In an Ocean Week speech on Capitol Hill in 2009, Jane Lubchenco laid out the goals: “Americans want clean beaches, healthy seafood, good jobs, abundant wildlife, stable fisheries and vibrant coastal communities … . This collection of services depends on healthy, productive and resilient ocean and coastal ecosystems.”
In Coos Bay, North Bend and Charleston, aka Oregon’s Bay Area, you can take a tour of the working waterfront, courtesy of Oregon Sea Grant.
With seed funds from Oregon BEST, researcher Goran Jovanovic is working on a novel “capacitive deionization” process that could remove salt from seawater using half the energy of prevailing technologies.
Fire, grazing and logging have all caused problems when they occurred in the wrong place at the wrong time for too long and too intensely. But researchers and land managers are finding that, if used strategically, these disturbances can become tools to control weeds, prevent juniper invasion and limit the extent of wildfire.
Schools in Kenya have become crucial partners with TAHMO by installing weather stations and collaborating with sister schools in Europe and the United States. In Corvallis, Adams Elementary School installed a Decagon weather station last September and has just started communicating with the St. Scholastica Primary School north of Nairobi.
The reliability of a weather station is subject to the wanderings of wildlife. Frogs crawl into rainfall collection buckets. Insects build nests in air tubes. Rodents chew through wires. And that’s on top of damage from dust, high winds, ice and hail — or simple equipment failure.