NYSG’s Winter 2011 New York Coastlines is available as a pdf, both in its full print version (see sidebar at right) and as individual articles. For individual articles and back issues of New York Coastlines, click here.
From the Director
Welcome to New York Sea Grant’s (NYSG’s) winter New York Coastlines issue, the first of 2011. Despite the snow piling ever higher on Long Island (a record 35 inches in January), NYSG research, outreach, and education activities have continued at a brisk pace. In mid-November 2010 the National Sea Grant Office conducted a two-day site visit of NYSG, when a six-member team visited Stony Brook. This was a review of NYSG that involved numerous NYSG staff, Board members, Program Advisory Council members, and university administrators, as well as many stakeholders. I again want to thank all those who participated for their time and effort. The site visit report was extremely favorable and recommended a broad “visioning” exercise to carry NYSG forward into the future. Since 2011 is also the 40th anniversary of NYSG, it is an appropriate time to take stock of our program as we celebrate this anniversary year and look ahead.
This New York Coastlines highlights a recently completed research project funded by NYSG which mathematically modeled the effects of sediment flocculation (the aggregation of particles) on the trapping of sediments in turbid estuaries. While this may at first seem obscure, it can be important in maximizing the efficiency of projects like the dredging of the upper Hudson River to remove PCBs from the sediment. This newsletter also spotlights a recent Sea Grant Association award to Dr. Paul Bowser, a researcher at Cornell, and Dave MacNeill, a NYSG Great Lakes fisheries specialist. They received this first-ever award for their NYSG-supported research and outreach on the Viral Hemorrhagic Septicemia Virus of fish in the Great Lakes, an issue previously described in Summer 2010 NY Coastlines. Also highlighted are NYSG outreach activities related to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, my participation in a joint US-Korean Sea Grant meeting in Korea, and stormwater-related outreach by NYSG’s Eileen Keenan at the Peconic Estuary Conference.
We are currently soliciting pre-proposals for new NYSG and regional research; please see our Web site for details. Finally, we must say goodbye to two long-time extension specialists, Bob Kent and Chuck O’Neill. Both had recently served as Interim Associate Directors for Extension and both recently retired from NYSG. Bob is briefly profiled in this issue and you will hear more about Chuck in the next. We hope to fill Bob’s position in the next year. NYSG’s Helen Domske has graciously agreed to serve as the Interim Associate Director until early April, at which time a new Associate Director will start.
