NROC News – March 2016

NROC News – monthly news and updates from NROC, its member agencies and partners.

NROC would like you to know –

• Save the date! NROC’s Winter meeting will be held Tuesday, March 15^th in Portsmouth, NH. See the NROC website for additional details. We hope to see you there.
• In September 2015, the Tidal Crossings workshop brought together 40 experts in aquatic passage, habitat, and infrastructure, who were identified by jurisdictions from New England, New York, Washington State, and Maritime Canada.  The workshop was designed to fill an interest in leveraging existing knowledge/experience as individual states develop protocols for assessing replacement of culverts. It also provided a unique opportunity for folks with different expertise (habitat, aquatic passage, and infrastructure) to sit around the table and discuss crossings from their different perspectives. The workshop was lead through a joint effort by NROC, GOMC, and LCC.  The LCC is supporting the North Atlantic Aquatic Connectivity Collaborative work to develop a tidal crossings assessment for habitat management.  NROC and GOMC both had indicated this workshop as a need in their workplans.  Funding support was provided by NOAA, NH DES, and GOMA. Notes and meeting materials from the Tidal Crossings Workshop are available on the library page of the NROC website, under the Ocean and Coastal Ecosystem Health Committee tab. The planning team will be reconvening this spring to determine any necessary follow-up.

NROC Partners would like you to know –

• Resilient Cape Cod: a Path Forward with Innovative Tool Development and Public Engagement: NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management has announced the 2015 Regional Coastal Resilience Grant Awards, including one to the Cape Cod Commission. The Cape Cod Commission and partners will undertake a public planning process to improve community understanding of climate change impacts, sea level rise scenarios, and various adaptation strategies. The planning process will include economic research, a public engagement process, and the development of communication tools to help residents and decision makers understand the environmental and socio–economic costs and benefits of different adaptation strategies. This information will be used to inform an adaptation plan for the Town of Barnstable, Massachusetts, to implement new policies and serve as a model for other Cape Cod towns. Click here for additional details on this and other 2015 Regional Coastal Resilience Grant projects. Via Betsy Nicholson, NOAA
• The Resilience and Adaption in New England (RAINE) database: New England communities are taking action to adapt to the impacts of climate change in new and creative ways. The Resilience and Adaptation in New England (RAINE) database is a collection of vulnerability, resilience and adaptation reports, plans and webpages at the state, regional and community level. It also provides examples of presentations that communities use to engage their citizens, what tools they used to identify their vulnerabilities and who funded their projects. Communities can use the RAINE database to share what they have done and learn from others, while planning agencies can identify where work has been conducted and where gaps may exist. Via Ivy Mlsna, EPA
• Community Resilience Building Workshop Guide now available: The Community Resilience Building Workshop employs a unique community-driven process, rich with information, experience, and dialogue, where the participants identify top hazards, current challenges, and strengths and then develop and prioritize actions to improve their community’s resilience to all natural and climate-related hazards today, and in the future. The newly available Community Resilience Building Workshop Guide is designed to provide clear instructions on how to lead your community towards improved resilience. This Guidebook carefully illustrates the essentials of the Community Resilience Building Workshop process as well as the “before” and “after” workshop considerations to help ensure immediate goals, outcomes, and strategic direction are realized within your community.  It is a very flexible approach that could be applied anywhere at any scale to get communities, corporations, organizations, and agencies further down the resilience path. You can get the Guide and much more at www.CommunityResilienceBuilding.com. Via Adam Whelchel, TNC
• LIS SLAMM web pages now available: Long Island Sound (LIS) Study has announced a new section on its website to assist conservation commissions, land trusts, academic institutions, NGOs and others interested in understanding a computer model’s predictions on how salt marshes in Long Island Sound may to respond to sea level rise. Information about how the Sea Level Affecting Marshes Model (SLAMM) was applied to Long Island Sound was developed as a resource to assist land use planners and natural resource managers in making decisions on how to manage the region’s changing salt marsh habitats. The pages provide access to easy-to-use web based map viewers for SLAMM, which was applied to each segment of the Sound’s shoreline to predict how each coastal area is expected to respond to sea level rise. The website also includes a fact sheet describing SLAMM, data viewer user manuals, and data summaries by State and for the entire Sound. Click here for the full announcement. Via David Kozak, CT DEEP, OLISP.