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Maryland Coastal Law and Policy Roundtable
Sponsored by Maryland Sea Grant and the National Sea Grant Law Center (NSGLC).
Date: Monday, December 2, 2019
Place: Admiral Fell Inn, 888 S Broadway, Baltimore, Maryland
Workshop participants were invited from a variety of sectors including nonprofits, local government, academia, and private industry.
A final report from the grant that produced this workshop is available for download.
Goals of the Workshop
- To discuss the rationale for developing a Maryland Sea Grant law and policy education model.
- To determine mechanisms for a Maryland Sea Grant law and policy education model to identify and address priority coastal and land use issues.
- To gather suggestions for the structure of a Maryland Sea Grant law and policy education model.
- To receive guidance on directional focus of the Phase II pilot project for Maryland Sea Grant law and policy efforts.
The workshop included presentations from existing Sea Grant law and policy program managers, roundtable discussions centered around specific priority legal topics, and discussions of commitment to next steps in the development process. For additional information on the structure of the workshop, please review our agenda.
The Role of the NSGLC
The NSGLC heads the Sea Grant Legal Network, which is comprised of several different legal programs associated with various Sea Grant state programs. In 2018, the NSGLC put out a call for small grant proposals to initiate legal program startup efforts at Sea Grant programs currently lacking legal education capacity. MDSG was awarded one of these grants, which was used to collaborate with the Agriculture Law Education Initiative (ALEI) in funding this workshop and other efforts.
Workshop Materials
The following materials were distributed to all attendees for background and reference:
- Workshop Agenda
- Needs Assessment Summary Report: A summary of the pre-workshop survey conducted in summer 2019 that was sent to various stakeholder groups.
- Resource Options: A list of legal and policy resource options that could be used in an MDSG law and policy education model when communicating information to stakeholders.
- Project Synopsis: An overview of MDSG and ALEI's efforts related to the grant received by the NSGLC.
- Attendee List
Program Announcements
News and Blogs
Featured Fellow
Nina Santos
Nina Santos is a Ph.D. student at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. For her dissertation, she is focused on small shrimp-like crustaceans called mysids – an understudied yet important part of many estuarine and coastal food webs.
Featured Research Project
Developing a habitat model for mysids, an important link in Chesapeake Bay food webs
Mysids are important mesozooplankton prey for many species of fish in Chesapeake Bay and are an important link in transferring energy from lower to upper trophic levels. Mysids also serve as biological vectors for benthic-pelagic coupling due to their diel vertical migration and omnivorous prey-switching behavior, which makes mysids important regulators of food web architecture. Despite their central role in coastal food webs, surprisingly little is known about mysid ecology and dynamics in Chesapeake Bay.
