Our forests are one of our most vital environmental, economic, and recreational resources, and we are fortunate to have abundant access to these wonderful spaces right here in Connecticut! The UConn Forest Crew works with Professor Tom Worthley in the UConn Forest and across the state to apply silvicultural practices, conduct maintenance work, and gather data to analyze the health and condition of this land. This summer, the Forest Crew has worked with UConn NRE professor Dr. Bob Fahey to conduct research at Lee Farm in Coventry, Connecticut.
This research is in collaboration with the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC) project which seeks to educate forest managers on changing silvicultural planning in the face of climate change. Each project uses a standardized method of plotting and recording to gather data on forest health, and to better predict the future condition of each area. The UConn sites have been revised from the ASCC scale to assess the land at Lee Farm. Our findings from this research will ideally help us to preserve and proactively protect the health of our forests. Forest Crew work also typically includes wood working, clearing trails, and managing sections of the UConn Forest. This summer, the crew is also working with Tom to create a video series entitled “Woods Talk” which is filmed with the intention of educating woodland owners. These videos will include information on age mixes, ecosystem health, and stand diversity among an array of other topics. Keep an eye out for this series on YouTube or via the UConn Extension website later this summer!
With frequent downpours flooding many of the state’s coastal roads throughout the fall and into January – including the previous day – the workshop could hardly have had more relevance and timeliness.
“I spent yesterday dealing with countless calls to my office from people saying they couldn’t get to their houses because of flooding,” said Steve Johnson, acting assistant public works director, open space and natural resource agent for Milford. “This is getting to be the new normal. Yesterday I also watched a school bus drive through two feet of water to get the kids home.”
Johnson was one of the speakers at theClimate Adaptation Academyworkshop on Jan. 25 on road flooding. A capacity crowd of more than 80 municipal public works, planning and engineering officials from throughout coastal Connecticut came to the Middlesex County Extension Center in Haddam to spend the day learning about legal, environmental and practical approaches and challenges to “a problem with no easy answers,” said Juliana Barrett, coastal habitat specialist at Connecticut Sea Grant, during opening remarks. Co-sponsored by Sea Grant, UConn CLEAR and UConn Extension, the workshop is the third in a series focusing on the local ramifications of climate change and how towns can learn to cope.
Caught between the encroaching waters and dry land are salt marshes and roadways through low-lying coastal communities. Finding ways so that both can continue to exist on the Connecticut shoreline will be one of the main tasks of coastal town officials for the coming decades, Kozak said.Setting the stage for the issue at hand was David Kozak, senior coastal planner in the Land and Water Resources Division of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. Ocean waters have been creeping onto land at accelerating rates over the past 50 years, and sea levels are projected to rise another 20 inches by 2050 and about four feet by 2100, he said. “Sunny day flooding,” when roads become submerged by high tides rather than heavy rains and storm surge, is becoming more common, he added.
The UConn Climate Corps is an undergraduate classroom and service learning opportunity. The program consists of a 3 credit course (Fall semester) on the local impacts of climate change, followed by a 3 credit independent study (Spring semester) during which students work with Extension faculty to assist Connecticut communities in adapting to climate change. In Spring of 2018 the Corps worked with the municipalities of Hartford, Westbrook, and Old Lyme.
A student in the 2017-18 class and shared her thoughts with Extension Educators Bruce Hyde and Juliana Barrett.
Student teams led by Bruce Hyde and other CLEAR faculty will work with Connecticut towns as part of the UConn Climate Corps.
Also I just wanted to say thank you for all the hard work you two put in to make this class/independent study possible. I had an amazing experience with it and met a lot of great people. I actually just accepted a really great post-graduation job offer from Homesite Insurance in Boston as a Catastrophe Risk Analyst, and half of my interview was spent talking about this independent study. I’ll be doing natural hazard risk modeling and identifying at-risk areas for certain natural disasters as a result of weather patterns, geographic locations, and climate change, which is something this independent study really prepared me for/got me interested in. This wouldn’t have been possible without you two and the Climate Corps class, so thank you so much!! Climate Corps had a huge influence on me, and for a while I wasn’t super excited about the sorts of jobs I’d be qualified to do with a Geoscience degree (consulting and cleaning up hazardous waste spills somehow didn’t appeal to me), but having this experience opened so many doors for me and exposed me to so many different things I could do. I’m really excited to start my new job because I’ve been able to combine a career with something I find super interesting, and I really have you two to thank for that.
I recommended Climate Corps to a bunch of people and I think one of my friends is signed up for it next year, so please keep doing this, it’s a great experience for us students (and I’m sure also for the towns we work with)! Thank you again!
A number of questions were raised at Legal Issues in the Age of Climate Adaptation, a conference held by UConn CLEAR’s and Connecticut Sea Grant’s Climate Adaptation Academy in late 2015. The Marine Affairs Institute & RI Sea Grant Legal Program at Roger Williams University School of Law reviewed the questions, which came from the audience during the course of the conference. The Legal Program then developed four fact sheets addressing the following topics: Takings and Coastal Management; Property and Permitting Boundaries at the Shoreline; Government Tort Liability for Disclosure of Flood Hazard Information; Flood and Erosion Control Structures. The fact sheets can be found at: http://climate.uconn.edu/
Tom Martella. Photo: Juliana Barrett.Beth Sullivan. Photo: Juliana Barrett.Living shoreline in Stonington. Photo: Juliana Barrett.
UConn Extension worked on a living shoreline planting on Friday June 10, 2016 at Dodge Paddock Preserve in Stonington. The area is owned and managed by Avalonia Land Conservancy. Special thanks to Beth Sullivan, volunteer extraordinaire and Avalonia project manager.
Tom Martella at a living shoreline planting on Friday June 10, 2016 at Dodge Paddock Preserve in Stonington. The area is owned and managed by Avalonia Land Conservancy. Photo: Juliana Barrett, UConn Extension
Often times students at my age find themselves concerned that the subject matter they have been studying for the past two, three, or even four years is not what they see themselves doing for the rest of their lives. Numerous questions begin to arise: Is it too late to change my study plan? If I do, will I now be incredibly behind? Have I just wasted a massive amount of time, money, and effort?
Figuring out what comes after college can be daunting, and everyone has to find their own path. For me personally UConn Extension played a major role in this process.
As most people will tell you, an education of any kind is a never a waste. Knowledge is invaluable beyond measure, and accruing any amount can rarely be a bad thing. That said, not everything we learn about is of interest, but that doesn’t mean it lacks purpose. My dad once told me that one of the best ways to find out what you want to do is by finding out what you don’t want to do, as long as you learn something from the experience. Take a class, or even a job you aren’t sure of. Try it out, learn what you can, and if in the end it wasn’t for you, it was a stepping stone to the next one. An education is as much about personal experiences as it is about lectures and tests. In order to make our contribution to the world we have to learn about ourselves; our strengths, our weaknesses, and where our interest most lies. For some this may take longer than others, but it is never too late to change things up. In fact, the longer it takes, the more you learned along the way! Never discount or disregard your past experience, just because it does not match perfectly with what you are pursuing in the present. Take that wealth of knowledge you have developed and mold it into something relatable to your current interests. Changing your course of study or career path may leave you somewhat behind your new peers in certain ways, but you have a different advantage that they lack. Bringing a new perspective, alternative insight, and fresh ideas to the table can be an extremely positive thing, and can lead you down a path you may have never thought possible. Explore your interests, pursue your goals, and actively take part in creating your future. My story of getting involved in the UConn Extension program is of doing just that.
I am a cognitive science major. For the past three years I have studied how the human mind works through psychology, philosophy, linguistics, neurobiology, anthropology, etc. I have learned a lot about human beings (and what we consider human nature), as well as problem solving, critical thinking, and communication skills, and I have certainly enjoyed it. So many are surprised when I now tell them that I hope to pursue a career in landscape architecture.
“But I thought you were going to be a cognitive scientist, how does that relate to landscaping?” A question I often receive after telling someone my plan. I have come up with a somewhat stock response about being interested in the way humans come to conceptualize and interact with the landscapes around them, but I realized that it doesn’t really matter how I justify it to them, as long as the transition feels like the right move to me. Truthfully, I don’t know if I ever really thought I was going to be a ‘cognitive scientist.’ When I was in high school I picked a school that was affordable with a major that seemed interesting. Since then, I have bounced around so many potential careers, from lawyer to marketing analyst, that I have started to lose track. One constant in this was that every summer, my job consisted of some form of landscaping. I have worked on a farm, in a state park, on a golf course, for commercial landscapers, and have even independently contracted my own jobs. Some of these jobs were a lot better than others, but I learned different things from each and, most importantly, I always loved being outside.
I have often thought about starting my own landscaping company from the ground up. I like the idea of owning my own business and managing people and projects, but many people I know who have done this started straight out of highschool (or even before) and didn’t bother getting a traditional college education. It felt to me like I was somewhat overqualified now, having nearly finished my undergraduate education at a top-notch public university, and while I have great appreciation for what general landscaping takes, I worked hard in college and wanted to make good use of it. I wanted to find a way to tie together my experience from cognitive science to my passion for landscaping projects, my desire to manage people, and my dream of owning my own company. Frankly, I was becoming increasingly confused and frustrated, while the question of ‘what to do with my life’ seemed to constantly loom.
As my frustration began to reach its pinnacle, a number of events occurred. The first was that while searching for summer internships I stumbled across the UConn Extension program, and through that, the Climate Adaptation Academy internship. I had been doing research that semester with a professor investigating people’s neural response to political issues, one of them being climate change, so I had been doing a lot of reading on the matter and had climate issues on the brain. If not for that I may have never clicked on it, and I certainly would not have been able to write the application essay. I did not think too much about the position when I applied (I sent in many applications to many places in my search), but I soon found out that I had received the job, and decided that it seemed to be the most interesting option I had. I still had very little information about what specifically the job would entail, so I waited to hear more.
Meanwhile, I came to the realization that I had a large amount of space in my schedule for the upcoming year. I decided to try and find out more about landscaping courses offered by the school, and if they were available to everyone. As it turns out many of them are, and so I met with a professor in the department, Peter Miniutti, who showed me around the design studio and I immediately fell in love with it. I enrolled in four landscape architecture courses for the upcoming year, and was told that if I was serious about design there were graduate programs out there that accepted plenty of applicants who did not have landscape architecture as a bachelor’s degree, especially if they had already started a portfolio, which these classes would help me do.
Soon the year had ended and I was preparing to start my internship with Dr. Juliana Barrett. Her partnership with Connecticut Sea Grant and UConn Extension has her working on projects that educate and spread awareness about the ways in which towns and communities can deal with the effects of Earth’s changing climate, from alterations to coastal landscapes to increased storm preparedness. I am now involved in all sorts of projects from helping plant one of Connecticut’s first living shorelines (an ecological form of coastal stabilization designed to prevent erosion while maintaining a healthy shoreline), to meeting with municipal workers from various towns to discuss how they have handled past storms and how they plan to handle those of increased severity in the future, to working on a design for a residential riverbank restoration project to replace the riparian vegetation buffer that was clear cut against state regulations. Dr. Barrett invites me to join her at all of her many meetings, and gets me involved in as many of her various projects as she can. When she found out that I was interested in landscape design, she steered me toward projects that would give me extremely valuable real life experience, which is the most important goal of the Extension program. I realized as soon as I started working with Dr. Barrett that she doesn’t care that I have been educated as a cognitive science major, she cares that I am eager to learn and that I am passionate about the work and the subject matter at hand. With this internship I learn new things every day, and while there certainly has been a learning curve in material, I use my past experiences to translate the incoming information into terms I understand, and let the prior insight I have developed shape what I produce. I intend to continue to do this in the coming year when I begin my landscape architecture courses, taking with me every experience I have gained from UConn Extension.
Maybe someday I will be a landscape architect, and maybe I won’t, it’s impossible to know for sure now. What I do know is that everything that I am down the road will be, at least in part, due to the active role I took in creating my future. A small decision like applying for an internship in climate change may not seem like it will change your life, but every experience is a valuable thing, and the interesting part is what it will lead to next. I can already see my Extension internship as being a milestone in creating my future.
In early May, over 700 people gathered in St Louis, MO for the second National Adaptation Forum (NAF). The purpose of the NAF is to promote and share climate adaptation research, issues, tools and strategies. Participants gathered from across the United States and Canada including federal, state and municipal officials, consultants, NGO’s, academics and representatives from tribal nations. There were heart wrenching stories of climate impacts slowly destroying communities and changing lives as well as inspiring solutions and new technologies.
The Forum included presentations, many of which incorporated audience participation or discussion, a poster session, working groups, training sessions, exhibit booths, and networking events. The networking events provided time to meet new people and talk with other participants about issues and strategies that are working in their communities. Bruce Hyde (UConn Extension) and I presented a poster on the Climate Adaptation Academy in Connecticut and shared the topics and issues facing Connecticut municipalities and residents.
Having attended the Inaugural NAF in 2013, progress on climate adaptation solutions and strategies is very apparent. The first Forum was very much, “Here’s what we should be doing.” A short two years later, the focus is, “Here’s what we are doing/Here’s what’s working/Here are new tools.”
The next NAF, to be held in 2016, will hopefully bring more students into the discussion as many of the solutions and strategies to deal with the impacts of climate change will come from them.
Modeled after CLEAR’s highly successful Land Use Academy, we are embarking on a new forum for land use officials and other interested professionals, a Climate Adaptation Academy (CAA). The CAA, sponsored by Connecticut Sea Grant and CLEAR, will serve as an outreach arm of the recently announced Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation. We envision the CAA as an exchange of information, issues, experiences and solutions.
A series of one-day workshop for local officials and other interested professionals are under development and will focus on current climate issues and climate adaptation that will lead to resiliency. We plan to have a revolving list of topics discussed by experts based on input and needs identified by municipal officials, land use commission members and others. The agenda for the CAA will run the gamut from sea level rise and coastal erosion to storm water flooding, the national flood insurance program, energy and power outages, and legal issues associated with climate change. We will be bringing in experts from academic institutions, state and federal agencies, and the private sector – whoever we can best find to address the questions that you raise. Each CAA will have an opportunity for you to express your needs and thoughts, and we will do our best to address those issues.
The first Climate Adaptation Academy is planned for Saturday May 3, 2014 at UConn’s Avery Point campus with an agenda that includes: Major Threats of Climate Change, Climate Change and Your Town, Flooding and Emergency Response, DEEP and Climate Adaptation, and an opportunity for you to identify what issues are most important to you. The location of the CAA will change to include coastal and inland sessions, as well as eastern and western locations so that it is easier for people from throughout Connecticut to attend.
