Property rights advocates are taking note of a recent minority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court on judicial takings. The cover story of this edition of Coastal Services takes a look at the case and explores the potential implications for coastal resource managers.
Also in this edition, we look at a two-year effort to "test-drive" Massachusetts' StormSmart Coasts website, which is a toolkit that communities can use to prepare for and bounce back from more intense hurricanes, flooding, sea level rise, and other impacts of climate change. The state now has seven real-life models that can be used by other coastal communities.
The NOAA Coastal Services Center provided two coastal management fellows to Massachusetts who helped create and test-drive the state's StormSmart Coasts website. Wes Shaw was the phase one project manager, and Daniella Hirschfeld helped lead the test-drive phase.
The Coastal Services Center also provided seed funding for the expansion of StormSmart Coasts to states in the Gulf of Mexico.
Since then, a partnership of the NOAA Coastal Storms Program, the Gulf of Mexico Alliance, and the Environmental Protection Agency has worked to establish the StormSmart Coasts Network, which gives coastal decision makers a definitive place to find and share the best resilience-related resources and tools available.
All five Gulf states now have sites within the StormSmart Coasts Network, which can be viewed at www.stormsmartcoasts.org. Other New England states are working to develop sites for the network.
A sister Web resource is StormSmart Connect—www.stormsmartconnect.org—which provides a venue for real-time collaboration, allowing users to share documents and expertise.
Also in this edition of Coastal Services, we look at efforts in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) to clean up marine debris by addressing on-land trash and recycling, and a county communications effort in Minnesota that merges print publications with the Internet and YouTube videos.
As always, we hope you find these articles interesting and informative. I am always open to hearing your thoughts and feedback.
-- Margaret A. Davidson
