FORT HANCOCK –Outdoor New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium student programs have more than recovered after attendance dipped in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.
Field trip and summer camp attendance increased to 19,700 students for the 2013-14 school year from 16,515 students during the 2012-13 school year, said Executive Director Claire Antonucci.
“We lost the fall season,” Antonucci said of the 2012 storm’s impact. “And then we had a slow start because people were hesitant to come back to Sandy Hook.” Read More …
Dr. Peter Rowe, director of research and extension for N.J. Sea Grant Consortium, will be one of the speakers at the the Rising Tide Forum hosted by the Bayshore Center at Bivalve.
The forum will be held Nov. 18 from 6 to 9 p.m. and will focus on sea level rise along the Delaware Bayshore.
Dr. Rowe will explain how the NJSGC has emphasized coastal resiliency in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.
His 25-minute discussion, “NJSGC Retools for Resilience: Updates on Local and Regional Resiliency Projects” will highlight NJSGC-funded research, extension and education projects that address resilience in a post-Sandy and changing climate world.
WEST LONG BRANCH, N.J. — Bait shop owners will soon receive “Striped Bass Catch and Release” posters, which marine experts hope will educate anglers on the best practices for releasing angled striped bass.
The posters are being mailed to bait shop owners throughout the state by New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium and Monmouth University in advance of the fall stripers. The posters are part of a three-year campaign called Stripers for the Future, which is intended to allow anglers to understand the causes of stress in angled striped bass and educate them about best practices to increase the survival of released fish. We believe that an understanding of proper catch-and-release techniques should be a key piece of every fisherman’s education. A brochure reviewing the best practices for catch and release can be found here: Striped Bass Catch and Release Brochure. Read More …
Catch the Education Department at New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium this fall at two Professional Development workshops presenting “Beaches, More than Just a Day of Fun in the Sun.” Both sessions will present “hands-on” activities on dunes, dune management, the impacts of climate change on the Jersey Shore, and storm preparedness and resiliency.
First you will find us at the New Jersey Science Convention on Tuesday, October 14th from 10-11am. Details about this important event and program information can be found at http://www.njscienceconvention.org/
Then on Thursday, October 16th from 10am-11am we will be presenting at the annual fall workshop of the NJ Marine Science Educators Association. Details about this exciting workshop which includes a boat trip on Sandy Hook Bay can be found at http://njmarineed.weebly.com/
Dr. Peter Rowe, director of research and extension at the New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium (NJSGC), will join a panel on Wednesday, Oct. 1, at St. Peter’s University in Jersey City to discuss how climate change is affecting coastal communities.
The panel, “Climate Change Challenges for Coastal Communities,” is the first of three at the 2014 Jersey City Sustainability Conference. Dr. Jon Miller, NJSGC’s coastal processes specialist and associate research professor at Stevens Institute of Technology will join Dr. Rowe on the panel along with Amanda Nesheiwat, environmental coordinator for the Town of Secaucus.
The Consortium’s involvement in the conference supports the Jersey City Coastal Communities Climate Adaptation Initiative, a resiliency planning project developed by Stevens Institute of Technology and funded by a grant from the National Sea Grant program and the NJSGC.
“The call for proposals was for researcher-community partnerships to develop models, tools, or other methodologies for coastal adaptation, with the long term goal for communities to utilize these tools in their planning,” Rowe said. “The Jersey City project was successful because of its innovative modeling techniques and well coordinated collaboration between the city and Stevens.”
The second and third panels that day will be on solutions and adaptations, and implementation. Dr. Philip Orton, of Stevens Institute and a principal investigator on the Jersey City grant, who built the inundation model for Jersey City, will sit on the third panel.
In July, Jersey City residents had a chance to review some of the model scenarios and adaptations prepared by Dr. Orton and others at an open house coordinated by Tanya Marione, Senior Planner for Jersey City’s Division of City Planning.
Some suggestions that were presented for making Jersey City more resistant to an overflowing Hudson River included building street levees and flood gates. Some sections of the city where the levees are proposed would require raising roads or land to between three and eleven feet above the current grade.
Hundreds of pounds of spat, or baby oysters were taken Sunday from the Haskin Shellfish Laboratory where they had been growing in mud flats and relocated to artificial reefs along the Delaware Bay shore.
The spat had been growing on the surface of shell-filled mesh bags since the early summer near the Rutgers University Haskin Shellfish Laboratory’s Cape Shore facility in Cape May County as part of Project PORTS: Promoting Oyster Restoration Through Schools, or PORTS. The bags were relocated by barge to a 5-acre reef located at the Gandy’s Beach Oyster Restoration and Enhancement Area in the Delaware Bay off Cumberland County. Led by Lisa Calvo, Shellfish Aquaculture Coordinator for Rutgers University and the New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium, Project PORTS has seeded more than 20 million oysters in conservation sites like Gandy’s Beach throughout the Delaware Bay since it began in 2007.
Since 2007, Rutgers has seeded more than 20 million oysters in conservation sites throughout the Delaware Bay through Project: PORTS.
“Scientific assessments indicate these restoration efforts have been successful,” said Jenny Paterno, a Rutgers graduate student examining the fish activity in the restoration areas and nearby parts of the bay. “A viable multi-generational oyster population, approaching natural oyster abundances, has been established in an area that was previously barren.”
Oyster populations have been decimated in many areas due to disease and overfishing. “Advancing Eastern Oyster Aquaculture through Marker-Assisted Selection” is one of New Jersey Sea Grant’s funded research projects for 2014-16. Dr. Ximing Gou, and his team at the Haskin Laboratory, are attempting to breed oysters with specific genetic markers that will assist the species in fighting diseases. Read More …
The New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium (NJSGC) Resilience Research RFP is now available and can be viewed or downloaded by clicking here. The NJSGC is one of 34 state Sea Grant Programs within the National Sea Grant College Program. The National Program is housed within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Department of Commerce. Sea Grant addresses marine issues and coastal sustainability in the context of wise resource use and management. In New Jersey, we are interested in balancing economic growth with resource stewardship to sustain the state’s $80+ billion coastal economy. NJSGC fulfills its mission to promote the sustainable use of New Jersey’s coastal and marine resources through relevant research and student training, educational excellence, and rapid dissemination of acquired knowledge. NJSGC is a statewide program bringing together the best talent within the region’s member colleges and universities without regard to academic affiliation.
The Graduate Fisheries Fellowship Program administered through NOAA’s National Sea Grant College Program and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) awards at least two new PhD fellowships each year to students who are interested in careers related to marine ecosystem and population dynamics, with a focus on modeling and managing systems of living marine resources. This year, Princeton University PhD student Lisa McManus has been awarded a NMFS-Sea Grant Population and Ecosystem Dynamics Graduate Fisheries Fellowship to pursue research on her project: Assessing the impacts of connectivity on coral reef metacommunity dynamics in the Coral Triangle. Princeton University is a member institution of the New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium who manages Ms. McManus’ fellowship award.
You can now register for two Boy Scout Individual Enrollment classes: Oceanography and Environmental Science. We offer these classes once in the fall and once in the spring. It is for individual scouts (not whole troops) who wish to study Oceanography or Environmental Science.
A workshop on undersea imaging took place on January 14-15, 2014, hosted by the New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium (NJSGC) and the NOAA Fisheries James J. Howard Marine Science Laboratory on Sandy Hook, which evaluated the strengths and limits of photographic, videographic and direct observations, as well as associated platforms, for seafloor imaging as part of a benthic monitoring strategy. The workshop brought together government and academic scientists and engineers to discuss the need for cost effective and comprehensive characterization of offshore macrobenthic and demersal communities and habitats in the Northeast Large Marine Ecosystem. A downloadable copy of the report is available here.