Monthly Archives: July 2009

Bacterial pollution affects Oregon beaches

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Oregon’s beaches are relatively clean by national standards, but they show sporadic hot spots of bacterial pollution at some popular destinations.

So concludes a study led by Oregon Sea Grant Extension agent Frank Burris.

“It’s definitely human-related,” Burris said. “It’s a significant problem. It’s really Oregon’s biggest beach problem.”

Read the entire article.

Oregon Sea Grant’s Rob Emanuel, writing in his own blog, offers some tips for coastal visitors and property owners for reducing their contribution to the problem.

Looking for a way to beat the heat?

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questforblog

Questing

… and learn a few things in the process? Head over to the central Oregon Coast, pick up an Oregon Coast Quests guidebook and head off in a puzzle-solving search for clues to the region’s natural, cultural and historical treasures.

Now in its third year – with several all-new Quests – Oregon Coast Quests is an all-ages learning adventure. Using the guidebook as your treasure map, find a series of clues that lead to a hidden Quest box – and have fun learning along the way. Once you find the box, sign its guest book, use the hidden rubber stamp to mark your victory, and tuck it all back away for the next adventurers to find.

Questing was born out of the 150-year old “letterboxing” tradition that originated in southwest England. In recent years, a high-tech version called geocaching, which uses GPS units to locate cached treasures, has become popular in the US and elsewhere.

Oregon Coast Quests are simpler, requiring nothing more than the Quest book and good powers of observation.  The 2009-10 Quest book contains 23 Quests scattered all over Lincoln County, including eight brand-new ones and one written in Spanish.

Read more and learn where you can buy the Oregon Coast Quests

Gear Retrieval Project Creates Jobs

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marine-debris-projectOregon Sea Grant’s early involvement with a pilot project to retrieve lost crab pots helped lay the groundwork for a $699,000 NOAA grant that will hire commercial fishermen to clean up 180 metric tons of abandoned gear off the Oregon coast.

The 2009 Gear Retrieval Project, announced last week by NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco during a visit to Newport, will employ fishermen during the off-season. Working with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the fishermen will locate and remove discarded crab pots, fishing nets and other marine debris that can  trap and kill marine mammals and fish and endanger fishing activities.

In 2006, Sea Grant collaborated with commerical fishing groups and the Oregon Crab Commission to test whether local fishermen could effectively locate and retrieve lost crab pots. In their first two test runs, fishermen found and hauled in nearly 60 crab pots and more than 600 feet of abandoned trawl cable.

The new gear retrieval project is among $7 million in coastal habitat restoration projects NOAA is funding in Oregon under the  American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Read more about NOAA’s stimulus act projects here.

Another El Nino year

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El Nino graphicWith last week’s NOAA announcement that El Niño is back, scientists, resource managers and coastal dwellers are preparing for a winter of increasing storm activity and potentially diminished ocean productivity in the Pacific – but a possibly milder-than-average Atlantic hurricane season and potentially beneficial rain in the arid American southwest.

El Niño, or the southern oscillation, is a climate phenomenon that occurs every two to five years and has significant effects on global weather, ocean conditions and marine fisheries. While its relative frequency makes El Niño among the most-studied and better-understood large-scale phenomena among climate scientists, it can be a mystery to the rest of us.

Oregon Sea Grant can help unravel that mystery through its short publication, El Niño. Profusely illustrated and written for lay audiences, the eight-page, color publication explains how ocean currents, wind and weather patterns come together in the Equatorial Pacific to create El Niño conditions that affect weather and fisheries from South America to Alaska.

El Niño can be downloaded free of charge from the Oregon Sea Grant Web site:

For more in-depth information, visit NOAA’s El Niño page.

Building a Resilient Coast: Maine Confronts Climate Change

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Building a Resilient Coast: Maine Confronts Climate Change

“The ocean is coming up, higher than it ever has. The climate is changing. The ocean water is warm, a lot warmer,” warns Timothy Pellerin, Emergency Management Agency, Lincoln County, Maine. Building a Resilient Coast addresses the concerns and interests of coastal Maine residents. The hour-long documentary highlights key climate change issues including public perception and the need to protect both private and public property from millions of dollars of future storm damage. The one-hour program was produced by Oregon Sea Grant as part of a NOAA-funded project with Maine Sea Grant.

Twelve short excerpts from the documentary can be found on the Sea Grant Web site.

They present “take home” messages and insights. The documentary focuses on coastal residents who are “being the change” that the circumstances warrant. For example, homeowner Dee Brown built her shoreline house on piers to withstand a rising sea and what she rightly calls, “terrible storms.”