Hello everyone!  I am excited to share my first post at the end of nearly three months in my position as the Tribal Federal Consistency Policy and Processes Fellow with the Oregon Coastal Management Program (OCMP) within the Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD).  To start, that title is a mouthful, so I’ll pull it apart to explain what exactly I am doing! 

Federal consistency is an authority granted to federally approved Coastal Management Programs (CMPs) pursuant to the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA) of 1972. This authority provides CMPs – such as Oregon’s – the ability to review proposed federal activities for consistency with state and local enforceable policies.  These activities include those which will be carried out by a federal agency and those for which a federal agency issues a permit.  During the review, OCMP staff work with the applicant and the network of state (10 agencies) and local government partner agencies (40 jurisdictions) in the coastal zone to determine if the proposed activity is consistent with statewide land use planning goals, state laws, and local land use regulations.  Based on the results of the coordinated review, OCMP staff can concur, concur with conditions, or object to the proposed activity.  Without a concurrence from the OCMP, federal activities cannot move forward. 

My project has the primary goal of creating the policy and processes by which Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes can meaningfully participate during federal consistency reviews.  Oregon is fairly unique (as compared to most states) in that state agencies are required by executive order and statute to adopt a policy for consultation and communication with the tribes.  DLCD’s existing policy establishes the over-arching goals and commitments that the department and the OCMP must meet.  It is the aim of this project to refine this policy and develop specific – but flexible! – processes and procedures to make the over-arching policy work: to lay out the foundation for a holistic and sustainable Tribal Relations program for the OCMP.   

One of the first steps we took was to formally offer the tribes the opportunity to request consultation on the development of this policy – asking if they want to “consult” on our consultation policy. We have continued to communicate and refine our messaging after that initial offer.  We are lucky to learn a lot about best practices through these exchanges – crossed lines are just a part of life when you’re trying to develop policy and procedures that essentially document a working relationship!  My perspective is that this project (and perhaps myself – I’m not complaining) are serving as the test subject so we can develop robust – and proven – best practices for the eventual Tribal Relations program.  To learn more about tribal interests and engagement, I have been able to correspond with and observe the proceedings of the Legislative Commission on Indian Services, including attending the annual Tribal-State Summit.  I am also able to participate in the state-tribal Cultural Resource Cluster, a forum where agencies and tribes can interact regarding issues that impact cultural resource protection.  We are also fortunate to have an advisor from the Coquille Indian Tribe providing guidance and insight along the way. 

I consider myself lucky to be able sit with – and dedicate my time to – the questions of how and where procedural interventions can be implemented to improve tribal relations practices.  This requires taking a systems-level view of the OCMP and its federal consistency authority.  So, in my first few months I have spent a significant amount of time reading and absorbing information about how the OCMP “works,” what a federal consistency review looks like, how and when network partner agency activities (e.g., permitting, rulemaking, planning, etc.) intersect with OCMP activities, and how and when network partner agencies are engaging with tribes.  This is to better understand how and where tribes are currently being engaged and look for opportunities to improve and/ or better coordinate engagement in the future.  I am excited about the work ahead and looking forward to one day meeting the great people at OCMP in person! 

As 2021 winds down, my fellowship is also coming to a close. It has been a wonderful and challenging experience. I wasn’t lucky enough to make it back into the office to meet coworkers in person this year, but I got to work with and learn from lots of awesome people virtually. My mentor, Meg Reed, is fantastic and was absolutely crucial in helping me succeed in this fellowship.

My main project for my fellowship was the creation of an erosion control guidebook. I spent the majority of the year reading, researching, and writing about erosion control and its regulation in Oregon. The main topics of the guidebook included:

• Physical setting of the Oregon coast: My goal was for the guidebook to introduce anyone unfamiliar with the Oregon coast to the basics, including wave climate, sea level rise, and the impacts of El Nino and La Nina events on the coast
• Coastal Policies: The guidebook covers the 1967 Beach Bill, which designated Oregon’s beaches as belonging to the public in perpetuity, and the coastal land use planning goals (Goal 16, 17, and 18). Goal 18 contains the most detail because its requirements are the most related to coastal erosion and beachfront protection.
• Beachfront Protective Structures: The guidebook discusses the impact of beachfront protective structures on the Oregon coast. It also discusses why a specific definition for a beachfront protective structure is needed, and provides the definition.
• Permitting: The guidebook lists the agencies typically involved in permitting erosion control projects, and discusses their jurisdictions. The entire permitting process is explained, including typical permitting timelines, permit requirements, and approval criteria.
• Types of erosion control: The guidebook divides erosion control mechanisms that are viable on the Oregon coast into two categories: nonstructural and structural. Nonstructural mechanisms include vegetative stabilization, dynamic revetments, beach scraping, and beach nourishment. Structural mechanisms include seawalls, riprap revetments, sandbags, and gabion structures. For each erosion control mechanism, the guidebook provides a literature review of the erosion control mechanism, its applicability to and use on the Oregon coast, and its usefulness in responding to sea level rise impacts.

I had the chance to do a series of 5 presentations in October and November to let people know that the guidebook existed; the most exciting and formal of these was to the Land Conservation and Development Commission. I also spent time learning Adobe InDesign so that I could present the guidebook information in a more visually appealing way.

I’m really proud of the work that I’ve done for this fellowship and of the final guidebook. However, this year has been tough. I’ve been fighting burnout and struggling with working from home. At the outset of my fellowship, I imagined myself finishing this fellowship as a super-productive master writer and communicator that had tackled several side projects in addition to my main fellowship project. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that that vision was both partially unrealistic and partially not possible due to the challenges of working through a pandemic. But I’ve learned other things from a challenging year of work. Stephanie and Sarah reminded me at the halfway point of my fellowship that part of the skillset I spent this year learning was resilience and the ability to advocate for myself in challenging situations.

Here are a few other non work-related things I’ve learned this year:

• Regular check-ins helped mitigate the dread Imposter Syndrome. At the halfway point of my fellowship, I was beginning to feel like I wasn’t meeting expectations and that my inadequacy would be found out at any second. However, after a halfway point check-in with my mentor, I found out that she had a good understanding of my progress and was happy with it. This shifted my perspective and allowed me to approach the second half of my fellowship from a place of confidence rather than fear.
• I learned how to plan and execute a longer-term project. For this project, I created a work plan, reevaluated it on a regular basis, and included review deadlines for outside parties to keep myself on track.
• I learned strategies to help myself push through periods of low motivation, including changing my workspace, using the Pomodoro technique to break work down into smaller chunks, and figuring out what activities allowed my brain to rest and recharge.

I’m excited to take what I’ve learned this year and bring it into my next job: a PhD in coastal engineering at OSU beginning in March 2022. I’ll be studying dynamic revetments, which are one of the erosion control practices I wrote about in the guidebook. I’ll get to do fieldwork on the Oregon coast and outreach with the practitioners who work there. I’m excited to continue exploring the issue of erosion control from the academic perspective and to continue working with the awesome people I’ve met over the course of this fellowship.

Time flies by and the Covid-19 situation in Taiwan is getting worse with the Delta variance. At this time, it is a pity that I cannot do in-person research and giving local marine issues exhibitions in the museum settings. However, it turns out that sometimes misfortune is a blessing in disguise. Specifically, I got an opportunity to make a marine environmental issue website to share with the public. Before discussing what I’ve learned during the website construction, I would like to talk a little bit more about OSU’s IRB application.

To start the project, I will have to apply for OSU’s IRB. One thing worth mentioning is that my research subjects are mainly early adolescents – the youth; therefore, I will need to have additional steps when providing the documents to apply for the IRB. For those of you unfamiliar with the term “IRB” I will provide you some basic idea of what is IRB? According to the FDA’s definition, the term “IRB” – “Institutional Review Board” – is a committee that provides reviewing and approval of applications for research projects involving human subjects. So, what is the purpose of IRB in human subjects’ research? The main purpose of the IRB is to protect the rights and welfare of human subjects. Particularly, children are more vulnerable and require special considerations in the research. I followed the Research Ethics Committee Guidance Research Involving Children to design and conduct research that is suitable for the youth.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term “IRB” I will provide you some basic idea of what is IRB? According to the FDA’s definition, the term “IRB” – “Institutional Review Board” – is a committee that provides reviewing and approval of applications for research projects involving human subjects. So, what is the purpose of IRB in human subjects’ research? The main purpose of the IRB is to protect the rights and welfare of human subjects. Particularly, children are more vulnerable and require special considerations in the research. I followed the Research Ethics Committee Guidance Research Involving Children to design and conduct research that is suitable for the youth.

As for making an outreach website, I started to find information regarding marine issues around the world for my website. Something interesting is that although different places have different kinds of marine issues, it seems that these issues are not independent to each other. I found that they will finally point to one of the critical problems related to humans – marine food security. This is the ‘Aha’ moment for me. Because one of the challenges of communicating abstract issues with the public is that they are rarely related to people’s life experiences. And this finding could be one of the keys to making people link their life with abstract or/and complicated issues. In addition, by doing so people would raise their awareness on critical environmental issues especially marine issues in this case.

Overall, one of the challenges for me is that, although there is a large amount of online information, I need not only select specific marine environmental issues that are suitable for the public but also be careful to edit educational video and text contents that I wrote for the youth. To be more specific, knowing your audience is an important step in science communication.

Things that I have practiced from what I have learned are useful for scientific outreach. First of all, “being inspired”, is somewhat important when communicating science to the general public of any age. That is because people usually want to learn something new and interesting or exciting that more or less makes them see or learn the world differently. Additionally, researchers have indicated that in museum settings keeping the audiences engaged or pay attention can be difficult at the best of times. And in my case, not to mention science education (environmental education in particular) for the youth.

Following the guide that “children just starting out in primary school may only be able to focus on an activity for around 10 minutes or so” the contents that I selected should hook children’s eyes and not going too far that is beyond their understanding. Although there are challenges to work with the youth, one of the advantages of my research in youth environmental education is that local marine issues would be as place-based learning for the youth and this may hook their eyes. Also, I believe through learning new knowledge from this virtual museum, early adolescents could construct or refine their environmental identity and stewardship.

To conclude, no matter what age of my audience is, things that a general public audience would be willing to learn – from the museum exhibitions or the online learning website (or virtual museums) – are interesting, inspiring, and somehow related to their life experiences. Therefore, if someone would like to try doing science outreach, I would recommend you think about what excites you regarding your work and then build it into a talk that is suitable for your audience. Above all, you should amaze yourself first. Finally, the greatest thing I enjoy in science outreach is I can engage with people, create a scientific dialogue and listen to their life stories – their life experiences with marine science.

Fellowship Update

As I’ve talked about in past blog posts, I’m working on an erosion control guidebook that will give planners and other interested parties an overview of erosion control policy and implementation on the Oregon coast. This month, I completed a first draft of the guidebook. It was exciting to see the research I’ve been doing come together into a real document with good structure and flow. I’m also looking forward to the chance to promote my project in a series of presentations in late October and November. I’ll save the outcomes of my project for my next blog post, but I wanted to talk in this one about my goals coming into this fellowship and some of the things I’ve learned from it.

Intentions for this fellowship

I was initially excited about this fellowship because it would allow me to apply my coastal engineering masters degree in a completely new context. At the end of my masters, I had begun to realize that creative and clever engineering couldn’t provide a ‘silver bullet’ solution for the challenges posed by sea level rise and that policy, economic, and that other kinds of solutions were also needed. I was interested to see how my specific area of focus (coastal engineering) could fit into a larger view of coastal solutions, and this fellowship seemed like the perfect opportunity.

There are three main sectors I have in mind when talking about the multidisciplinary teams working to solve coastal issues. Obviously, there are many more areas of expertise that could be included, but these are the three that I feel are the most closely related to my continuing career:

• Scientific: Scientists are instrumental in studying and understanding the challenges that impact coastal communities. Academic institutions or scientific agencies like DOGAMI have the ability to study problems and their potential solutions and contribute to a greater understanding of the coastal environment. They can also study the effectiveness of potential solutions. However, scientists have to be careful that their work is useful outside the scientific world and can be used by other practitioners
• Policy: Policy-makers are able to use federal, state, and local laws to guide the development and conservation of the coast. Policy-makers have the important role of taking scientific knowledge and working with governing bodies and the community to come up with the best possible outcomes for coastal environments and people. Policy-makers can help coordinate between coastal issues and a huge range of other interests in a community, from economic to transportation to safety and much more. However, sometimes policy-makers don’t have the specific subject expertise for policies they are considering or are forced to rely on scientific information not suited for direct application in policy. Policy changes can also occur over a much longer time scale than scientific research and engineering.
• Engineering: Engineers have the role of applying scientific information, policy restrictions, and individual site conditions to design creative and safe solutions to solve the solutions coastal communities are facing. Engineers bring valuable experience and practical knowledge of construction. However, they can be limited by funding (needing to use a less ideal, but cheaper solution). Engineering also sometimes acts as a “band-aid” solution without fixing the cause of the problem.

The coast is important to me, and I want to protect it in the best way I can from the threats of sea level rise and overdevelopment. I feel that communication and collaboration between these three disciplines is crucial to managing current and future coastal challenges, and I want to contribute to this by working at the intersections of them. I’ve interned for coastal engineering consulting firms (engineering sector), gotten my Master’s in coastal engineering from Oregon State University (science sector), and am now working on this erosion control guidebook with DLCD (policy sector).

Experience in the policy sector

After 9 months of my fellowship, I can identify a few things I’ve learned about the intersections between engineering, policy, and science:

• As part of my project, I’ve been writing about different kinds of erosion control for an audience of policy-makers and planners. I’ve enjoyed getting to use my expertise with reading coastal engineering academic papers to make the information more easily accessible for people in the policy realm who aren’t as familiar with engineering literature.
• During my internships at coastal engineering firms, I often had to quickly learn all about the history of an area of the coast. Searching for relevant project reports in the area took time and resources for me as an intern, so I am trying to use my guidebook to collect as many resources in one place as I can for anyone involved with the Oregon coast to use.
• I’ve learned a lot about the process of coastal policy-making in Oregon, especially around the subject of erosion control. After observing the Goal 18 exception processes and using recommendations from a public focus group to guide my project, I feel much more confident in participating in public processes like these, both from a professional and personal perspective.
• Through observing public processes, I better understand how scientific and engineering information is leveraged in a policy context. The most useful information was presented with conclusions that were clear and understandable to people without any experience on the science/engineering of the issue. For example, rating systems like DOGAMI’s erosion hazard zones were useful for policy-makers because they were simple, created by scientists, and enabled policy responses to vary based on clearly delineated hazard zones.
• By learning about the history of development on the Oregon coast, I understand why policy today is restrictive about coastal development and erosion control. While I sometimes personally wish that policies were more restrictive in some cases and less restrictive in others, understanding the history behind their development helps me appreciate their value in protecting different aspects of the coast.
• Funding for projects is difficult to come by for state agencies, especially when they are often responsible for the upkeep and updating of basic tools rather than the flashier projects preferred by funding organizations. Collaboration between state agencies and scientists could be beneficial in securing grants.

I am confident that, whatever my next job, this fellowship will have prepared me to better connect the worlds of science, engineering, and policy. The coastal issues facing us in the near future will be complicated and will affect all aspects of coastal society, and I hope that this experience will position me to be a valuable member of multidisciplinary teams.

Working as an Oregon Sea Grant Summer Scholar these past ten weeks has been a blast! I learned so many lessons that will be applicable throughout the entirety of my career in science. My favorite parts of my internship were all the times I was able to interact with other people interested in the Oregon seafood industry. I loved Fridays when I could join my mentor, Angee, at the Newport docks. I also enjoyed the interviews I had with industry leaders up and down the Oregon coast. Overall, I felt the most connected to the coast when I could interact with people who had deep connections with it. 

This feeling is something I hope to carry into my next step as a scientist. I am currently living in Guam working towards getting my masters degree in coral restoration genetics. While working here I plan to establish a relationship with community members and other scientists. By learning from people who have lived with and studied this area far longer than I have, I should be able to deepen my respect for corals and integrate a diverse range of disciplines into my work. In addition to expanding my community here, I plan to continue making science education videos and posts. Instead of posting about Eat Oregon Seafood, I will shift to posting about coral restoration research. I also hope to make some videos that may help demystify graduate school for students who don’t initially see themselves belonging there.

I will spend three years here in Guam completing my masters (and I can already tell they are going to be three of the best years of my life). Afterwards, I plan to pursue a PhD in coral science (and maybe even dive a little into policy as a Knauss fellow – who knows!). I am positive that I will continue to appreciate Oregon seafood management from afar and use everything I learned this summer to look at my current work from different perspectives. Big thank you to Oregon Sea Grant, my summer mentors, and everyone else who made this summer possible!

It is bittersweet knowing that I have to say goodbye to this amazing opportunity, but I was ready to return home. For the final weeks of the internship, we continued to survey, entered date into excel, and then created the final presentation. It was great to meet new people and learn about everything everyone was doing. I was really happy I took this awesome opportunity. I am happy that I accepted the position with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and was granted the honor of being an Oregon Sea Grant Scholar. I wouldn’t have changed it for the world. I met some great people, gained lot of professional skills and experiences. The west coast was defiantly something different. I would love to visit the west coast, but for vacation purposes. The scenery is so beautiful and I was honored to be on the ancestral lands of the Umatilla, Coos, Siletz and many more tribes. It is with gratitude that I had the opportunity to work there. Thank you. The Oregon Coast is unlike anything I have ever experienced, I am glad I had the opportunity. My favorite part was the scenery and will include one of my favorite photos that I captured while conducting surveys. It is in Otter Rock. Until next time.

To echo the words of my mentors in a meeting yesterday, “it’s been 10 weeks already?!” My time at the Oregon Coastal and Ocean Information Network (OCOIN) has absolutely flown by. Beyond a doubt, my personal growth and learning over the course of this Summer is due to the amazing network of people within OCOIN and Sea Grant. I felt supported by my mentors who both helped me become an expert in ESRI software, like survey123, and supported my own curiosity and innovation while working on OCOIN’s tools this summer. I also want to recognize my fellow Oregon Sea Grant Summer Scholar, Joshua, whose collaboration allowed me to be a better team member and always challenged me to learn more skills and organize efficiently. 

This internship confirmed that after I graduate in 2022 I want to continue exploring the ways mapping and spatial data can be used as a research method and a vehicle for science communication. I plan on taking a year to work before pursuing a graduate degree in the geospatial data science realm, and I feel confident the skills I’ve learned at OCOIN will help me with both endeavors. Beyond software, my expanded confidence in troubleshooting and the  design and implementation of user-interface updates I gained while working on OCOIN’s tools will be invaluable while searching for jobs. 

Finally, I would like to say a heartfelt thank you to the Oregon Sea Grant, my mentors in the CEI program, and the entire team at OCOIN. It was a pleasure to work with everyone and I know we will be in contact in the future!