Three Coastal Stories:

Maine—Keeping Fishing in the Family

New Hampshire—High Tech Hobby Sheds Light on Prehistoric Creature

Virginia—Preserving an Ancient Coastal Flyway

Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management

Stories from the Coast

How Federal Investments Help the Nation's Coastal Communities, Economies, and Ecosystems Thrive

March 14, 2011

Last week, NOAA's Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management (OCRM) launched a new website that illustrates federal investments in coastal management programs around the nation. But how do these investments affect real people in real places?

Here are a few of the stories from the coast that show how OCRM investments help the nation's coastal communities, economies, and ecosystems thrive.

Maine - Keeping Fishing in the Family

Maine watermen have been supplying seafood to America for generations. But development on the Maine coast is making it harder and harder to earn a living on the Maine waterfront. A state program helped with funding from the Maine Coastal Program is doing something about that.

Thanks to Maine's Working Waterfront Access Pilot Program, four-year-old Ryan Davis of Mt. Desert Island, may be the fifth generation of Davises to earn a living as a Maine waterman.

High Tech Hobby Sheds Light on Prehistoric Creature in NH

After a summer of tromping around in the mudflats of New Hampshire’s Great Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR) to study feeding pits dug by horseshoe crabs, NERRS Graduate Research Fellow Wan-Jean Lee realized that her own feet were getting in the way of her research.

A chance encounter with another marine ecologist whose hobby is remote control airplanes helped Lee solve her footstep dilemma and led to a novel way to show the importance of the Great Bay estuary to the horseshoe crab.

Preserving an Ancient Coastal Flyway in Virginia

When a landowner on a Virginia peninsula decided to sell his property, people worried that songbirds that landed there to replenish during their long migrations to South America would lose critical habitat. Instead, CZM funding helped set into motion a venture that would permanently protect the land, for wildlife and people, and launch an ecotourism industry.