Northeast Region

Connecticut Sea Grant
New website provides expanded resources for land use planners

• Connecticut Sea Grant and partners unveiled a new website that will allow local land use decision makers to practice better landscape stewardship and protect important natural resources in their communities.
• The Community Resource Inventory (CRI) Online (http://nemo.uconn.edu/tools/cri) enables visitors to create a series of key natural and cultural resource maps for any of the state's 169 municipalities without any specialized knowledge of mapping or computer mapping technology.
• The maps provide essential information for land use planning at the local level. Officials believe the maps will stimulate and boost local planning discussions and capabilities.
• The website was developed by Connecticut Sea Grant and the Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officials (NEMO) Program, the University of Connecticut (UConn) and the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).

• Roman Stocker, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been awarded the 2007 Doherty Professorship in Ocean Utilization from the MIT Sea Grant College Program.
• Every year, the program selects one or two new faculty members for a supplemental award of $25,000 per year for two years.
• The Doherty Fellowship encourages promising, non-tenured professors to undertake marine-related research that will further innovative uses of the ocean's resources.
• Stocker's research will focus on improving our understanding of marine microorganisms, which are at the base of the oceans' food web and are essential to the oceans' healthy functioning.
• Stocker expects this study to help answer important questions such as how marine microbes find food, avoid predation, and survive in a turbulent and heterogeneous world.
• This work will contribute to a more thorough understanding of the oceans, and may aid in fisheries and aquaculture endeavors, as well as water quality monitoring.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Sea Grant
Sea Grant researchers transfer technology for forecasting harmful algal blooms to private company

• Sea Grant researchers have developed molecular probes that differentiate and enumerate the species responsible for harmful algal blooms (HABs).
• The probes are used to rapidly characterize bloom conditions and the potential threat of toxin accumulation in shellfish stocks.
• The probes have been commercialized by Saigene, Inc., and were very effective in predicting the extensive red tide conditions experienced off the New England coast during the spring and summer of 2005.

Maine Sea Grant
Workshops providing tools for preserving working waterfronts offered statewide

• In November 2005, voters in Maine approved tax breaks for owners of waterfront property where the land is used for commercial fishing activities and other “working waterfront ”uses. 
• To help those who may be eligible for Waterfront Current Use Tax program learn more, Maine Sea Grant and partners are sponsoring five workshops along the coast this winter.
• Representatives of the Maine State Planning Office and the Working Waterfront Coalition will describe the new program, and how it might apply to those interested in preserving working waterfronts. 

New Hampshire Sea Grant
New Hampshire Sea Grant develops cod-friendly gillnet to reduce by-catch

• In a fishing gear project, New Hampshire Sea Grant designed and tested two low vertical profile gillnets.
• The low profile net (one-third the height of a standard gillnet) was found to have potential for reducing cod catch (as by-catch) without a reduction of flounder catch.
• This new net is being evaluated by the fishing industry and could be in wide use soon in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank.

New York Sea Grant
Multi-state, bi-national team guides rapid research response to new invasive species

• New York Sea Grant is working to develop a rapid research response to the discovery of Hemimysis in Lake Ontario as part of a multi-state, bi-national group coordinated by NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL).
• A non-native invertebrate species, Hemimysis anomala, closely related to the possum shrimp that is native to the Great Lakes, was identified in a Lake Ontario water sample collected in spring 2006.
• Hemimysis anomala was found in Lake Michigan in November 2006 by GLERL scientists.
• Hemimysis, native to the Ponto-Caspian region (Caspian and Black Sea areas) of Eurasia, is presumed to have arrived in the Great Lakes system in the ballast of oceangoing ships.
• Research is needed to determine how the Hemimysis will affect the Great Lakes’ food webs and fisheries. Despite this uncertainty, top scientists are developing a research plan for Hemimysis in the Great Lakes.

Rhode Island Sea Grant
Rhode Island Sea Grant extension leader chairs $2.3 million initiative aimed at researching deadly lobster disease

• For years, a bacterial shell disease has affected local lobster populations without any clear explanations of the cause. Now, a concerted search for answers is underway.
• A $3-million appropriation, sponsored by Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, was used to create the New England Lobster Research Initiative based at the University of Rhode Island.
• Kathleen Castro, Rhode Island Sea Grant's fisheries extension leader, was named chairwoman of the initiative’s executive committee.
• A total of $2.3 million in grants was awarded to nine research projects and two monitoring programs targeted towards finding out more about a disease that afflicts as many as a quarter of the lobsters hauled in Rhode Island.