On June 8, 2015 the Integration & Application Network and its many partners held two simultaneous press conferences to announce the inaugural Long Island Sound report card. I traveled to Glen Cove with Alex Fries while Caroline Donovan and Suzi Spitzer were in Westport, Connecticut. Suzi and Alex previously posted blogs about these press conferences. Long Island Sound report card team gathered together in Newark, NJ Ironbound District following the report card releases:

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On June 7th, Caroline Donovan, Bill Dennison, Suzi Spitzer, and I traveled to New York and Connecticut to release the Long Island Sound Report Card. In addition to the overall report card, we also released two embayment report cards, the Norwalk Harbor Report Card, and the Inner Hempstead Harbor Report Card. After picking up a second rental car, Bill and I continued on to Glen Cove, NY for the release on the southern side of the Sound.

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On June 8, 2015 the Integration & Application Network and its many partners held two simultaneous press conferences to announce the first report card about the health of Long Island Sound. Bill Dennison and Alex Fries traveled to Glen Cove, New York, on the south shore of the Sound, while Caroline Donovan and I headed north to the Sherwood Island State Park Nature Center in Westport, Connecticut.

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One of the important decisions in developing environmental report cards is choosing the reporting region boundaries. In addition to defining the overall extent of the report card coverage, defining the reporting regions within this coverage is crucial.

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On October 9th, Bill Dennison, Caroline Donovan, and I traveled to New Rochelle, New York, for a meeting on the Long Island Sound Report Card. The Long Island Sound Study includes two working groups, the Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC), and the Science and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC). These committees had a joint meeting on October 10th that we participated in, to further the progress of the Long Island Sound Report Card.

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An interest to support community-based monitoring efforts around Long Island Sound motivates IAN’s work to develop a set of ecosystem report cards for that region. Long Island Sound is an estuarine embayment on the northeast coast of the United States, located directly east of New York City. The western portion of the Sound connects with the East River and New York harbor.

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Following our Connecticut stops, we took the Cross Sound Ferry from New London, CT over to the tip of the north fork of Long Island at Orient Point. From the ferry we could see some important features of Long Island Sound. First, as we sailed out of the Thames River, we could see the rocky headlands, industrial development (particularly the submarine manufacturing base) and busy harbor traffic.

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Bill Nuttle, Caroline Wicks, Anthony Kung and I circumnavigated Long Island Sound, crossing it at both ends (over the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge on the western end and aboard the Cross Sound Ferry on the eastern end), and drove through most of the Connecticut coast and the length of Long Island. We visited five different groups of scientists, resource managers and local conservation groups in Connecticut and Long Island, New York in March (10-13).

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In early 2014, a 558 pp. book “Long Island Sound: Prospects for the Urban Sea” was published. The co-editors JS Latimer, MA Tedesco, RL Swanson, C Yarish, PE Stacey and C Carza were able to get 57 contributors to produce this comprehensive summary of the state of science in Long Island Sound. Springer lists the book for $279 and the eBook for $219, which is a steep price.

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On 24 Jan 2014, I traveled to New York City to meet with the Long Island Sound funders network. This recently formed group is pooling their resources to develop Long Island Sound conservation and restoration initiatives. They are a stimulating and thoughtful group of people from different organizations with different backgrounds, united in this effort to make Long Island Sound a better place to live for the 8+ million people who call the Long Island Sound watershed home.

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