hope to be incorporating photo identification into the project.  Both of these methods allow us to ultimately identify what species are present and to calculate species abundance.  If we are able to sample throughout the year we can also address questions about seasonal and diel variability, ask questions about larger scale processes, and paint a more comprehensive picture of our whale, dolphin, and porpoise communities.

This is only part of the method, however.  While looking from the bow of the boat can be a very effective method for documenting mammals, porpoises and dolphins can be difficult to spot under even the best conditions.  To compliment our visual surveys we have plans to launch multiple hydro-acoustic platforms that will record oceans sounds for analysis.  Cetaceans are highly vocal.  Baleen whale species produce some of the loudest calls on the planet, that may be capable of traveling across ocean basins.  Odontocete species utilize echolocation for navigation and foraging, and produce whistles under various social situations. However, high frequency odontocete calls may only be detected in the range of meters, and low-frequency baleen whale calls may be masked by anthropogenic or ocean noise.  What we have in the wings, is a few technologies that will help us work around these problems to get clear recordings of cetacean vocalizations.

Our hope is that the combination of the two methods will yield sufficient data to form a comprehensive understanding of who is really out there.  Why do we want to know?  Well… I’d love to tell you all about it (and I’m sure I will in my next post!).  But for now, I have a rainy  boat ride to prepare for, and I need to find my hat.

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.