November 7, 2014 — While it's not quite like hitting the lottery, winning a $1 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is plenty of seed money for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute to rev up a new pilot program to help coastal communities cope with sea level rise, changing water chemistry and climate.
The team of WHOI scientists has partnered with groups like the Nature Conservancy, Buzzards Bay Coalition and Commercial Fisheries Foundation to come up with solutions and strategies.
"Our focus is on Buzzards Bay and offshore waters," noted WHOI chemist Scott Doney, the head investigator.
But the approaches and tactics employed will be applicable up and down the coast.
"That's why the MacArthur Foundation was interested in this proposal. They viewed it as developing pilot technologies that could be translated to other communities," Doney explained.
They'll test informational outreach through libraries, local officials, public meetings, the Internet and citizen involvement.
"One focus is on sea level rise and storms," Doney explained. "One of our researchers, Jeff Donnelly, is doing a lot of work looking at the record of storms in history and before the historical record. He's taken cores from intertidal estuaries and he can see the big hurricane events because they wash sand from the beach back into the ponds. Taking numerical models of storm surge events from information that already exists he can communicate that to coastal property owners and community managers in a way that's more accessible. We focus on Buzzards Bay because it is so sensitive to storm surges."
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