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08/06 - CT NEMO Receives Outstanding Achievement AwardThe CT NEMO Team has been awarded the 2006 Outstanding Achievement Award by the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation (RNRF) for their Putting Communities in Charge publication. As you probably know, this is the CT NEMO program’s first official compilation of some of the local actions that have been catalyzed by CT NEMO. The Report can be ordered online on the NEMO website's Publications section. The official press release is also attached for those who want to learn more. 5/05 - NEMO Welcomes Mike Dietz Dr. Michael Dietz will be joining the NEMO program team in June as an Extension Educator, specializing in “low impact development” (LID) stormwater practices. Mike is no stranger to UConn, having earned all his degrees here, including his recently completed PhD from the Natural Resources Manage-ment and Engineering Department. Working with Dr. Jack Clausen, Mike has participated in a number of projects researching the effectiveness of stormwater practices, including the Jordan Cove Project in Waterford and his doctoral research on the rain garden treating the roof runoff from NEMO Central at the Middlesex County Extension Center. Mike’s addition brings long-sought engineering expertise to the NEMO Team, and beefs up our ability to develop educational programs and conduct applied research in the burgeoning field of LID. With our current emphasis on the Connecticut Stormwater Quality Manual and the increased use of LID practices around the state (including at UConn), Mike’s arrival couldn’t be better timed. Mike is a nice guy (another new wrinkle for the NEMO Team!) and can be reached here at Haddam after June 3rd at 860-345-4511 or by email at michael.dietz@uconn.edu 5/05 - Connecticut's Changing Landscape Web Update The Connecticut’s Changing Landscape website now includes on-demand town and watershed maps. At the Your Town or Your Watershed portions of the site, you can click the state map or use the pull-down menu to access land cover and land cover change data tables, statistics, maps and (for a lucky few) animations. NEMO’s Emily Wilson made this possible with something called “active server page” technology. Whatever it’s called, it’s pretty cool—check it out at: clear.uconn.edu/projects/landscape/local/town.asp clear.uconn.edu/projects/landscape/local/rbasin.asp 5/05 - Putting Communities in Charge Booklet Back by Popular Demand Putting Communities in Charge is a new booklet that highlights the work of a number of communities that have been working with NEMO over the past decade. It demonstrates the wide range of activities and initiatives that a community can pursue, once it begins to implement an agenda of natural resource-based planning. It also has succinct and painless summary information on NEMO programs, research, partners, etc. Released as a can’t-miss stocking stuffer around the holidays, our supply was quickly exhausted—but thanks to our NEMO parent/partners at Connecticut Sea Grant, we are doing a second printing. So, order a free copy today by calling John at 860-345-5225 or visiting the NEMO pubs page at: nemo.uconn.edu/publications/index.htm#impacts. 5/05 - New Workshop: Map Reading 101 Map Reading 101 is a new NEMO educational workshop that focuses on the basics of site design review. Have you ever felt at a disadvantage as soon as an applicant’s engineer whips out the site plans (c’mon, be honest….)? This workshop will benefit anyone who has ever had trouble locating the North arrow or been perplexed determining where the water drains from those irritating topo lines. The workshop is a typical 2-hour extravaganza, with interactive exercises and plenty of time for Q&A, and was developed in collaboration with the Connecticut Land Use Education Partnership and NEMO’s CLEAR sister project, the Green Valley Institute. A perfect primer for all land use boards that review plans. The workshop is free of charge. We recommend scheduling 2 hours to allow for discussion and questions. Contact John Rozum at john.rozum@uconn.edu or call (860) 345-4511 to schedule a workshop. 1/05 - CT NEMO’s New Publication, Putting Communities in Charge CT NEMO recently printed its first official impact report dedicated to the work of the NEMO Program in Connecticut. The report describes the origin, objectives and progress of the program and includes a number of exciting new initiatives that have begun during this past year. The main body of the Report, however, is given over to portrayals of selected towns that have worked with NEMO, and the ways that these towns are taking charge of their community’s future development patterns. The report profiles Old Saybrook, Waterford, Woodstock, Salem, Central Naugatuck Valley, Watertown, East Haddam, Candlewood Lake Authority and Stonington. The examples detailed in the report, while they represent only a portion of the good work being done around the state, demonstrate the power of local citizens to bring about positive change in their communities.To order a copy of the report, free of charge, visit the CT Impact Reports section of the Publications page. The profiled areas (Old Saybrook, Waterford, Woodstock, Salem, Central Naugatuck Valley, Watertown, East Haddam, Candlewood Lake Authority and Stonington) are also available as individual .pdf files for easy online viewing. 1/05 - Connecticut Stormwater Quality Manual Training The CT NEMO Program Team will be providing training around the state during 2005 on the new Stormwater Quality Manual by CT DEP. A number of key constituents will be targeted including municipal officials, town and consulting civil engineers, landscape architects, public works departments, state employees and others. View the manual at: http://dep.state.ct.us/wtr/stormwater/strmwtrman.htm. For more information: 1/05 - CLEAR & NEMO featured in the Earth Imaging Journal November/December 2004 vol.1 no. 6 An article about CLEAR and NEMO was recently published in Earth Imaging Journal, a fairly new high-profile publication in the remote sensing world. EIJ is published by private sector remote sensing interests, and is not a peer-reviewed journal. However, their interest in our work (they solicited the article), and the fact that they put it on the cover of the hard copy journal, is a good sign indicating our growing national recognition. Interestingly, we assumed that they wanted to know all about our latest CLEAR research, but the Editor kept asking us for more about NEMO and the on-the-ground results of our work. Thus, there are nice breakout boxes on both CT and National NEMO. The e-article is at: http://www.eijournal.com/Local_Decisions.asp 6/04 - Connecticut's Changing Landscape Project in the News Connecticut's Changing Landscape project got a bit of press this past winter. Below are several articles, originally printed in The Hartford Courant. • March
22, 2004 - The Hartford Courant, Editorial • March
21, 2004 - The Hartford Courant, Commentary by
Chester Arnold • January
4, 2004 - The Hartford Courant, Article By
Mike Swift • Or read the original electronic article posted on The Hartford Courant's ctnow.com website. Satellite Pinpoints State's Sprawl (you may need to sign up for a free e-subscription to access the article. Back to Top6/04 - NEMO Highlighted in the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy's Preliminary Report "Released by the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy on April 20, 2004, this document presents the Commission’s preliminary findings and recommendations for a new, coordinated, and comprehensive national ocean policy. Mandated by the Oceans Act of 2000, the Preliminary Report is now available for review and comment by the nation’s Governors and interested stakeholders." NEMO is highlighted in Section V, chapter 14: Addressing Coastal Water Pollution, page 170. Visit the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy website. View full report. 2/04 - New NEMO Program Coordinator Announced Finally, you have someone to call! After a nation-wide search for a NEMO Program Director, it turns out that we had only to look down the hall. John Rozum, an AICP Planner and our first and only National NEMO Network Coordinator, decided to throw his hat into the ring after our original search, this past fall, did not produce quite the right candidate. After earning Master's degrees at the University of Arizona in Ecology and Land Use Planning, John worked as an environmental and community planner in Michigan for three years. In 1999 he came to UConn to lead the National NEMO Network, which at the time was just starting to take shape. Under John's tender ministrations, the Network has grown like a weed, going from 9 to 34 programs in four years. While John was nurturing the National Network, he was also delving into local planning in the Nutmeg State. He is a member of East Haddam's Planning and Zoning Commission, the East Haddam Village Planning Group and the Eightmile River Wild and Scenic Study Management Committee. In addition, John has provided many important contributions to Connecticut NEMO during his tenure as National Coordinator, including leading the development of the Community Resource Inventory educational module. With enthusiastic support of the rest of the team, John made the decision to focus on assisting Connecticut's communities, even though he'll miss the national program. Having recently celebrated our 10-year anniversary, the NEMO Program is at an important crossroads. With John at the helm, the NEMO Team will in short order reshape the program to keep all that has made it successful while adding new ideas, new services, new information and new partnerships into the mix. 2/04 - Steal Connecticut Land Cover Maps! No need for larceny, you can download the maps and information on Connecticut’s Changing Landscape Project for free on the CLEAR website. Here you will find more information on how the data were created, some preliminary interpretation, fact sheets, frequently asked questions, as well as ways to download the GIS information for those geospatially inclined. If you don't have the latest GIS software on your computer, no worries. The website also includes an interactive mapping section that allows you to view, query and print the maps using nothing more than your internet browser. So grab your favorite beverage and point your browser to the CLEAR website to learn more about Connecticut's changing landscape. 2/04 - Connecticut’s Changing Landscape Presentation Website isn't enough? Want to learn more about Connecticut's changing landscape right from the horse's mouth? Your friendly neighborhood NEMO Team has a 45 minute presentation about the project that we'd be glad to bring to your town. Call John Rozum at (860) 345-4511 or email nemo@uconn.edu. 2/04 - Connecticut's Changing Landscape Project, So What's Next? Connecticut's Changing Landscape is a project in several installments. Over the next year, CLEAR researchers will be applying several landscape analyses to the new 1985, 1990, 1995 and 2002 land cover datasets. Urban growth and forest fragmentation models will help us to further mine the land cover data. With this type of information, we hope to be able to better address some of the more qualitative issues involved with development—in other words, not just how much we've developed, but in what pattern, and with what implications for the health of our communities and natural resources. Another analysis will deal specifically with that nemesis familiar to NEMO veterans—impervious surfaces, an indicator of the impacts of urbanization on water resources. Using the developed category from the new land cover data as a “first cut” identifier, and then applying cutting-edge “subpixel” analysis that estimates the amount of impervious cover directly from the satellite data, CLEAR researchers will be able to accurately chart the growth in impervious cover from 1985 to the present. So what about the million dollar question: Does Connecticut's changing landscape present compelling evidence on sprawl in our state? We still don't know enough about what the data is telling us to say much in the way of definitive statements. What we do know is that the study is coming at an opportune time, given the debates on sprawl and “smart growth” that are taking place from the Capitol to town halls across the state. It's interesting to note that the first two organizations to request downloading of our data were the Connecticut Homebuilder's Association and The Nature Conservancy! Like those groups, we invite you to pour over the study results and come to your own conclusion. As we collectively absorb and debate the results of the study, the true take home messages may become clear. By the time of our next newsletter issue, you can expect some of the preliminary results of the next wave of studies to hit the web! |
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