On the shores of Long Island Sound. Photo: Long Island Sound Study

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”

Yogi Berra as life coach or organizational management guru? Well no, not really. But, this alleged Yogi-ism does remind me that it’s the strategic planning season again at New York Sea Grant. Every four years, we take a step back to look at what we have been doing, assess the constellation of current and looming coastal issues facing New York, match the issues against the types and amounts of the (limited) resources at our disposal to address them and decide which problems will command the majority of our attention over the next four years. Those will be the issues on which we think we can make the biggest impact. We cannot travel all of New York’s coastal roads simultaneously. Which roads to choose?

This past mid-winter, our Extension staff sought input from a wide array of stakeholders to help us set priorities for the 2018-2021 planning period. We have reached out in similar fashion to our Program Advisory Council and current/recent Sea Grant-supported graduate students and fellows. As we resurrect a printed edition of our newsletter, New York Coastlines with this issue, I offer you, the reader, an opportunity to contribute to this direction-setting process. We fund applications-oriented research on important coastal problems and pair this with targeted education and public outreach programs to help deliver science-based information to those in New York’s coastal communities who need it.

If you were the sitting Director of New York Sea Grant, where would you focus the program’s energies, and why?  Reach me at william.wise@stonybrook.edu. Suggestions received by the end of July 2016 will be most useful.  
 
—Bill Wise


More Info: New York Sea Grant

New York Sea Grant (NYSG), a cooperative program of Cornell University and the State University of New York, is one of 33 university-based programs under the National Sea Grant College Program (NSGCP) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The NSGCP engages this network of the nation’s top universities in conducting scientific research, education, training and extension projects designed to foster science-based decisions about the use and conservation of our aquatic resources. Through its statewide network of integrated services, NYSG has been promoting coastal vitality, environmental sustainability, and citizen awareness about the State’s marine and Great Lakes resources since 1971.

New York Sea Grant maintains Great Lakes offices at SUNY Buffalo, the Wayne County Cooperative Extension office in Newark and at SUNY Oswego. In the State's marine waters, NYSG has offices at Stony Brook University and Stony Brook Manhattan, in the Hudson Valley through Cooperative Extension in Kingston and at Brooklyn College. 

For updates on Sea Grant activities: www.nyseagrant.org has RSS, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube links. NYSG also offers a free e-list sign up via www.nyseagrant.org/coastlines for its flagship publication, NY Coastlines/Currents, which is published several times a year.