Anastassia Swenticky, a Georgian Court University senior, was featured in the Asbury Park Press. Her project, Evaluation of use of deep-rooted ornamental grasses as a mechanism to mitigate soil compaction, was funded by New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium’s 2016 Undergraduate Minigrant award.
Along with her faculty mentor Dr. Louise Wootton, Swenticky’s aim was to determine if the use of deep-rooted plants can be used as an alternative to heavy machinery in decreasing soil compaction. Read more about her work here.
Ocean Fun Days are almost here! Come to Ocean Fun Days and celebrate waves of ocean discovery. Enjoy exhibits, classes, nature tours, and children’s activities all about our coastal environment. You’ll have a great time learning the science of our shorelines and how to care for them for years to come!
A record number of exhibitors have already committed to be a part of this year’s event. Activities at both locations include seining, coastal crafts, an energy-saving scavenger hunt, youth fishing clinics, face painting, touch tanks, a student science fair competition and the NJSGC’s famous fiddler crab races.
The Sandy Hook location will also include guided tours of many of Sandy Hook’s historic sites and an open house at the NOAA/James J. Howard Marine Sciences Laboratory. A complimentary shuttle bus service will be available at both locations to take visitors to tour sites.
Dr. Michael Schwebel presented a workshop at the 32nd Annual Alliance for New Jersey Environmental Education Conference. Dr. Schwebel is the New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium and Urban Coast Institute community resilience and climate adaptation specialist.
The workshop, titled “Communicating about climate change and its impact in New Jersey’s coastal communities” was given to formal and informal educators to gain insights on how to discuss and teach about climate change to students and program participants. The workshop focused on explaining the current and future impacts of climate change in New Jersey. Dr. Schwebel worked with participants to try climate change-related classroom activities. Feedback gathered in the session will help New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium staff plan future efforts in climate education.
The National Sea Grant College Program has spent the last year recognizing its 50th anniversary. Each month, Sea Grant programs across the country have worked together to create content to highlight Sea Grant successes with a monthly theme.
January’s theme was “K To Gray” education. New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium’s education program holds a wide variety of programs directed towards advancing greater understanding and stewardship of our state’s marine and coastal resources. Collectively, these programs engage a large and diverse audience of learners. Our K-12 field trip program alone provides instruction to over 20,000 school children annually, taking them out of the classroom and onto the beaches, bays, and estuaries of New Jersey for active learning experiences.
To highlight these programs, the Consortium contributed an article on everything from summer camp to underwater exploration to be featured on the National Sea Grant homepage. The Consortium is also featured in an interactive story map covering education programs across Sea Grant’s entire network of coastal and Great Lakes states.
Check out the story map and read the article below to see how Sea Grant educators work in New Jersey and across the 33 other Sea Grant programs.
Michelle Hartmann, New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium’s water resources specialist (also of the Rutgers Cooperative Extension Water Resources Program) has been hard at work this year installing more than 25 green infrastructure projects this fall alone. Most recently, helped NJSGC funded the installation of an 800-square-foot rain garden at Ocean Township High School. Michelle completed this project in partnership with the Whalepond Brook Watershed Association with the assistance of students in the Ocean Township High School Environmental Science club.
“It was an amazing opportunity to visit a very unique country and discuss some of the great things we’re doing in New York and New Jersey in the field of living shorelines,” he notes.
Dr. Miller, also a research associate professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, delivered a keynote address titled “Living Shorelines in Urban Environments.”
“Equally enlightening from my point of view was learning about Hong Kong’s philosophy on land reclamation and their desire to implement innovative shoreline stabilization approaches that help preserve/restore the marine environment,” Dr. Miller adds.
Dr. Amy Williams was awarded the Rising Star Award at the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association Conference. The Rising Star Award is given periodically to honor an individual ASBPA member who has gone above and beyond for the organization.
Dr. Williams, NJSGC coastal ecosystems extension agent, started participating with ASBPA as she worked on her master’s degree from Texas A&M in 2007. She credits a connection created at an ASBPA networking event in 2014 for her current position at Stevens Institute of Technology.
“Through participation in the ASBPA Coastal Conferences and D.C. Summits, I have gotten to experience so many aspects of coastal work that I would never have received in the classroom,” she notes. “ASBPA has a diverse group of members that have shown me how much collaboration is needed for coastal projects, such as engineers, geologists, biologists and political entities.”
Dr. Williams was awarded for her efforts to engage students and young professionals through social media. She was also recognized for her own time volunteering as well as organizing other volunteers for ASBPA events. She has also worked on the steering committee to for the ASBPA’s 90th Anniversary Coastal Conference in Long Branch, N.J. where she organized an ASBPA field trip to New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium headquarters at Sandy Hook.
“I look forward to continuing my work with ASBPA so I can further interact with professionals in my field and help students and new professionals get more involved,” she adds.
Climate change affects both coastal and inland communities. The National Network for Ocean and Climate Change Interpretation (NNOCCI) is a community of practice that unites informal science educators, climate scientists and social scientists to better communicate this crucial science. Diana Burich, K-12 program coordinator, and Mindy Voss, education specialist, were recently accepted into this network. This growing network of informal science educators and climate and ocean scientists aim to work together to help communicate the facts on climate change and the effects it will have on our daily life — from rising seas to extreme weather events — as well as the effects on marine organisms.
From education to research to extension, this year was full of opportunities and accomplishments. You can check out more of what we’ve been up to in our Coastodian archive, but here are just a few of the highlights:
