CUNY CREST HIRES Director, Dr. Shakila Merchant participated in the State-Wide Natural and Nature-Based Feature (NNBF) Symposium held at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC), New York on April 30, 2024. This event was part of an initiative by the Science and Resilience Institute, Jamaica Bay (SRIJB) in collaboration with New York Sea Grant that aims to apply and share emerging knowledge about NNBF. Learn more here.
The symposium aimed to ‘coordinate across the state of New York to learn, share and inform challenges and success of shoreline planning, design, and management practices’ and was hosted concurrently in four different locations – New York City (CUNY Advanced Science Research Center), Long Island (Stony Brook University), Hudson (Norrie Point Environmental Center), and the Great Lakes (Woodlawn Beach State Park).
During the event, attendees gained the opportunity to learn about several important topics such as baseline conditions, success rates, and socio-cultural benefits of NNBF, results from previously held forums on NNBF. They also learnt about crucial case studies from New York City, Long Island, Hudson, and the Great Lakes and the NNBF project goals, successes and failures, shoreline protection implications, ecological function, post completion monitoring, and data collection associated with each. The day concluded with regional breakout sessions that resulted in productive discussions on regional lessons learnt that fit into a larger framework for New York and a diverse set of stakeholder processes and products that utilize existing NNBF research and monitoring data.
