2006 Knauss Fellow Reflections

Meredith Mendelson --

In my year as a Knauss Sea Grant Fellow in the Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management (OCRM) at NOAA, I have had several wonderful experiences. I work with incredibly bright, passionate people who take creative approaches to solving traditional management problems. Under the authority of the Coastal Zone Management Act, our office works in partnership with the state coastal programs and National Estuarine Research Reserves. That cooperative aspect really sets OCRM apart from other offices and requires us to be responsive and flexible to the needs and interests of our partners. The greatest challenge, for me, has been to understand the complexity of the interactions between the various levels of government, and to learn to respond to the needs of local and state governments while maintaining a national perspective. I consider myself especially lucky to have had the opportunity to participate in several truly innovative, locally-driven projects.

My work has focused on the Portfields Initiative, a federal port revitalization program focusing on environmentally and economically sustainable redevelopment, recently implemented on a regional scale for the first time in southeastern Louisiana. The importance of the Lower Mississippi River ports to our national security and economy cannot be underestimated. We held a large kickoff meeting in New Orleans in May, 2006, with eleven federal and six state agencies represented, several local partners and the six participating ports.

Two days were spent identifying priority projects and applicable financial and technical assistance opportunities. In recent months, the ports have applied for many grants with agencies ranging from NOAA and EPA to the Economic Development Administration and the Department of Homeland Security.
The first major success came in September when five ports received a grant of $11.4 million from DHS for layered port security improvements.

Portfields represents the federal level approach to port revitalization, and even though it requires a great deal of initiative on the ports’ part, there are some fascinating community-based efforts underway as well.

I recently attended a Special Area Management Plan (SAMP) Neighborhood Plan implementation workshop in Wilmington, Delaware. The Delaware coastal program has been working closely with the community to bring jobs, better housing and mixed-use development back to the area. They are also seeking to provide public access to the waterfront and restore several wetlands in the area.

In Providence, Rhode Island, the Sea Grant program is also engaging in a SAMP process for the Metro Bay area. As part of that project, Rhode Island Sea Grant is considering possible solutions for redevelopment of the Providence waterfront. Balancing the marine economy with the desire to bring mixed-use development to the waterfront is no small feat, but is a wise approach to making educated re-zoning decisions. It is certainly inspiring to see the states and local governments pursuing long-term strategies for waterfront planning.

Jessica Barkas --

For the past year, I’ve been part of the National Observer Program (NOP), a part of the Office of Science and Technology at NMFS. Fisheries observers are required in several United States commercial fisheries. They sample catch and bycatch and record interactions with protected species, such as sea turtles, marine mammals, and seabirds. The NOP facilitates communication and cooperation between the fisheries observer programs in each of the six NMFS regions and coordinates the resolution of issues and problems that affect the observer program on a national scale.

A major project during my time with the NOP has been initiating work on the National Bycatch Report. The definition of bycatch has several technical variations, but in short, it is that proportion of the catch that is typically “thrown back,” including fish that are of little market value due to size or species, and other species that may not be retained, such as sea turtles, marine mammals, or sea birds. Catch of non-target species is undesirable because it wastes marine resources and injures and kills protected species. The report will bring together bycatch data on finfish, marine mammals, sea turtles, and seabirds from each of the NMFS regions to produce national estimates of commercial fisheries bycatch and serve as a yardstick to help measure NMFS’s success over time at reducing bycatch. Much of my work on the report has been drafting some of the introductory sections and helping to assemble data and other information in support of the NMFS scientists who will be producing the bycatch estimates and transforming regional fisheries observer data, collected for diverse assessment purposes, into a national estimate of bycatch. We’ve just completed the first year of what is presently scheduled to be an approximately two to three year effort.

I’ve also been involved in projects related to assuring the quality of the data NMFS disseminates to the public. Under the Data Quality Act, federal agencies must assure that scientific and technical information is thoroughly reviewed before it is released to the public. To this end, NMFS conducts pre-dissemination review on all of its scientific products and peer reviews all of the influential scientific information it produces. For information that is being peer reviewed, agencies are required to make peer review plans available to the public, so that they might be commented upon. The NOAA peer review agenda was recently updated, including many peer review plans from NMFS, and may be viewed on the website of the NOAA Chief Information Officer: http://www.cio.noaa.gov/ itmanagement/infoq.htm. As the Acting NMFS Data Quality Act Coordinator, I had the opportunity to coordinate the update of the NMFS peer review plans and to provide my NMFS colleagues with general advice on Data Quality Act compliance.

Finally, in another interesting lesson in federal administrative practice, I had the opportunity to move a draft proposed rule that intended to improve fisheries observer health and safety through the administrative rulemaking process. The average law school administrative law class does not really prepare a person for just how many memos, approvals, assorted analyses, and revisions go into administrative rulemaking, even on a set of relatively minor changes to an existing rule. Nonetheless, the process has been very instructive, and the rule should be published in the Federal Register in the coming weeks.