GUIDE CASE STUDY: Collaborative science projects are designed to inform and catalyze action, but often those impacts do not develop until after a grant ends. Two project teams working with New England reserves found different ways to support the work of their partners after their grants ended.
See Keywords and Reserves
Keywords: enhance collaboration
Reserves: Great Bay, NH, Narragansett Bay, RI, Waquoit Bay, MA, Wells, ME
GUIDE CASE STUDY: Collaboration with diverse team members and stakeholders can sometimes result in disagreements or contention, as was the experience of the New England Climate Adaptation Project, a regional initiative involving the four New England reserves.
GUIDE CASE STUDY: Understanding beliefs, perceptions, and values of end users increases the potential for reserve-based science to make the greatest impact on surrounding communities. A project led by the Wells Reserve used communication audit and mental mapping techniques to understand the collective beliefs about riparian buffers among reserve staff, their partners and stakeholders. Based on this research, they identified which communication and engagement strategies should be collectively prioritized.
GUIDE CASE STUDY: Interactive workshops engaging stakeholders require time and effort to plan and implement. This project team at the Hudson River NERR held a day-long workshop to share project results and products with approximately 50 stakeholders including engineers, landscape architects, state permitting officials, and researchers.
Rising coastal flood risk and recent disasters are driving interest in the construction of gated storm surge barriers worldwide, with current studies recommending barriers for at least 11 estuaries in the United States alone.
GUIDE CASE STUDY: During the second year of their project, a team based at the Wells Research Reserve suffered the tragic loss of the lead science investigator. This individual had served as the Reserve's research coordinator for many years and possessed a deep reservoir of scientific knowledge about the local ecosystems on which the project was focused. In addition to the intense emotional impact, the loss of a respected researcher and team member posed a significant challenge to the project.
This 2022 paper which appeared in Nature discusses a modeling approach to examine the marsh ’s buffering capacity in a changing climate (from 2020 to 2100), considering a potential marsh restoration plan (from 2020 to 2025) and potential marsh loss due to sea-level rise.
This article, published in Scientific Reports in 2021, describes work done as part of a 2016-2020 collaborative research project conducted at Hudson River Reserve in New York. The article describes a regression model that can be used for wetland restoration planning to help reduce storm-related structural damage.