A new tool has been developed, the Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment Tool for Coastal Habitats (CCVATCH), to help land managers, decision makers, and researchers develop conservation, management, and restoration plans for coastal habitats. This assessment tool identifies primary sources of vulnerability to assist with prioritizing coastal habitat management actions. As part of this project, four estuarine reserves in New England will conduct assessments of their areas, demonstrating the utility of the tool to support adaptive management in response to climate change. This science transfer project was funded by NOAA through the National Estuarine Research Reserve System Science Collaborative to promote the use of science. It did not produce any new data.

Across all five New England reserves, this project team will deploy a novel sensor package to measure greenhouse gases and develop a salt marsh greenhouse gas monitoring protocol for reserves and other practitioners to enhance understanding of salt marsh carbon cycling.

This project will develop, produce, and implement role-play simulation case studies for Georgetown County citizens and leaders, with the goal of starting community discussions around climate adaptation and mitigation planning. The project team will develop the simulations based on localized climate information and data for temperature and precipitation. This will be combined with information gathered through key stakeholder interviews on their understanding of climate change, the climate-related risk factors that are of the greatest interest to them, and the social and political context in which decisions will be made. This information will then be used to create a scientific fact sheet for each case study, the roles within the case studies, risks that are present, and possible solutions based on sociopolitical context and scientific evidence. The project seeks to engage 150-200 participants in the role-playing simulations through a minimum of four community participation workshops throughout the county. The role-play will allow for collective community learning and engagement, and the potential for developing policy recommendations. It will help to incorporate climate risk management into local decision-making processes in the public and private sectors. This science transfer project was funded by NOAA through the National Estuarine Research Reserve System Science Collaborative to promote the use of science. It did not produce any new data.

This project synthesized Sentinel Site data for four New England National Estuarine Research Reserves (Great Bay, Narragansett, Waquoit Bay, and Wells), which have been individually monitoring salt marsh vegetation and elevation changes since at least 2011. The project team developed statistics-ready data packages linking vegetation change with surface elevation and other data, including output from an inundation tool. This project equipped New England reserves and coastal managers with new information to inform and improve the management, protection, and restoration of salt marshes. It produced an improved Sentinel Site monitoring protocol and established a methodology for analysis of marsh condition that can be used across the reserve system and by coastal managers nationwide. This catalyst project was funded by NOAA through the National Estuarine Research Reserve System Science Collaborative to advance collaborative science. It did not produce any new data.

Resilience dialogues are conversations that occur among people with diverse perspectives who have agreed to work together to increase community and ecological resilience. For over a decade, the National Estuarine Research Reserve System has been leading a new approach to collaborative science that brings together scientists, environmental managers, and community stakeholders to address pressing coastal issues. Conflict is a natural part of collaborative science as people with differing perspectives and values interact in new ways over complex and uncertain issues. While leading collaborative science projects, reserves and their partners have accumulated a wealth of knowledge about how to confront and manage conflict. The Resilience Dialogues project drew on this experience to identify four best practices for collaborative science. The project created a curriculum, case studies, and peer-to-peer trainings to share these successful collaboration techniques and build conflict mediation skills. Multiple in-person and virtual workshops for reserve staff established these best practices and contributed to the effectiveness of collaborative science projects within the reserve system, while the project’s resources brought this expertise to a wider audience of state agencies and coastal management partners. This science transfer project was funded by NOAA through the National Estuarine Research Reserve System Science Collaborative to promote the use of science. It did not produce any new data.

Understanding why estuarine habitat restoration is viewed as successful or not is critical for evaluating completed projects and garnering support for future projects. Particularly important, and often overlooked, are the perceptions of partners and the surrounding community which play an integral role in shaping the future of coastal habitats. Restoration metrics rarely include human dimensions even though community support for restoration can promote or thwart potential projects and the long-term success of completed projects. Working with the South Slough NERR, this catalyst project worked to more fully account for and understand the impacts of estuarine habitat restoration by developing social metrics for restoration success and linking them to ecological monitoring metrics. Using South Slough NERR, The Wetlands Conservancy, and other restoration projects in Oregon as case studies, the project involved a two-pronged approach to data collection: 1) synthesis of existing and newly collected ecological data from nine salt marsh restoration projects to derive commonly used ecological metrics and 2) focus groups in three Oregon locations (South Slough, Alsea, and Yaquina) to understand public perceptions about marshes. The team then connected the social and ecological datasets conceptually to create a matrix linking the datasets and indicating mismatches between ecological data and social values. Based on these steps, the team was able to provide recommendations to help improve restoration design and implementation, including more inclusive and effective communications surrounding estuarine restoration.

Restore America's Estuaries is partnering with the Gulf of Mexico Coastal Training Program Initiative and the five research reserves in the Gulf Coast to promote blue carbon projects. Through workshops planned around the Gulf, the project team will facilitate discussions about current needs and opportunities related to blue carbon. The project team will also help to establish local working groups and provide technical assistance through a targeted Gulf Coast blue carbon training workshop. The goal is to support new projects that advance local understanding of blue carbon science and help pilot ways to use emerging carbon markets to fund coastal wetland restoration and conservation. This science transfer project was funded by NOAA through the National Estuarine Research Reserve System Science Collaborative to promote the use of science. It did not produce any new data.

Using a collaborative approach that engages researchers and local business owners, the project team will adapt a tourism-resilience index for southern Maine businesses. After pilot-testing, a broader community of local business leaders will complete facilitated self-assessments in Kennebunkport and Kennebunk, Maine. Participating businesses will be given their custom tourism-resilience index, or score, along with a set of suggested steps they can take to increase their resiliency to natural disasters. The project team will meet with these same businesses one year later to reassess and measure progress. The project team will aggregate the indices of participating businesses and a summary of lessons learned will be shared with southern Maine chambers of commerce, municipalities and climate adaptation professionals. Strategies for adapting and implementing the tourism resilience index in different regions will also be shared with business communities, climate adaptation professionals, and the National Estuarine Research Reserve system. Project results will highlight common gaps and barriers businesses share when it comes to increasing their resilience to natural disaster. This science transfer project was funded by NOAA through the National Estuarine Research Reserve System Science Collaborative to promote the use of science. It did not produce any new data.

Water quality monitoring experts, scientists, and estuary caretakers built a long-term collaborative monitoring strategy for estuary nutrients and phytoplankton dynamics at the headwaters of Lake Superior. The Project The St. Louis River Estuary, located at the headwaters of Lake Superior, is nearing a major milestone: its anticipated delisting as a Great Lakes Area of Concern by 2030. Yet even as remediation and restoration successes are celebrated, new environmental stressors, particularly harmful algal blooms, raise concerns about the estuary's long-term water quality health. In response, a group of local, state, federal, and tribal partners who have long worked in and cared for the estuary began calling for a science-based monitoring strategy that could respond to emerging threats and support ongoing stewardship beyond delisting. Together, they shaped a shared vision: a comprehensive program of observations, analyses, and public reporting that would protect remediation and restoration investments and inform future decision-making. To advance this vision, this group of partners who had long advocated for a coordinated monitoring effort, collaborated closely with the Lake Superior National Estuarine Research Reserve to launch the project. The Reserve brought together a scientific team that included collaborators from the University of Minnesota's Natural Resources Research Institute, who contributed expertise in phytoplankton and bloom dynamics. The partners co-authored the proposal and remained actively engaged throughout the project, helping select sites, shape the study design, and review statistical analysis and draft recommendations. Together, the partners and project team developed a research approach that combined strong scientific design to build foundational understanding of phytoplankton dynamics with a focus on generating practical, actionable insights for a shared long term monitoring strategy. Eight high-priority sites were intensively sampled in 2023 and 2024, focusing on areas vulnerable to nutrient enrichment, low oxygen, and bloom formation. The study also prioritized public relevance by targeting restoration areas, heavily used public zones, and capturing rarely collected wintertime data. The project successfully identified predictors of cyanobacteria biovolume in the estuary and actionable monitoring strategies to improve bloom detection and efficient water quality monitoring in the future. Important predictors of blooms included low nitrogen, warm temperatures, low dissolved organic carbon, and high pH. In addition, the team observed significant year-to-year differences in bloom composition and intensity suggesting bloom dynamics are highly responsive to variations in hydrology and nutrient stoichiometry which are driven by precipitation patterns. Further analysis evaluated the efficiency of different monitoring designs by assessing redundancy across space, sampling frequency, and parameters. These findings informed a science-based strategy that identified periods and locations of elevated bloom risk while accounting for the real-world capacity of agencies and partners. The resulting recommendations include a reduced set of priority sites and a tiered approach to sampling. This strategy is designed to be flexible with available funding and effort, while ensuring that high-risk bloom locations are monitored as a minimum standard. The project's result is not only a clearer picture of what drives blooms in the estuary, but also a durable and collaborative roadmap for long-term monitoring, co-created by the people who first called for a collaborative, comprehensive program.

To build communication, coordination, and information sharing among scientists and restoration practitioners, this project established a coastwide network from Baja California to British Columbia, the Native Olympia Oyster Collaborative. The project team synthesized past restoration projects, developed an experimental design for future research, and created educational and outreach materials that convey the importance of native oyster restoration on the Pacific coast. These efforts engaged communities in Olympia oyster restoration, provided tools to enhance future restoration outcomes, and strengthened connections among researchers and practitioners to support ongoing collaboration. This catalyst project was funded by NOAA through the National Estuarine Research Reserve System Science Collaborative to advance collaborative science. It did not produce any new data.