[SLIDE 1] Welcome everyone to the first of the NOAA Marine Debris Program’s applicant webinars for this year. Today’s webinar will be highlighting our FY24 Marine Debris Removal funding opportunity, under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Tomorrow, we have another webinar focused on our second funding opportunity regarding interception technology. My name is Sarah Lowe and I am a grants management specialist with the NOAA Marine Debris Program. I’m joined today by Amanda Dwyer and Tom Barry who are also part of the NOAA Marine Debris Program’s Grant team. If you have questions throughout this presentation, please enter them in the question box. Our moderator will be collecting them and we will either address them on the webinar or we will follow up with you afterwards. Also, this webinar will be recorded and will be available on our website as soon as possible.

 

[SLIDE 2] For today’s presentation, we will be providing you with a background on our program and the funding, and will also be getting into the details regarding this funding opportunity. We will share the anticipated funding levels, eligibility, competition priorities and process, application content and resources, information on how the applications will be evaluated, tips and submission instructions, the anticipated timeline for this competition, and lastly we will be answering some questions.

 

[SLIDE 3] Through this webinar today, we are hoping to communicate our expectations for proposal submission, timelines, process, and of course answer questions.

 

[SLIDE 4] We will start with a brief introduction of the NOAA Marine Debris Program, which was established as the federal lead for marine debris in 2006 through the Marine Debris Act. Our mission is to investigate and prevent the adverse impacts of marine debris. Our team consists of around 30 people of which about half are located in the NOAA HQ office in Silver Spring, MD and the other half are in field offices around the country.

 

[SLIDE 5] Eleven of our staff are regional coordinators who are both regional and technical experts on marine debris, and who may be able to answer any region-specific questions about your proposed project ideas. We encourage you to reach out to these individuals with those questions - and I’ll share this slide again at the end of the webinar for their contact information.

 

[SLIDE 6] Funding for this competition is being provided by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, formerly known as Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). NOAA will receive $1.467 billion dollars for their Climate Ready Coasts portfolio, which focuses on helping coastal communities build the future they want to see. NOAA will be investing in high-impact natural infrastructure projects that build coastal resilience, create jobs, store carbon, and restore habitat.

 

[SLIDE 7] Within NOAA’s Climate Ready Coasts BIL portfolio, two provisions are designed to address the issue of marine debris. Provision 7 which is overseen by the NOAA MDP in the National Ocean Service, and Provision 8 which is overseen by the National Sea Grant office in NOAA’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research line office. Specifically, the NOAA Marine Debris Program will receive $150 million over 5 years (from FY22 - FY26) for “marine debris assessment, prevention, mitigation, and removal.” Most of this funding is expected to be used for competitive removal grants, such as this one. 

 

[SLIDE 8] Last year, we had offered our first round of BIL funding. With combined funding from FY22 and FY23, NOAA MDP has awarded $54.5M in competitive grant awards with an additional $12.64M of leveraged one-time Inflation Reduction Act funding. 13 transformational multi-year marine debris removal projects were funded under two priorities:

 

• 11 projects were selected under the first priority which included removal of significant legacy debris such as abandoned and derelict vessels (ADVs) and derelict fishing gear (DFG). Other examples of large debris to be removed under this priority include a plane, oil and gas infrastructure, and other large debris.

 

• Under the second priority, 2 projects were awarded that deploy marine debris interception technologies. These are devices that will capture and remove marine debris before it enters waterways.

 

• The NOAA MDP received requests for $330.6 million in federal funds under these two priorities last year, to give you an idea of the competitiveness of this funding opportunity. 

 

[SLIDE 9] For this year, we have split our two general priorities (removal and interception technologies) into two separate funding opportunities. Again, the funding opportunity we are highlighting today is only covering our FY24 removal funding opportunity. For this fiscal year, up to $24M will be available to award to meritorious removal projects. Individual removal projects should request at least $800,000, but no more than $6M. We expect typical awards to range from $1M to $4M dollars.

 

Through this competition, matching funds are not required, but are strongly encouraged. These match funds can be in the form of direct cost sharing, in-kind support (such as volunteer labor or equipment use) and also leveraged funds. Please note, there will be an evaluation criteria regarding cost sharing and leveraged funds, which is why it is strongly encouraged, where possible.

 

[SLIDE 10] Eligible applicants include state, local, Tribal, territory, and freely associated state governments whose activities affect research or regulation of marine debris, as well as any institution of higher education, nonprofit organization, or commercial (for-profit) organization with expertise in a field related to marine debris. All proposed work must take place in the coastal areas and waterways of the U.S., including Great Lakes, US territories, and freely associated states.

 

[SLIDE 11] Non-eligible applicants would be federal agencies or employees of federal agencies. Although interested federal agencies or employees may collaborate with eligible applicants, they cannot receive funding through this competition. Additionally, foreign public entities, individuals, and organizations, from outside the Freely Associated States and United States are not eligible to apply. Please note as we walk through the priorities for this competition, there are additional expectations applicants will need to demonstrate to be competitive for the various priorities of this competition. 

 

[SLIDE 12] The highest priority for this funding opportunity is to support impactful, large marine debris removal projects. This competition considers impactful projects to be those that will have long-lasting, transformational benefits to marine and coastal NOAA Trust Resources, coastal communities, and/or local economies. For the purposes of this funding opportunity, “large debris” is defined as abandoned and derelict vessels (ADVs), derelict fishing gear (DFG), and other debris that is unable to be easily collected by hand. That said, we also encourage you to review our website for examples of currently funded projects as NOAA will consider the proposals in the context of already-funded projects, including projects that received funding through previous Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Marine Debris Removal Grants, to avoid duplication of removal efforts in similar locations.

 

[SLIDE 13] Through this funding, there are a variety of ways that projects can propose to be structured. Applicants may conduct removal activities on their own, collaborate with other organizations and partners on removal efforts, pass-through funding to already identified subawardees, or administer a competitive funding opportunity to allow for funding of smaller projects and lower the administrative burden on applicant organizations. Applicants may propose one or a combination of these structures. 

 

[SLIDE 14] The second identified priority for this competition is that NOAA will prioritize applications that demonstrate clear removal and disposal outcomes. Applicants should identify clear target removal metrics, such as pounds removed, and removals should also be conducted with a focus on alternative disposal methods when possible, which means applicants should use disposal methods that are the most environmentally friendly given the location, availability, and resources of the specific removal effort.

 

[SLIDE 15] Removal projects proposed to this competition that include strategies to prevent the reaccumulation of marine debris in the future may also be prioritized. Marine debris prevention activities should aim to reduce the recurrence of the debris that is being targeted in the removal efforts. Examples of various prevention activities include, but are not limited to, the development or expansion of state, regionally, or nationally focused marine debris prevention programs, vessel or fishing gear turn-in opportunities, vessel or fishing gear recycling programs, and targeted programs working with boaters, fisherman, or other relevant stakeholders.

 

[SLIDE 16] Removal projects that include monitoring activities to demonstrate long-term outcomes are encouraged. Monitoring refers to project-specific, pre- or post-removal data collection where important ecological metrics are analyzed to show the effect of the removal project. Long-term outcomes can be described as the anticipated benefits to habitats, communities, and the economy. Examples include the ecological services to be restored, benefits to local economies from an increase in tourism, the economic benefit to fishers from the removal of ghost gear, jobs created, or how planned prevention activities will sustain the benefits of the marine debris removal activity. All monitoring activities must be complementary to the proposed large-debris removal efforts.

 

[SLIDE 17] NOAA is committed to advancing equity and support for underserved communities. We strongly encourage applicants (and when relevant, subawardees) to incorporate diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and accessibility into their projects through proactive, meaningful, and equitable community engagement at various stages of the proposed projects. This work can be demonstrated in a variety of ways, which include, but are not limited to working in or with underserved communities, working with stakeholders for whom there is currently limited direct engagement on marine debris issues, encouraging diverse perspectives from project leaders and partners (including, but not limited to, sectors, age, career stage, gender, ethnicity, disability, geography), incorporating different learning or engagement approaches into the project, or translation of resources/signage into other languages. Applicants should describe any project activities that will take place within, have a portion of the benefits flow to, and/or meaningfully engage Tribal or underserved communities. Meaningful engagement refers to an intentional exchange between the applicant and the underserved community where both have multiple opportunities to ensure the other is correctly understanding each other’s perspectives and ideas.

 

Applicants should note that greater consideration will be given to projects that propose to work in areas with underserved communities that have been historically marginalized and overburdened by pollution. Please see the notice of funding opportunity for additional details and tools to aid you in this priority. 

 

[SLIDE 18] We also wanted to outline the competition process, as this is different from our previous round of BIL funding. This year, our competition includes a Letter of Intent step to determine if proposed projects are well-suited for this specific competition. Applicants must submit a letter of intent (or LOI) and receive an invitation from the NOAA MDP before submitting a full proposal. Additionally, LOIs are NOT submitted via grants.gov, but must be submitted via email as an attachment to our grants email grants.marinedebris@noaa.gov by 11:59pm ET on October 27th. You will then receive an email confirmation from our team. We highly recommend that LOIs are submitted early in the event that there are issues with the email submission or attachment. 

 

The goal of the LOI process is to streamline the proposal review and to provide feedback and guidance on invited application ideas. LOIs will be reviewed by at least 3 qualified reviewers, in accordance with the LOI evaluation criteria, which I will outline more in a few slides. Based on the merits of the proposal and alignment with funding priorities, applicants will receive an email indicating whether their project is invited to submit a full proposal or not. Feedback on the reviewed LOI and full proposal submission instructions will be included at that time.

 

Again, only applicants who have been invited to submit a full proposal may do so. Full proposals are then due to be submitted to the grants.gov website by February 23, 2024. These full proposals will then also enter our merit review process, as outlined in the funding opportunity. The exact amount of funds to be awarded and other changes will be determined in any pre-award negotiations with successful applicants. 

 

[SLIDE 19] The LOIs that are submitted must be no more than 3 pages in length, and be single spaced using 11 or 12 point font on an 8.5x11 page size. They should also have page margins that are no smaller than 1” on each edge. A 4th page may be submitted showing only project site maps and photographs of the area or the debris targeted for removal. 

 

Letters of Intent should have the following 9 components highlighted here in letters A through I. They should include the applicant organization, project title, the list of principal investigators and project partners (including their contact info and experience), and the project location. The project description should outline the purpose of the project and the list of tasks to be completed, it should identify the debris type and explanation as to why it was chosen, and describe the mechanism for the distribution of funds (meaning how is the project to be structured; referring back to whether this is an applicant-led removal, a collaboration with partners, pass-through to identified subawardees, a subaward competition, or any combination of those options). The project description should also describe the proposed removal techniques and their duration and describe any associated prevention and/or monitoring activities.

 

Following the project description, the LOIs should list the anticipated removal activity start date (not the proposed award start date), the approximate federal funds being requested and the approximate non-federal match or informal leverage anticipated, it should highlight project outcomes and metrics, and lastly describe how the project demonstrates principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, justice & accessibility.  

 

[SLIDE 20] Besides the NOFO, we encourage you to check out our website (marinedebris.noaa.gov) for additional guidance and resources for your applications.  Most notably for this first step in the application process, we provide an LOI template and some NOFO guidance. There are additional resources for the full proposal stage as well.

 

[SLIDE 21] As mentioned previously, LOIs will be evaluated by at least 3 reviewers according to the evaluation criteria as outlined in the NOFO. We’ve copied that here for your general awareness. There are 5 pieces which follow our identified priorities: will the project have impactful benefits to NOAA trust resources and the surrounding coastal environment or community?; Are there clearly identified project goals and objectives with a realistic and cost-effective approach?; the applicant capabilities, experience, or expertise; are prevention activities included and appropriate?; and does the project demonstrate how diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and accessibility will be promoted in the project. There are additional detailed questions in those evaluation criteria as outlined here and in the NOFO.

 

[SLIDE 22] Next we have some general application tips. Please note adobe PDF is the preferred format for application attachments. Please combine files into one pdf, if necessary.

 

As mentioned earlier, please carefully review the NOFO for certain details about proposal requirements we were not able to cover today. Again, we highly encourage you to view the guidance on our Proposal Submission Guidance for Applicants webpage.

 

[SLIDE 23] When you are ready to submit your LOI, we have outlined the submission instructions here. As mentioned previously, you MUST submit a LOI and receive an invitation from the NOAA MDP before submitting a full proposal. LOIs must be submitted as an email attachment to grants.marinedebris@noaa.gov by 11:59pm ET on October 27, 2023. Please submit early as we cannot extend the deadline for folks who may experience technical difficulties or other extenuating circumstances on the day the submissions are due. Within the NOFO, you will also see another due date (February 23rd). Please note that this due date is only for invited full proposals. Again, LOIs are due on October 27th.

 

When emailing the LOI, please put “FY24 NOAA Marine Debris Removal Letter of Intent or LOI” in the email subject line.

 

Once submitted, you will receive an email confirmation indicating successful submission. If you do not receive an email, that is an indication that the LOI submission was not successful and therefore will not be reviewed. So again, please submit early in case there are issues with your submission.

 

[SLIDE 24] For your planning purposes, here is the anticipated timeline for award review and notifications. Again, LOIs are due to our grants.marinedebris@noaa.gov email address by 11:59pm ET Oct 27, 2023. The LOI will be reviewed in November 2023. We are then planning to send invitations for full proposals out in early December 2023. After that point, we will have another information webinar like this, which will be for invited full proposal applicants only. Those invited applications will then be due to grants.gov by 11:59pm ET on February 23, 2024. The full proposal review will occur from March through April 2024. We are hoping to recommend projects for funding and notify those successful and unsuccessful full proposal applicants in May 2024. And finally, awards will receive an official offer and project activities can begin in late summer/early fall of 2024 (so around this time next year).

 

[SLIDE 25] There are several other funding opportunities related to marine debris that we also wanted to highlight. As mentioned previously, the NOAA MDP has a second funding opportunity open currently, directed at supporting the installation, monitoring, and maintenance of proven marine debris interception technologies. If you are also interested in that opportunity, we are having a similar webinar tomorrow at 3pm ET. Registration information is available on our website. 

 

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law also provided $50 million to the National Sea Grant College Program for marine debris prevention and removal over the next 5 years.

They anticipate offering similar funding opportunities as they have previously with an expected announcement soon. Their focus in FY22 was on community action coalitions and a marine debris challenge competition.

Look for future announcements for Fy24 Sea Grant funding at seagrant.noaa.gov/marinedebris

If after today’s overview of the NOAA MDP’s removal competition priorities you realize your project might not align with this particular funding opportunity, we highly suggest you review these other marine debris competition opportunities, to see if they would be a better fit for your project ideas. 

 

[SLIDE 26] That concludes the overview of our removal funding opportunity, but we would like to take some time to address a few questions that were submitted through the registration process. 

 

Switch over to that document a second. So, the first question that we had received was 

 

‘Will NOAA consider projects that remove derelict debris and project costs below the minimum $800,000 dollars?’ 

 

So the answer there, the proposals that request under  $800,000 dollars will unfortunately not meet the minimum requirements of this competition and will not be reviewed.

 

The second question that we had received

 

‘Are there business designation requirements for this, such as small business or minority-owned businesses?’

 

There are no business designation requirements for this funding, such as small business owners or minority-owned businesses. As we highlighted in the presentation today and in the funding opportunity, eligible applicants include state, local, Tribal, territory and freely associated state governments whose activities affect research or regulation on marine debris, as well as any institution of higher education, non-profit organization, or commercial for-profit organization with expertise in a field related to marine debris. Again, all proposed work must take place in the coastal areas and waterways of the United States which includes the Great Lakes, U.S territories, and freely associated states.

 

Alright, our third question

‘Does the applicant organization have to have an official safety plan?’

 

Yes, so all NOAA funded projects do require a written safety plan. So if the proposed project is selected as one of the projects that is recommended for funding, it will require one before work begins. The next question

 

‘Would vessels abandoned on land such as on a local street be eligible for removal and disposal through the grant program?’

 

So to answer that question, priority will be placed on proposals that clearly demonstrate the beneficial impacts the removal project will have on NOAA trust resources and the surrounding coastal environment or community. So NOAA Trust resources generally refer to marine or Great Lakes habitats and resources in which NOAA has a stewardship interest. So if the case can be adequately made that by removing these dry dock vessels there will be a beneficial impact on these resources they would be eligible. However, please note that the proposal will be competing against in-water derelict vessels, so there needs to be a strong connection made to NOAA trust resources and the likelihood of these vessels becoming marine debris.

 

Alright, one final question for me I think

 

‘Can we use these grants for purchasing equipment to remove traps and nets from water or waterways?’

 

So the answer there, equipment costs can be included in proposals for this competition as long as the specific need for the equipment to conduct the proposed project activities is clearly explained in the proposal in addition to a clearly stated plan for the equipment's maintenance and use following the award period. So this explanation should include why the equipment is being purchased rather than leased, which could include basically it will be used and maintained

following the award period, it is more cost effective to purchase than lease it, there are no leasing options for the equipment, etc. Please note that the NOAA budget guidelines defines equipment as a purchase that has a useful life of more than one year and a per unit acquisition cost equal to or greater than  $5,000 dollars. So any item that costs less than $5,000 dollars individually should be included as supplies in your budget line.

 

And now I think I am going to hand things over to my colleague Amanda who's going to answer a few more of your questions. Amanda.

 

Thanks, Sarah. So the next question is 

 

‘If you are looking for funding to focus on educational programs related to marine debris removal, is that something that is allowable?’ 

 

And yes, prevention activities such as educational programs are encouraged but should be complementary to removal efforts and not the primary focus of the proposed project.

 

Next question is about subawards. 

 

‘So if subawards are made, should all subawardee activities and deliverables be wrapped up by the end of the grant duration?’ 

 

And yes, all project activities including those by subawardees need to be completed before the end date of the award.

 

Next question is 

 

‘I would like to get a clearer idea of the preference for very specific projects versus broader scoped removal projects?’

 

So both specific projects that have previously identified removal targets and broader removal projects, such as applications that propose administering a competition for subawards, are eligible for this competition as long as the other eligibility criteria in the notice of funding opportunity are met. We recommend reading through the program priorities and evaluation criteria in the notice of funding opportunity for more information on what may make a given proposal competitive.

 

Okay, the next question is 

‘Does this funding opportunity consider a community driven approach to marine debris removal to be aligned with the grant intent?’ 

 

And yes, we encourage partnership and community-based decision making in project development and execution.

 

The last question for me is 

 

‘Are there any significant changes from the 2022 marine debris removal funding opportunity?’ 

 

So, the marine debris removal and NOAA marine debris interception technologies are different notice of funding opportunities this year and additionally as Sarah described a letter of intent needs to be submitted to our grants.marinedebris@noaa.gov email before full proposals are invited. The funding thresholds for eligible projects are also different from our last competition. The minimum federal request for this solicitation is $800,000 dollars and in some cases up to $6 million dollars may be awarded. 

 

And now I'll turn it over to my colleague Tom Barry to answer some more questions. Oh yeah, thanks Amanda. So there was a question.

 

‘How much funding is available for ADVs in California?’

 

So, removal of derelict vessels in California, so we don't have a designated amount of funding per state or per debris type for this competition. It's a nationwide competition and solicits applications from any eligible coastal area. So, we don't have funding set aside for specific project types or locations. Our selection process is based on the merit of all applications, even though we do try to strive for geographic equity where possible.

 

The next question 

 

‘Does this marine debris program grant include Vieques and Culebra?’ 

 

So yes, those areas are part of the U.S., a U.S territory, and are eligible to apply for funding under this competition.

 

This was addressed above 

 

‘Can a group outside of the U.S apply for this funding opportunity?‘

 

So as Sarah mentioned, uh foreign public entities from outside of the freely associated states and the United States are not eligible to apply. uh And again a reminder projects must take place within the coastal United States territories or freely associated states.

 

Let's see was a question here

 

‘How is this RFP different from a bid to collect marine debris?’

 

So, this is not a contractual bid solicitation where the government is asking for you to complete you know a specific removal or focus on a specific target. We're soliciting projects that are proposed by the public for the benefit of the public. Hence the fact that this is a grant competition. So it's not considered a contractual bid. In the case of this grant competition really we're asking for your ideas for marine debris removal projects based on the needs that you see within your communities and regions.

 

and I think those were it. Sarah I think we would pass it back to you. I think there were a few other questions. Yeah, thanks Tom. So a couple more questions to address for today. 

 

So the next question 

 

‘Is an unrepairable bulkhead marine debris? We are building an oyster reef and need to remove the bulkhead.’

 

So, marine debris is defined as any persistent solid material that is manufactured or processed and directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, disposed of or abandoned into marine environment or the Great Lakes. So if the bulkhead fits this definition, the fact that it is part of a larger restoration or development project is okay.

 

Some other general questions that we have.

 

‘How does this funding opportunity differ from the other funding opportunities related to marine debris that NOAA is providing through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law?’ 

 

So, we did roughly talk about this in the presentation today and I mentioned that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is providing $3 billion dollars over five years for NOAA including $150 million to the NOAA marine debris program and $50 million dollars was also appropriated to NOAA Sea Grant. So, funding opportunities through NOAA Sea Grant have been primarily focused on building community level marine debris coalitions and supporting innovative research and development projects that will address the prevention and/or removal of marine debris. They do anticipate offering similar funding opportunities as they have previously and there is an expected announcement soon. So keep an eye on their website for that announcement.

 

‘How are the marine debris funding opportunities through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law being coordinated between the NOAA Marine Debris Program and NOAA Sea Grant?’

 

So, the NOAA Marine Debris Program does work closely with NOAA Sea Grant to coordinate our activities and share information in order to reduce duplication and identify opportunities for collaboration. So, through the various funding elements of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law the NOAA Marine Debris Program will continue to work closely with NOAA partners to coordinate efforts and make a collective impact.

 

Another question that has come in 

 

‘Would minor habitat restoration work following removal, for example, replanting after removing an abandoned derelict vessel, be an approved cost?’

 

Minor restoration work and other monitoring activities should be complementary to removal efforts and costs and not be the primary focus of the proposed project.

 

Okay, we're going to move into some of the questions that we have received as we've been going through the presentation today.

 

So one of those questions 

 

‘Can multiple agencies combine for a grant?’ 

 

And there was a question and 

‘I doubt our agency alone can meet the minimum grant amount?’

 

The answer is yes, an applicant may partner with other eligible organizations in putting together an application. So, if you are partnering with other groups, you should ensure that the overall proposal represents a cohesive project or series of related projects that are responsive to the priorities of the competition.

 

Another question.

 

‘What is the definition of leverage for funding?’ 

 

Leverage simply refers to non-federal contributions, so be it cash contributions or other in-kind contributions, that are combined with the requested federal funding to increase the impact of the proposed project. So, hopefully that answers that question.

 

Another question that has come in. 

 

‘Can more than one letter of intent be submitted by a single organization?’

 

Yes, you can submit more than one LOI for a separate, distinct project.

 

Alright, another question here. 

 

‘Can cubic yards be used versus pounds?’

 

Yes, but please also try to estimate the total weight in pounds as well.

 

Another question. 

 

‘Can a project proposal be submitted to scale up a project currently funded by the NOAA Bipartisan Infrastructure Law?’

 

So, funding is primarily aimed at supporting new or impactful removal efforts or programs that require funding to scale up or expand their existing removal efforts to achieve those broader and more impactful outcomes. So, the proposals that scale up projects that were funded through the previous Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Marine Debris Removal Competition are allowed but the proposals must clearly indicate how additional funding will lead to outcomes above and beyond what was considered through the previous grant application.

 

Alright another question.

 

‘Will commercial for-profit businesses with expertise and salvage be encouraged to show recent or past performance and will it help with proposal score?’

 

So, all applicants are asked to describe their technical capabilities and should include a description of necessary experience, training, facilities, and administrative resources to meet proposal objectives. So for more specific information about the LOI and proposal scoring you can see the evaluation criteria in the notice of funding opportunity.

 

Okay, another question. 

‘I understand that LOIs must be accepted before a full proposal is invited but is it true there will be no reply to LOIs or acknowledgement of receipt unless invited for a proposal?’

 

So, an email confirmation will be sent indicating successful submission of the LOI. If there's no confirmation email received that is an indication that the LOI submission was not successful and will not be reviewed. In such cases, please contact the NOAA Marine Debris Program to resolve that issue prior to the deadline.

 

Okay another question

 

‘If awarded, will funds be available at award?’

 

So, the earliest anticipated start date for awards will be August 1st 2024. So applicants should consider this date when developing plans for initiating proposed project activities. Applicants selected to receive funding may be also asked to modify the project start date to accommodate any delays in federal funding or environmental compliance consultations as well.

 

‘Does allowing a woman-owned small business to participate in the project address the underserved community?’

 

Yes, this could be considered as addressing an underserved community. However, please closely refer to the notice of funding opportunity which includes important additional details including that greater consideration will be given to projects that propose to work in areas with underserved communities that have been historically marginalized and overburdened by pollution as well as that priority will also be given to removal projects that fully meet the other priorities of this competition and describe that meaningful engagement with tribal or underserved communities.

 

I think that addresses oh maybe there's one more question here.

 

‘Will NOAA focus more on recreational craft removal or derelict barges removal?’

 

So the answer there is priority will be placed on proposals that clearly demonstrate the beneficial impacts the removal project will have on NOAA Trust resources and the surrounding coastal environment or community. NOAA Trust Resources generally refer to marine and Great Lakes habitats and resources in which NOAA has a stewardship interest.

 

Okay, so I think that addresses all of the questions. If we did not get to your question, please note we will either follow up with you directly via email if it's more specific to a specific project idea you have. We are recording them and we'll be sure to address those questions after the webinar as well.

 

Alright let me switch back to the presentation.

 

[SLIDE 27] So again we just hope we have provided helpful information that you might have had today and answered any questions you may have had.

 

If you have other questions specific to your project or if questions come up following this webinar please feel free to reach out to the NOAA Marine Debris Program Grants team email that's grants.marinedebris@noaa.gov.

 

If you have project-based questions related to a particular region of your proposed work please reach out to the regional coordinator in the area the work is being proposed and again here's that regional contact list if you need it. 

 

[SLIDE 28] Again this is also available on our website. If you need to jot it out for a few more seconds.

 

[SLIDE 29] Alright and as a reminder this webinar has been recorded and will be available on our website as soon as possible. We do thank you all for your participation this afternoon and hope you have a great rest of your day. Thank you.

 

Miembros:

Estudiante: Buenos días, mi nombre es Natalia López

Estudiante: Mi nombre es Alondra

Estudiante: mi nombre es Natalia

Estudiante: Yo soy Claudia

Estudiante: Gabriela Acevedo

Estudiante:Ariana de Jesús

Estudiante: Ariana Negrón

Estudiante: Fabiola Collazo- López

Estudiante: Grecia Borges-García

¿Quiénes somos?

Estudiante (Natalia López): Estamos muy emocionadas por hablarles de diversos temas que impactan al medio ambiente. Pero antes de empezar esta lección nos gustaría explicar en qué consiste este proyecto. Este grupo está formado por chicas puertorriqueñas que aspiran a ayudar al medio ambiente y proveer información a un público de todas las edades. 

Primera lección

Estudiante (Claudia Rentas): Nuestra primera lección consiste en orientarlos sobre lo que son los desechos marinos, sus impactos y qué podemos hacer al respecto como individuos.

Primero, ¿qué son los desechos marinos? (sonido de grillos) Son enormes cantidades ya sea de plástico, metales, papeles, textiles, equipo de pesca abandonado, embarcaciones (abandonadas) y otros objetos descartados que llegan al medio ambiente. Esto puede ocurrir por acciones de individuos irresponsables o de manera involuntaria. Como resultado, el medio ambiente y el ecosistema cambia, afectando la vegetación, las fuentes de agua, el suelo marino y a los organismos que viven en el hábitat.

Otra razón… (manera de afectar la vida marina)

Estudiante (Natalia Liu): Otra razón menos común para afectar la vida marina es la invasión del hábitat. Lo que queremos decir con esto es que a través de los escombros, los animales viajan hacia otros entornos. Debido a que no son  nativos de esos entornos afectan negativamente a las especies  que sí lo son y como consecuencia (podrían) acabar sus fuentes de nutrientes y destruir su hogar.

Cómo las tortugas son afectadas  

Estudiante (Grecia): Muchas especies marinas están siendo afectadas por la contaminación de cuerpos de agua.El plástico se puede encontrar en el fondo del mar, en el suelo marítimo, como en la orilla y en la superficie del agua. Esto causa que disminuya la cantidad de las especies y en otros casos puede hasta caer la especie en peligro de extinción. Globalmente mueren 100,000 especies (organismos) marinas al año, muchas de estas empiezan cuando la especie o el animal se come  el plástico y cuando (lo) vaya ingiriendo se siente lleno (ejemplo, tortugas marinas confundiendo bolsas de plástico con alimento) … los animales no se están alimentando bien y eso causa mala nutrición e incluso se pueden asfixiar. Como los diferentes animales (aves) encuentran esto como si fuera comida, se lo traen a las crías y esto causa que no puedan sobrevivir las crías y empieza a disminuir la población de ese animal. 

¿Qué podemos hacer?

Estudiante (Ariana de Jesús): Ahora se deben estar preguntando: pero, ¿qué podemos hacer para ayudar a todas estas especies que están en peligro de extinción? Debido a la pandemia, no podemos salir de nuestros hogares (abucheo). Sin embargo, no significa que no podamos mantenernos ayudando. Debemos mantenernos diligentes y conscientes sobre el uso de plásticos en nuestros hogares , ya que así podemos poner nuestro granito de arena y minimizar nuestro propio consumo de plástico. Así reducimos la cantidad de plástico utilizado en el mundo. Siempre recuerda tratar de REUTILIZAR los artículos en vez de reciclarlos. Así estás utilizando toda la energía que se utiliza en el proceso de reciclaje. ¿Quieres conocer más información? ¿Quieres ayudarnos a todas nosotras a hacer la diferencia? ¡Manténgase conectado con nuestras plataformas! Y siempre recuerden: “la naturaleza no es nuestra, sino que nosotros somos de ella”.

Proyecto auspiciado por NOAA Marine Debris Program y por el National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.

Ariana: Hola, mi nombre es Ariana Carrillo y junto a mis compañeras Alanis Fajardo, Fabiola Carrió y Natalia López les estaremos hablando sobre cómo podemos reducir el marine debris por medio del “zero waste” o basura cero. En nuestro primer video pudimos conocer sobre este proyecto liderado por chicas con interés en las ciencias y cómo los desechos marinos nos pueden impactar la vida de distintas maneras. Si no has visto el video, no te lo pierdas. Hoy estaremos hablando sobre consejos de cómo mejorar el medio ambiente y nuestro estilo de vida. 

Estudiante: En Puerto Rico podemos clasificar los residuos en diferentes tipos. 

Alanis: En Puerto Rico podemos clasificar los residuos en varios tipos. Tenemos los desperdicios domésticos, que son aquellos producidos en los hogares, los desperdicios industriales, que se generan en el sector industrial en sus procesos de fabricación, mantenimiento y limpieza; los desperdicios orgánicos, que son aquellos que son de origen biológico como la comida o ramas caídas de árboles; los inorgánicos, como metales y plásticos; los electrónicos, que tienen partes eléctricas ejemplo microondas, neveras, computadoras, etc, entre otros.

¿Sabías que se predice que los vertederos en Puerto Rico estarán a capacidad dos años? Hay mucho que podemos hablar al respecto, pero ¿qué podemos hacer como individuos? ¡Te tenemos varias alternativas! Por ejemplo: a parte de las 5Rs que te presentaremos adelante y que eliminan un gran porcentaje de basura de nuestros vertederos, tú puedes compostar.   

Fabiola: El objetivo del movimiento, o filosofía de vida Zero Waste o Basura Cero, es reducir al máximo los residuos que generamos cotidianamente. En este movimiento se sigue la regla de las 5 erres: rechazar lo que no necesitamos, reducir los desechos, reutilizar cambiando los desechables por alternativas reutilizables, reciclar aquello que no podemos rechazar, reducir o reutilizar y ROT que traducido quiere decir composta, descomponer. Dentro de este movimiento se le da especial atención a la reducción del plástico desechable. El problema medioambiental al que nos enfrentamos debido al consumismo desmedido de la sociedad actual, es extremadamente grave. Nos hemos convertido en la generación de usar y tirar, y es justamente aquí, en nuestra cultura de adquirir bienes que compramos, usamos y tiramos, esos desechos pueden llegar al mar  y lo hacemos continuamente sin detenernos a pensar qué efecto esto puede causar. 

Alanis: Algunos consejos para reducir su desperdicio:

Rechaza: evalúa si necesitas utilizar sorbeto a la hora de  pedir bebidas en restaurantes, elige  alimentos sin empaque o empaque mínimo, use jabón en barra que tiende a venir en menos envoltorio que el jabón líquido.

Reduce: siempre lleva contigo una  botella de agua reusable llena. Cambia tu cepillo de dientes de plástico por uno de bambú; construye un kit de basura cero (muestra foto de ejemplo en el video) y llévelo con usted cuando salga para estar siempre preparado. Comprométete a llevar tus bolsas reutilizables a las tiendas. Si no las tienes, ¡date la vuelta a buscarlas, no sólo estarás ayudando, sino también ahorrando!

Ariana: Otros consejos para reducir sus desperdicios:

Reutiliza/da otro propósito: dona artículos que ya no estés usando y que estén en buenas condiciones para poder apoyar el mercado de segunda mano; puedes convertir las sábanas y las toallas en pañuelos, en bolsas reusables o en otras cosas.

Por último, reciclar, recuerda que los materiales reciclables son el plástico, el cartón, el aluminio, el vidrio y el periódico. Puedes hasta vender el aluminio de las latas, y hacer dinero mientras ayudas al ambiente. Pero te exhorto a que busques las reglas de reciclaje de tu área debido a que pueden variar dependiendo de donde estén localizados.  

Natalia: El propósito de este video fue el de  educarlos sobre diferentes términos relacionados al marine debris y darles las herramientas para que sean parte de este movimiento que te beneficia a ti, a mi y al planeta.  Recuerda que esta es una iniciativa formada por chicas que les interesan las ciencias con el apoyo de National Marine Sanctuary Foundation (NMSF) y NOAA Marine Debris Program. Si te gustó este video, dale “like” y compártelo con tus amigos y familiares. Puedes seguirnos en nuestra página de Instagram @marina.puertorico para más consejos y suscribirte a nuestro canal de YouTube Marina Puerto Rico para más videos como este. En nuestro próximo video te enseñaremos a darle un nuevo uso a esa camisa que te encantaba, pero creciste y ya no te la puedes poner!

¡Hasta pronto!

Grupo: Fabiola Collazo, Ariana De Jesús, Ariana Negrón

Tema del video: huracanes y su relación a los desechos marinos

Libreto:

¡Hola! Gracias por seguirnos en este proyecto en el que estaremos compartiendo videos sobre los desechos marinos en nuestras costas. Hoy estaremos presentando el 2do video de una serie de cuatro sobre el tema Islas, huracanes y los desechos marinos. Si te perdiste el primero, te invitamos a que lo veas. En el video de hoy presentaremos sobre la vida en las islas y los desechos marinos.

Sin duda vivimos en un paraíso, pero las islas tropicales son altamente vulnerables al impacto de huracanes ya que, estos, además de ser peligrosos, traen una gran cantidad de consecuencias,  una de estas las grandes cantidades de desechos marinos que se generan. En nuestra curiosidad de conocer más sobre el tema y cómo relacionar los desechos marinos con los huracanes y las islas, tuvimos la oportunidad de conversar con tres mujeres especialistas en el área de conservación marina: Shanelle Naone de Hawái, Kristina Edwards de las Islas Vírgenes Estadounidenses y la Dra. Nilda Jiménez de Puerto Rico. Complementado con el blog del Programa de Marine Debris de NOAA que puedes acceder en la descripción de este video, te compartimos lo que aprendimos.

 Los desechos marinos presentan un peligro para las comunidades costeras, los ecosistemas y la economía. En las islas, los desafíos aumentan exponencialmente debido al constante desarrollo costero, por ejemplo, construcciones cercanas a la costa, el gran número de barcos anclados y la dependencia excesiva de los alimentos y suministros importados.  

Los desechos marinos pueden llegar a las costas desde múltiples fuentes como, las marinas, edificios cercanos a las costas, incluso de las ayudas que llegan para la recuperación del área. 

Después de un desastre natural, los alimentos y el agua pueden llegar a ser escasos. Esto se debe a la pérdida de la agricultura local en una isla, los cierres temporales de puertos, las inundaciones, la contaminación de los cuerpos de agua y/o los daños a la infraestructura que apoya los servicios esenciales. Esto va a resultar en meses de provisiones limitadas. Como respuesta a esto y a cuestiones sanitarias, los plásticos de un solo uso se utilizan para reemplazar artículos cotidianos. Por ejemplo, aquí en Puerto Rico y en las Islas Vírgenes después del huracán María se distribuyeron millones de botellas de agua de plástico cuando no había acceso al agua potable. La basura generada por estas actividades de ayuda se suma a las ya grandes cantidades de desechos marinos resultantes del desastre inmediato.  

La eliminación de desechos marinos generado por huracanes puede tardar años en completarse y es extremadamente costoso, especialmente en islas pequeñas, como Puerto Rico, donde la basura tiene que ser exportada ya que el espacio en los vertederos es limitado. Además, hay islas que no tienen los recursos necesarios para poder remover dichos desechos.  

 ¿Por qué te debe importar? Como mencionamos en el video anterior, nuestros ecosistemas marinos sensitivos como los manglares, las yerbas marinas y los arrecifes de coral se ven afectados. Esto se traduce a que esas playas hermosas que nos encanta visitar y disfrutar de ellas y la economía que es inyectada por ellas se ven afectadas. ¿De qué otras maneras te puedes ver impactado? ¿Qué posibles soluciones nos puedes compartir? Déjanos tus comentarios y preguntas y abundaremos sobre ello. 

En nuestro próximo video te vas a enterar de que puedes hacer para evitar que los desechos marinos lleguen a nuestras costas, ¡así que síguenos!

 Si te gusta este video, compártelo. Esta es una iniciativa de chicas interesadas en las ciencias con el apoyo de National Marine Sanctuaries Foundation (NMSF) y NOAA Marine Debris Program. Para más información sobre el contenido de este video y sobre los desafíos de vivir en islas tropicales, puedes visitar el Blog de la página del Programa de Marine Debris de NOAA.  Te incluimos en la descripción del video el link para The Challenges of Hurricanes and Marine Debris on Islands. 

Recuerda que la naturaleza no es nuestra, nosotros somos de ella.

Recurso (incluir en la descripción del video): https://blog.marinedebris.noaa.gov/challenges-hurricanes-and-marine-debris-islands 

00:01 (Narrator) This is the ocean. This ocean provides

00:06 food shelter and protection. This ocean

00:10 provides for us we should take care of

00:12 it, like it takes care of us.

00:16 This ocean is for me this ocean is for

00:20 you this ocean is for your brother and

00:25 sister. This ocean is for your father and

00:28 mother. This ocean is for your children

00:33 and grandchildren this ocean is ours.

00:37 [Music]

00:44 [Music]

00:55 [Music]

01:02 But the ocean is in trouble. For years

01:05 our trash has been entering into our

01:07 waters. Trash that takes years to break

01:10 down. Trash that doesn't belong in the

01:13 water, we call this trash marine debris.

01:18 Marine debris is defined as solid, man

01:21 material in the ocean. The most common

01:24 type of marine debris is first plastic

01:26 then glass, paper, and fishing lines.

01:30 Fishing nets and gear left in the ocean

01:32 can cause a lot of damage harming and

01:35 destroying fragile habitats. Marine

01:38 debris can either be direct from a ship

01:41 or ocean platform, indirect from storm

01:44 drains etc., intentionally disposed or

01:47 unintentionally abandoned. The bottom

01:50 line is that marine debris comes from us.

01:53 Sometimes

01:54 the debris is so tiny you can barely see

01:57 it in the water. Oftentimes fish and

02:00 other marine animals mistake it for food

02:03 whether it's a plastic bag mistaken for

02:06 a jellyfish, or shiny object and glass

02:09 resembling a tiny sea creature, marine

02:12 debris can be very small, very big, or

02:16 anything in between. In the ocean marine

02:20 debris is on the surface in the water

02:22 column and on the ocean floor and this

02:25 harms our coral reefs because heavy

02:27 debris will crush and damaged coral.This

02:30 harms us because we depend on food from

02:33 the ocean. It affects the environment, the

02:36 economy, fishing, navigation, our health,

02:38 and our safety we need oceans full of

02:41 life not plastic.

02:58 [Music]

03:07 [Music] (Teacher) Hafa adai (hello) class. Let’s into the shoes of a marine animal who gets entangled by marine debris. So for this activity, you just need a regular size rubber band. What you’re going to do is hook the rubber band across your pinkie finger, stretch it across the back of your hand and hook it on to your thumb. Now you’re going to take your other hand and put it around your back and you’re going to try and remove the rubber band using only your entangled band, and not your teeth and your other hand. You have 15 seconds.

03:37 [Music] Were you able to free your hand from the rubber band? How did it feel while trying to remove the rubber band? It was hard. So this activity demonstrates what it might be like for a marine animal who gets entangled in marine debris. Common examples are sea birds entangled in fishing line and turtles entangled in rope or ghost line.

04:14 These animals are not like us who can

04:16 easily untangle ourselves. They end up

04:18 dying. Animals are harmed through

04:20 entanglement or ingestion.

04:44 (Teacher) Are you ready for another activity? So this is called the Plastic Break down. You need a piece of scratch paper, any size. And what we are going to do is rip the piece of paper into smaller and smaller pieces until you can no longer rip it anymore. 

04:50 [Music] (Teacher) Ok, you how small they are? So it isn’t exactly the piece it used to be but it hasn’t completely disappeared, right? This is how plastics work.  So, they break down into these teeny tiny pieces, called microplastics. These tiny pieces are especially harmful for marine animals because they can ingest them by accident. They are also super difficult to remove from the marine environment. Ok, so let’s talk about the top five types of marine debris worldwide. We have cigarette butts, plastic food wrappers, plastic straws, bottle caps, and plastic beverage bottles. What do all of these items have in common? They are all single-use items which means you use them once and then throw them away. What are some ways you can reduce your use of single-use items? Let’s take some time to brainstorm so we can reduce the amount of trash in our waterways. 

05:53 (Narrator) If you said reuse, reduce, recycle, you've

05:58 got it!

05:59 You can purchase reusable or

06:02 biodegradable products and bring

06:05 reusable shopping bags to the grocery

06:07 store, but there are other things you can

06:10 do as well. You can get involved with the

06:12 local agencies and help out in their

06:14 community events. You can get together

06:17 with some friends and do a cleanup along

06:19 the beach or in another area that needs

06:22 it. When at the beach park or playground

06:25 dispose of all trash in the proper bins

06:28 or take your trash home with you. Another

06:31 thing you can do is prevention. Limit

06:34 your use of disposable items. Think of

06:37 where your trash is going and ask

06:40 yourself how you can keep it from

06:42 turning into marine debris. Serve as an

06:45 example to others. Encourage your friends

06:48 and family to keep the beaches and

06:50 oceans clean.

06:52 [Music]

07:18 

07:24 [Music]

I tasi esti 

I tasi ha nånå ́i hit nengkano ́, guma ́ yan pruteksion 

Esti na tasi ha pribeniyi para hita

Debi na ta adahi 

Taiguihi ni ha adadahi hit

Esti na tasi para guåhu

Esti na tasi para hågu

Esti na tasi para i mañe ́lu-mu 

Esti na tasi para i mañaina-mu

Esti na tasi para i famagu ́on-mu yan i famagu ́on famagu ́on-mu

Esti na tasi iyo-ta 

Låo i tasi guaha prublema na

Meggai na sakkan man malofan, ya I basula-ta manhahalum gi hanom ta. 

I Basula siha ni man makkat para u fan mayamak papa’. Or malingu

I Basula ni ti debi di u fanggaigi gi halom hanom 

Ta a’agang esti or fanana’an esti, “Basulan Tåsi”

I basulan tåsi madifina komu I manmahetok na materiat gi halom tasi nu i fina’tinas tåotåo tano’

I mås bula na klåsin basulan tasi, fineni’na, i plastik, dispues i manmamafak na kosas siha, i pappit siha, yan i kuddet siha.

Kosas siha ni mana’fansesetbi para u fan makonni' i guihan siha, yanggin manmayuti’ ha’ gi tasi, siempri bula distrosu fina’tinas-ñiha gi halum tåsi.

I basulan tåsi siña måttu ginin i batku pat ottru såhyan gi tasi, siña lokkui’ gumuaha basulan tasi ginin i kosas siha ni mambinaksala halum gi tasi ni milak hånum, yan lokkui’, siña gumuaha basulan tasi sa’ manmayutti’ kosas siha gi tasi nu i taotåo siha.

Ta kumprendi na i basulan tåsi måffatu ginin hita mismu ni taotåo tano.

Guaha na biåhi na i basula mansen dikiki ya tisinia ta li’i’ gi holom I tasi.

Guaha na biåhi na i guihan yan ottru gå’ga gi tasi man linaisen ya makåkanu’ i basula sa’ sa inason niha na nengkanu’.

I butsiyun plastik siña uma’achuli’ yan i “jellyfish” pat i manlåmlam na kosas siha, yan i impiridoma siña man a’achuli’ yan i mandikiki’ na gå’ga’ gi tasi.

I basulan tasi siña ha’ sen dikiki’, siña ha sen dångkulu, siña todu klåsin mineddung.

Gi halum tåsi, 

Guaha basulan tåsi gaigi gi hilu ́ tåsi

Guaha gaigi manmåma’ya desti i hilu’ tåsi asta i fondun tasi 

Yan guaha gaigi gi fondun tåsi.

I mandångkulu yan manmakkat na basulan tasi para u disnitrosa I ribentasion ni manasaga yan manochocho I guihan ni man dikiki siha.

I basulan tasi ha na’ dådañu i lina’lå’-ta sa’ta depepende I nengkano’ ta ginen i tasi.

I basulan tåsi ti ha na’såsafu’ i lina’lå’-ta, ya ha afefekta i håfa guaha gi uriyå-ta, i ikunumiha, i hinanao gi tasi, yan i hinemlo’ta.

Ta nisisita tåsi ni bula manlåla’la’ na gå’ga’ yan nengkanu’, åhi, ti tåsi ni guaha plastik.

 

På ́gu maila ́ ya ta fanguentos put i singku (5) na mås sanhilu ́ na basula gi todu i tano ́ 

1. Cigarette butts – otpus chuppa 

2. Balutan Nengkano ́ 

3. Straws- ngasan gumimen 

4. Tanpin Buteya 

5. Plastik na Buteya siha     

Gof atan todu esti siha

Håfa mohon inachule’-niha este siha? 

Kåo guaha ineppe-mu? Pura ha’ esti na kosas ni mana’fan setbi gi un biåhi ha na manera. 

Sina ha’ un usa un biahi despues un yuti ́. 

Håfa taimanu ni siña un ribåha usamu nu esti siha na kosas?

Påra. Chuli ́ un mumentu ya un hassu håfa taimanu nai siña un ribåha

I basula-siha ni humahatmi hånom-ta. 

Yanggen un sångan hagon ma ́usa, ma ́usa, ribåha, pues un danchi!  

Siña un fåhan produktu nai sina manna’usa pat biodegradable na produktu siha.

Yan fañuli ́ buksiyon pappet guatu gi tenda.

Lao guaha lokkue’ nai siha mås para un cho ́gui

Siña hao sumånao yan i otro na ahensia siha ya manayuda gi okasion I kumunidåt siha. 

Siña manhamyu yan i manggå ́chong-mu yan fan na ́gåsgas gi uriyan tasi pat gi otru na lugåt ni ma nisisita mana’gasgas.

Yanggen gaigi hao gi kanton tasi pat lugat sagan humugåndu, munga maleffa para un yute’ todu i basula gi propiu na sagan basula pat sino chule ́ hånao para i guma-mu.

Otru lokkui siña un cho ́gui i para ufan chomma’.

Ribåha i ma ́usan i man ma’uusa na kosas siha.

Hasson maolek amånu ni para hinanao-niha i basula mu. 

Pues faisin maisa håo, håfa taimanu ni para un adahi na ti u fama ́basulan tasi.

Na ́ihemplu hao para otru siha na taota-ta.

Abiba i mangga  ́chong-mu yan familia-mu siha ya para u makontinua muna ́gåsgas i kanton tasi yan I halom tasi siha.  

0:50 welcome to day two of Capitol Hill ocean week 2016 here on oceans live
0:56 i'm your host Kate Thompson coming to you live from Capitol Hill ocean talk
1:00 don't forget to be part of our conversation by tweeting us questions
1:03 using hashtag child 2016 or chat us at oceans live . org this morning will be
1:09 turning to one of the biggest and most preventable problems facing the ocean
1:12 today
1:13 marine debris but before I introduce this morning's panelist i want to tell
1:17 you about the highlights from last night's ocean prom
1:20 the National Marine Sanctuary foundation hosted the 14th annual oceans awards
1:24 gala at the ronald reagan building an international trade center in washington
1:28 DC
1:29 many of the oceans most influential leaders such as the Lifetime Achievement
1:33 Award winner and I Noah Thompson came out to celebrate the importance of our
1:37 ocean
1:38 senator maria cantwell was honored with the leadership award and recognition for
1:42 her leadership in the fight for ocean conservation and for her advocacy for
1:46 sustainable fisheries expanding ocean acidification research and increased
1:50 ocean monitoring and science
1:52 the Foundation also honored volunteer of the year captain Scott hickman from the
1:57 flower garden banks national marine sanctuary
1:59 now back to today's panel on marine debris so what happens the litter on the
2:04 street or trash on the beach too often it ends up in the ocean which is filled
2:08 with items that don't belong there
2:10 huge amounts of consumer plastics metal rubber paper
2:14 textiles derelict fishing gear and other lost or discarded items enter the marine
2:18 environment every single day
2:20 joining us to talk today about that enormous and preventable problem is my
2:24 colleague from Noah
2:26 aimie Amy urine amy is the chief scientist for knows marine debris
2:30 program will talk with her about the sources and impacts of marine debris and
2:35 what knowing know is doing about it
2:37 we're also joined by Katie register the executive director of clean Virginia
2:41 waterways which works with long university to improve Virginia's rivers
2:46 and other water resources through citizens stewardship for more than 20
2:50 years now clean Virginia waterways has coordinated the International coastal
2:54 cleanup in Virginia
2:55 thanks ladies so much for joining me today in the studio
2:59 hey everybody here yeah i'm really excited to talk about this crazy problem
3:02 of marine debris
3:04 so I'm going to start us off with a quick question take a look at a picture
3:07 here
3:08 so what do you see and just give me one word of of what what that means to you
3:13 well i would say preventable and i have to say three words surprised but not
3:19 surprised
3:20 yeah right for words haha well you know what I'm just to me I look at that and I
3:28 go
3:29 that could be mine and I you know I'm gonna hold this up right here this right
3:35 here is a toothbrush that you know it's a transportable toothbrush that you
3:41 everybody sees when they go on vacation or a trip they they take this toothbrush
3:45 with them but it hits home because everybody uses a toothbrush every single
3:49 day
3:50 so how does that end up that was at the monument how does that toothbrush end up
3:54 the monument up in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands
3:57 I mean it's just it's crazy to think about that that that albatross right
4:00 there is looking at somebody's toothbrush from who knows where in this
4:04 world so I mean every day we use things such as cans or coffee cups or plastic
4:17 water bottles all of these things can become marine debris
4:23 so those are a few examples but Amy can you tell me a little bit about what
4:28 marine debris is and what and why it's such a big problem right so you kind of
4:32 hit on some of the high points
4:34 k and that is the definition of marine debris tells us that they are the solid
4:39 and persistent man made materials so their manufacturing process materials
4:44 that are intentionally or unintentionally directly or indirectly
4:48 abandoned or discarded into the Great Lakes and the marine environment and as
4:53 you indicated it's an everyday problem and it's a global problem
4:56 it's an everyday problem because as you said everybody across the globe uses
5:01 these products in their everyday life in some capacity right so it's an everyday
5:05 problem
5:06 it's a global problem because there are a lot of people in the world and people
5:09 across the planet are using these products everything
5:12 single day and if they are mismanaged if their waist is mismanaged if the
5:16 recycling is managed they can find their way into the environment into waterways
5:20 and eventually into the ocean
5:23 it's also a global problem in the sense that we are all connected by the ocean
5:27 right the continents are surrounded by water and so something that ends up in
5:31 on a beach end up in the water on a shoreline say in Florida you know could
5:38 find its way up the coast to Virginia could find its way into the Caribbean
5:42 things that wash into the ocean off the coast of Japan could find their way to
5:45 the west coast of the United States due to tides currents you know wind waves on
5:50 the surface and so debris
5:52 Marie connects us in that way it's not necessarily going to be a local problem
5:56 but your local problem we can extend beyond your immediate vicinity right I
6:01 read a book once it was called Moby duck and it-it-it talked about a container
6:06 ship the container was lost off the ship in the middle of the ocean and it was
6:10 carrying rubber duckies
6:12 so you know we all can relate to a rubber ducky and and being in the
6:15 bathtub with rubber ducky
6:17 but what was interesting about the book is it is we are completely
6:21 interconnected it is one ocean that these environmentalists and research
6:26 scientists were tracking these rubber duckies all over the world people were
6:30 finding them everywhere so it doesn't matter if the u.s. is completely clean
6:35 of marine debris and say you know Africa isn't and they have Tom marine debris
6:40 it doesn't matter it goes everywhere find its way it can find his way
6:43 everywhere so I mean at that
6:44 that was pretty impactful book for me to read just to understand how that all
6:48 works but you know speaking of that so where does it come from
6:52 I mean do what I do in my backyard can that go into the ocean oh absolutely i
6:57 mean as you point out trash travels
6:59 it travels from tiny streams two rivers to base to the ocean and most of the
7:05 trash has been documented it comes from inland even though it's called marine
7:10 debris most of it comes from inland
7:13 we're talking about a tennis ball that somebody loses we're talking about a
7:16 cigarette but that was tossed out of a car window
7:19 and in fact there's a group the ocean conservancy does the International
7:24 coastal cleanup were thousands of volunteers pick up debris items and they
7:28 record data and you're looking right now at the top 10 most frequently found
7:34 debris items
7:35 this was collected last year by nearly 800,000 volunteers worldwide notice
7:40 number one cigarette butts
7:42 almost everything on the list after cigarette butts have to do with what we
7:46 eat and what we drink
7:48 so a lot of that's coming from inland however about 20 or so percent comes
7:53 from the marine environment mostly we're talking about things that go fishing
7:58 that's crab pots lobster pots things that are designed to capture animals and
8:04 so when they become derelict or abandoned in the ocean in the coastal
8:09 environments they can be very very deadly to the animals and the wildlife
8:13 that live there
8:14 right right i think we were diving in the Florida Keys just the other day and
8:18 you know the the season for lobstering what had been over for two months and we
8:22 found one on the bottom that was still goes fishing and had like eight lobster
8:26 still in it so easy craving it's no longer attached to its float:right still
8:31 catching and killing animals and then the animal that it get in the trap
8:34 become bait for the next right animals come along right
8:38 so Amy I'm going to ask you a couple Tuffy's back
8:42 so where is all this stuff end up and basically how much I mean can you give
8:48 me a figure like poundage or weight of how much marine debris end up in the
8:52 ocean
8:52 deriving that kind of exact statistic is very difficult for a number of reasons
8:57 but perhaps the largest one is just the vastness of the ocean right it's a huge
9:02 water body and so if you want to try to derive some statistics about how much is
9:06 in the action you have to make sure that your sampling all the different oceanic
9:09 compartments and so when debris finds its way to the coast
9:13 it can become stranded on the shoreline so that's a compartment
9:17 it can find its way into the nearshore surface waters and eventually out to the
9:20 open ocean surface water so it can be on the surface it can possibly sink and
9:25 become vertically distributed in the the water column
9:29 it can completely think to the sea floor right and be laying on the bottom both
9:34 in nearshore environments and debris has been found on in deep submarine canyons
9:38 in the ocean
9:39 it can become buried when it's on the sea floor and also animals take up the
9:44 debris and so in order to try to figure out how much is out there you would have
9:49 to effectively and accurately sample all those different compartments which is a
9:52 very very difficult task
9:54 um what we do know though is study came out last year by researchers at the
9:58 University of Georgia
10:00 they looked at a hundred and ninety-two coastal countries across the globe and
10:04 looked at waste management practices and what they found was that about
10:09 on average eight million metric tons of mismanage plastic waste actually ends up
10:14 in the ocean and out of those a hundred and ninety two countries there were a
10:19 top 20 which contributed to eighty-three percent of that eight million metric
10:23 tons so we have numbers like that where we know how much is entering the ocean
10:27 but once it enters it becomes distributed right again I said the ocean
10:31 is vast and so we do know that there are areas where it tends to accumulate rack
10:36 line on beaches so where vegetation comes up and get stranded is kind of a
10:41 hot spot for marine debris if you will and then also in the open ocean areas
10:45 where currents converge on one another are natural areas of debris accumulation
10:49 and also everyone is probably heard of the North Pacific Garbage Patch well the
10:54 reason
10:55 that debris is accumulating there is because there's an oceanic gyre there
10:59 and what a gyre is a system of rotating currents so they can be clockwise or
11:04 counterclockwise depending on which hemisphere in but think of them as a
11:07 giant expansive slow-moving whirlpool if you will right so they're rotating like
11:12 this and what happens in a whirlpool things get drawn into the middle so they
11:16 tend to be areas of accumulation of debris on
11:19 but even though debris accumulates there you can't just go out and encounter
11:23 sample it or collect it because there tend to be very small particles in the
11:29 gyre so the larger plastic items can break down through UV radiation hitting
11:35 the particles some bacterial action and so a lot of the materials that are in
11:40 those generals are very tiny like this and it's difficult to sample this kind
11:44 of material when it's so small
11:46 the other problem is that the jurors move it so they're slowly rotating but
11:52 depending on wind patterns and the temperature of the water the gyres can
11:55 actually shift within a water body and they can shift as much as a thousand
11:59 miles north or south depending on conditions and so on
12:05 I think I made a good point to indicate that it's not having it you can just go
12:08 with a dip net and then quantify how much is out there
12:11 unfortunately yeah he's shaking your head fortunately
12:14 oh ok well Katie I mean what are the impacts mean all this stuff in the ocean
12:20 and the environment can't be good
12:22 so what are some of the impacts that that are found out there
12:25 the most famous impacts are those on wild animals
12:29 seabirds dolphins sea turtles even whales have been documented to eat
12:34 they ingest the plastic and trash mistaking it for food especially plastic
12:38 bags can look a great deal like a jellyfish and jellyfish are the favorite
12:42 food of many sea turtle species of so ingestion
12:46 but by wildlife is a big issue another big impact is entanglement animals that
12:51 become entangled in nets or fishing line or the ribbons on balloons are usually
12:57 plastic so in addition though to the impacts on wild animals we also impact
13:03 on habitat for example of a plastic bag or a piece of fabric even on a coral
13:08 reef can destroy and kill the living coral
13:12 there are also impacts on human safety and you don't want to be on a boat
13:16 get your prop caught up in a fishing net and burn out your engine so you've got
13:20 safety issues there right
13:23 there's also food chain issues right now there's a concern that some of the
13:27 animals that form the base of the food chain in the oceans like plankton so
13:32 plankton smaller juvenile fish when they ingest marine debris typically smaller
13:36 plastic particles like I indicated earlier larger fish eat the smaller fish
13:40 an even larger fish eat those fish so what we really don't have a good handle
13:44 on right now is how those effects translate up the food chain and then
13:48 eventually to us because there are some species or plastics have been documented
13:52 from their guts and then their species that we eat
13:55 the other concern is that there could be population-level effects for the species
14:00 that do in jest marine debris so not only does it impact individual organisms
14:05 in terms of their biology or their physiology but it can have impacts in
14:09 the next generation so a study came out earlier this year looking at oysters and
14:14 so they found that oysters didn't just tiny micro plastic particles microbeads
14:18 what they found was that it affected the aspects of the reproductive system of
14:23 those oysters so sperm or less motile eggs were smaller
14:28 there weren't as many eggs and also in the next generation of oysters those
14:32 oysters were smaller
14:33 so we're starting to get indication that yes there can be individual level
14:37 impacts but possibly we could be talking about impacts up the hierarchy at the
14:42 population level
14:43 so essentially we are ingesting the plastic that can kind of scary to think
14:48 sir
14:50 so you work for noah and obviously this is such a large problem that that no one
14:57 Congress that we need to create a program
15:00 so can you tell us a little bit about Noah's marine debris program for I do so
15:03 I love to
15:04 so the program is actually established through an act of congress the marine
15:08 debris act in 2006 so this year is our ten-year anniversary which is very
15:12 exciting and the act was real
15:14 rise in 2012 and so what the active is it instituted the program and provided a
15:19 number of mandates that we were to operate under or a number of activities
15:23 that we were supposed to coordinate and and and and handle and so from those
15:28 mandates our program actually developed five pillars coordination emergency
15:33 response prevention through education and outreach removal and research and so
15:39 coordination is a big one we have nine regional coordinators across the United
15:43 States alaska and hawaii and they serve as our eyes and ears on the ground for
15:48 the program because we're here in washington DC at headquarters
15:51 but they also serve as a focal point for folks in that region that are working on
15:55 marine debris issues so they know who they can contact if they have questions
15:58 and they can get people to network that are working on similar issues and things
16:02 of that nature for emergency response in the last 10 years we've actually help to
16:07 respond to four different events the american samoa tsunami the japanese
16:11 tsunami and then hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and so we assist states or
16:16 territories that are impacted by those events and trying to get a handle on
16:21 what washed up
16:23 how much of it where it came from and then prevention remove one research and
16:27 so each year we hold grant competitions for prevention and removal projects and
16:34 so removal projects might include these are larger ticket removal larger ticket
16:39 items so this might be a project where a community has a derelict vessel in there
16:43 harbor and they just been wanting to get rid of it they just haven't had the
16:46 means to do so and then the prevention grants seek to a fun project looking at
16:52 education and outreach so how can we teach folks about marine debris and how
16:56 it can be prevented and so this might be someone developing a curriculum for
17:00 school to teach students
17:02 it could be a community that wants to put up signage because their community
17:05 is on a water body and they want to make people aware of what marine debris is
17:09 and and how we can combat it
17:10 and then lastly research so withheld grant competitions for research in the
17:15 past we also fund research through other mechanisms but looking at several
17:18 different aspects of the marine debris issue source
17:21 how much how its distributed how it moves through the environment
17:25 and how it impacts animal this Katie was talking about
17:28 and so again our ten-year anniversary we're really excited about all our
17:31 accomplishments
17:33 you can check us out on marine debris . know . go to learn more
17:36 yeah well I know that sanctuaries has received quite a few of those amazing
17:40 grants to go out each year and bring up that either derelict fishing gear or
17:45 just pounds of trash and it
17:48 it really is amazing that the marine debris program does these grants because
17:52 it helps us to to clean up and make somewhat of an impact anyway so Katie
17:59 tell me a little bit more about the clean Virginia waterways program and
18:03 what you do all right well for 22 years clean Virginia waterways has led the
18:07 international coastal cleanup in the state of Virginia
18:10 we've our volunteers of removed more than 3 million pounds of trash from
18:15 Virginia streams rivers and beaches
18:17 they also collect data because it is part of the international coastal
18:21 cleanup we've also done some groundbreaking research our first big
18:25 research project was on cigarette butts which is the number one source of
18:29 plastic that people don't understand that those filters are made of cellulose
18:33 acetate
18:34 we've also recently been working on research about balloon releases balloons
18:39 are very unique source of marine debris
18:42 it's one of the few things that people purchase they go outside with the intent
18:46 of releasing it into the environment and i think most people have no idea or
18:52 don't think about how one hundred percent of those balloons will return to
18:56 Earth or the ocean and we find hundreds and hundreds on the ocean beaches of
19:01 Virginia
19:02 we also recently with our partners the Virginia coastal zone management program
19:07 and Noah wrote the Virginia marine debris reduction plants so Virginia is
19:13 one of the very few states in the United States that has a plan to deal with
19:18 marine debris and reduce it over the next 10
19:21 yours well we actually have a question from our live chat you can chat your
19:25 questions in and we will answer in your life which we're going to do right now
19:30 so our question is how can civilians get involved in the cleanup
19:33 oh boy getting involved and clean up there in first of all the International
19:37 coastal cleanup
19:38 you can learn about it through Ocean Conservancy and they will tell you where
19:42 in your state of who to contact
19:45 wherever you live not just in your state is international but people can also get
19:49 involved by prevention prevention is one of the biggest solutions to marine
19:53 debris cleanup SAR great data collection very important but prevention by the 3
19:59 r's reduce the amount of trash you're producing everyday SE nota straws reuse
20:06 things reusable shopping bags coffee mugs things like that
20:10 recycle of course whatever trash you do end up producing but yes it's very
20:16 preventable whether you're in fourth grade or you're a country i mean there's
20:20 so much we can do with education legislation and innovation and that you
20:26 just wanted to share one little thing when the Virginia Institute of Marine
20:30 Sciences worked on a panel to put on crab pots and this panel is made up of
20:37 readily biodegradable plastic so if a crab pot gets severed from its float and
20:42 it's down there in the Chesapeake Bay or coastal waters after a while this panel
20:47 will biodegrade in any animal that's captured can come out
20:50 well the scientist who created this said well let's do that with shotgun wads
20:54 shotgun
20:55 if you're a hunter and you're off shooting there's a piece of plastic that
20:59 separates the powder from the shot made out of plastic
21:03 unruh treatable once the shotguns been shot
21:06 so they are gearing up to make available commercially these biodegradable odds
21:12 for shock and so it's just a sample of innovation right to solve the problem
21:18 can I see on facebook or something the other day there is that a beer company
21:21 because because that's always the this six-pack rain and that's what you always
21:26 see like around turtles or whatever but there's actually a beer company that now
21:30 they're making edible rings like it
21:32 turtles can actually eat the ether rate I think it's genius like we all need to
21:37 move forward and come up with these innovative ideas to prevent this from
21:41 happening
21:42 so what are some of the solutions that your organizations are working on to
21:48 combat marine debris
21:50 I think Katie touched on several of those but I didn't want to make kind of
21:53 a plug for her
21:55 our marine debris monitoring and assessment project so again if you go to
21:58 our website it's under the research header and so this was a project that
22:02 was initiated as a result of the japan Tsunami and 2011 that i mentioned before
22:06 and our partners were really interested our partners on the west coast were
22:10 interested in determining what kind of debris was on the shorelines all ready
22:13 to serve as a baseline before the potential influx of debris from the
22:18 japan Tsunami and so our staff developed some rapid assessment protocols so folks
22:23 would go out on their shorelines on the west coast of the US and do some random
22:27 recounts and get a handle on you know what was out there and so that project
22:31 has been around for for a while now and just at the beginning this month we
22:35 launched an online tool box for that project that's called to get started
22:39 toolbox and so it's kind of a one-stop shop online for folks who participate in
22:44 the monitoring project as Katie group does where they can find all the tools
22:49 that they need to get started if they're not yet a partner or to continue being a
22:52 partner things like all the data sheets can be found there in the field manual
22:57 and a photo field guide folks sometimes are not sure what to call a piece of
23:01 debris when they find it so there's a nice handy field guide they can look at
23:04 there's a video tutorial for folks who are interested in getting involved in
23:07 the project so they can watch the tutorial and figure out what exactly is
23:11 involved how do we actually monitor on the beach on
23:14 yeah so I would encourage folks to get involved if you want
23:17 don't want to take on something as large as being an official part of the
23:20 monitoring project just participating in in beach cleanups in your area or even
23:25 if you don't live on the coast line participating in a clean up wherever you
23:28 live because as we've you know it's been a theme in this discussion it can end up
23:32 in the ocean and often times it does right and just looking back at that top
23:36 10 list that collected by the International coastal cleanup volunteers
23:40 tells you a lot of what we could do we can say no two straws for example you
23:45 know most people really don't absolutely need a straw smokers can use pocket
23:50 ashtrays or they're also a strange that you can buy for your car since i don't
23:55 have ashtrays built into them anymore
23:57 i mean if if smokers stop littering if people who eat and drink
24:01 stop littering or if they go to reusable water bottles and reusable shopping bags
24:07 so this top 10 list gives us a lot of answer right right so again let's show
24:12 that that reusable water bottle
24:15 this one we can go here first over this
24:18 this verse this there we go if your reusable the plastic use reusable and if
24:26 you have to use single-use disposable make sure you get it recycled right
24:30 right
24:31 recycle recycle recycle I think it's important we talk about recycling to to
24:35 make sure you understand the recycling policies in your area because they vary
24:39 they vary across stage at a very across communities within States so really find
24:44 out what is and is not recyclable in in your community and so that you know
24:47 because it can be a problem for the recycling industry when things are mixed
24:51 commingled the Sun can be recycling some can so it does create problems for that
24:56 industry so so knowing knowing the rules and regulations in your area is really
25:01 important for example important you know such a large problem but so completely
25:05 preventable
25:06 absolutely so completely confident we can solve it right reduce reuse recycle
25:10 thanks ladies your money for joining me they and discussing this incredibly
25:14 important topic
25:15 you can learn more about knows marine debris program at marine debris . Noah .
25:19 gov and about the clean Virginia waterways program at longwood dot edu /
25:24 clean VA at 11:15 a.m. child will continue discussing this issue with a
25:30 panel on turning trash into cash
25:32 innovation and industry leadership will be back with Capitol Hill ocean talk at
25:36 twelve-fifteen with a panel on ocean acidification
25:40 but before we go I want to extend a special thank you to our presenting
25:43 sponsors the national oceanic and atmospheric administration the US
25:46 Department of the Interior and the walton family foundation the co-host of
25:50 chow
25:51 the Campbell foundation
25:52 the Gordon Betty Moore Foundation and all the sponsors
25:55 because without their support the success and accessibility of child would
25:59 not be possible
26:00 thanks so much for watching and I'll see you right back here at 12:15

Jenna Malek: Good afternoon everybody, thank you so much for joining us for the Marine Debris Program communications webinar series. Just a quick introduction for those of you that might not be super familiar with the NOAA Marine Debris Program. We are in NOAA”s Office of Response and Restoration and our mission is to investigate and prevent the diverse effect so of marine debris. To fulfill this mission, we have 5 pillars which include: regional coordination, emergency response, research, prevention, and removal which we are going to be focusing on today. In future webinars, we will be focusing on other things such as prevention. One of the big things that our program does is that we give out grants to different partners in order to do things such as removal and prevention, and since 2006 when the program started, with our partners, we have removed over 5500 tons of debris from the coastlines of the United States and the Great Lakes. Today we’re going to focus on a few of the current removal grants that we have, and these are all really interesting because they revolve around the removal of derelict crab pots, but they take place in different parts of the country. A really cool characteristic that these projects have is that they are all working with local fishing communities. So we are really excited for you to join us today and to hear about these projects. We will start first with Dr. Kirsten Gilardi at the University of California Davis in the School of Veterinary Medicine. Kirsten take it away!
Kirsten: Thanks! Happy to be here with all of you spread out all over the country and maybe even in other parts of the world. Thanks for organizing. My name is Kirsten Gilardi, I am the co-director of the Wildlife Health Center at the UC Davis School of Medicine in CA and am presenting today on behalf of my staff person Jennifer Renzullo as well. So we’re going to talk about this project for which we currently have NOAA MDP funding for implementation.
(next slide)
That’s a photo of Jen Ren, my colleague. We launched the California lost fishing gear recovery gear recovery project well over 10 years ago, July 2005, with some initial funding form the California Ocean Protection Council. We modeled our program very closely on the derelict fishing gear recovery programs that were underway at the time in Washington state and Hawaii and the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. To date, overall, our project have recovered more than 120 tons of fishing gear and debris and that has been comprised of many hundreds of nets and traps and pots, as well as millions of feet of monofilament fishing line. As we’ve gone through this project, as I’m sure we’ll hear from the other projects, we’ve documented many entanglements, well over 1000 entanglements and entrapments including marine mammals and sea birds, sharks, fish, live and dead, and of course a lot of lobsters, Dungeness crabs, other crab species, other invertebrates.
(next slide)
Our first several years, we did most of our work in the Southern California Bight. Our grants were fairly geographically specific. We worked very closely with urchin harvesters as our contractors and they essentially did search and collection underwater for derelict fishing gear, both for nets and also lobster gear.
(next slide)
That was keeping us plenty busy for quite a while and then we started receiving calls as our project became well known in the state, we were receiving calls from fishermen on the north coast of California just talking about what they perceived to be a really growing problem with derelict Dungeness crab gear. This is a photo just to show you how big and harsh the ocean can get. Those aren’t crab pots, those are boats. But basically, ocean conditions on the north coast are pretty severe, there is a lot of boat traffic, kelp and the combination of those factors means that everybody in the fleet loses gear and there was too much of that accumulating as far as the fishermen and other ocean users were concerned.
(next slide)
We first received funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) through their fishing for energy program in the summer and fall of 2015 and launched this program in partnership with the Humboldt Fisherman’s Marketing Association (HFMA). The HFMA themselves selected 3 boats to serve as the primary crews in the field recovering gear and the HFMA members themselves agreed that those fisherman would be paid $50/trap that they pulled and $75 per pumped trap. They would also have their fuel costs reimbursed and then HFMA, the gear that they bought from the fishermen, the derelict gear, would then be sold back to original owners, for the same price.
(next slide)
So the result of that pilot effort was that the three different fisherman spent 20 days on the water and ended up recovering 666 lost and abandoned Dungeness crab traps, as well as a lot of buoys and line. And that gear represented by gear lost by 65 different boats.
(next slide)
And if you look at what I call the fiscal snapshot, out grant from NFWF was $109K and we sub awarded the HFMW $50K to cover gear retrieval costs and boats and fuel, etc. HFMA, of that $50K sub award, spent about $45K to pay fishermen for retrieval and to cover some of the reimbursable costs and when the HFMA turned around and sold the retrieved traps back to the original owners, they earned $25,805 which they put into an Escrow account to support future gear recovery efforts.
(next slide)
So this program was successful enough that we started to field inquiries from other parts of the coast. There was an interest in continuing the work in the North coast, but there were parts further down the coast also interested in getting involved. So we applied for funding from the Marine Debris Program and continued our partnerships with the HMFA but then also expanded and partnered with the Commercial Fishing Association of Bodega Bay (CFABB) and this time around, having gone through the pilot effort and having had success with that, we tried some new strategies. We set just one price per trap whether pulled or pumped. We decided not to continue fuel reimbursement to the retrievers. For those retrievers who had already been working on the projects, we did not place project staff on the boat as an observer. And then the fisherman themselves handled all of the gear sales back to original owners.
(next slide)
This is kind of a dense slide, I apologize for that, but it does kind of itemize or describe the result of this NOAA funded effort. On the North coast, again partnered with HMFA in fall 2015 and 2106. We worked with a couple different crab fishermen who retrieved 326 traps in 10 days of effort. Those traps represented gear lost by 28 different permit holders and of those 326 traps, 243 were returned to owners. Only 16 were purchased and 83 traps were recycled. In the San Francisco Bay area, with HMFA brokering this effort in fall 2015, we worked with 3 new fishermen who recovered 200 traps in 6 days, this is in fall 2015. Of those 215 traps belonging to 54 different permit holders and 128 of those traps were returned to the owners, with most of those being purchased back by the original owners and 72 traps were recycled. And then this last fall, again in the San Francisco Bay area, we had our agreement set up with CFABB, working with a couple of their members, they spent just 3 days in the water and retrieved 33 traps, 4 of which were returned to owners but not purchased, and 29 were recycled. You all asked us to list or think about what were our particular successes or challenges. So just listing here, the quantity of gear retrieved, the number of crabs that were released back to the ocean, an estimation of the sea floor that was cleaned up, the numbers of fisherman involved, and this is all right here. But I wanted to focus on the challenge, the fact that our fisherman’s association partners really did not earn funds in selling gear back to original owners as had gone so well in our pilot project. And this was in part because first of all, word kind of got with the fishing community that is wasn’t requirement to pay for the gear, as well there was one effort on the north coast where a huge number of traps were retrieved for a particular fisherman who had unfortunately undergone a family tragedy and had not been able to go out and get his own pots. So this was done by one of our fishermen and the association itself decided not to charge him.
(next slide)
This was kind of how things were going when as you all know, I don’t need to tell you, there was a big up-kick in the last couple of years in the entanglements of large whales in commercial fishing gear off the U.S. West coast. These are figures pulled from NMFS report 2016 West Coast Entanglement Summary. There were 71 whales in 2016 and of those, 33 of 47 where they could identify the gear, the gear was Dungeness crab gear.
(next slide)
So this prompted the Dungeness Crab Task Force to advocate for and work with the state senator to draft Senate Bill 1287, the Whale Protection in Crab Gear Retrieval Act, which was signed by the governor last fall and basically allows the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CA DFW) to permit gear retrieval and also allows them to require that a fee be charged to permit holders for derelict traps that are recovered. They are in the process of figuring to how to set that fee at a level that allows for being able to cover the cost of the regulatory program and compensate fishermen who recover lost traps. We are currently in the process of helping the CA DFW develop a plan for implementation and the Dungeness Crab Task Force continues to coordinate Dungeness crab working group.
(next slide)
That’s it in a nutshell and I think I hit my 10 minute mark and wanted to leave time for questions, I’m very happy to field those.
Jenna: Thank you so much Kirsten, that was really interesting, really great numbers, good to see. We would like to open it up to anybody on the line ask questions.
Q: Was it determined that most of the entanglements were in derelict gear?
A: Are you talking about the large whale?
Q: Yeah.
A: No. I was just at the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission workshop on the particular topic last month. The point we all discussed is that it’s really impossible to know whether the gear the whales are getting entangled in was legally deployed in season and they got tangled in it, and of course the minute it’s on a whale, its derelict, it’s not fishing anymore. It has been difficult to tell that.
Q: But the incentive for the legislation was to allow for permitted recovery, was this prompted by the number of entanglements?
A: I can’t speak for the fishermen, but I do know that first of all, they knew it was the right thing to do because there shouldn’t be a large amount of gear being left in the water by their fishery and I think that there was concern that if they weren’t being proactive about it as a problem, that there was going to be an even higher level of scrutiny on the fishery and so first and foremost, the impetus was to do the right thing. But I think on the background being that there was also a higher level of attention now being paid to fishing gear in the ocean and how it’s impacting marine mammals. I hope that answered the question.
Q: Yeah, I just didn’t know what it was a direct correlation between…
A: It was really more the fact that with the pilot effort that proved to be effective and have so much buy-in from the fleet, that there was an opportunity to do something bigger, more permanent and sustainable.
Q: It looked the removal numbers were decreasing year on year. Is that a function of there being fewer traps on the bottom?
A: Yeah, the trouble with the state over is of course we had the domoic acid closures and significant delay in the opening of the fishery, so there was just not nearly as much gear in the water during the season as in normal years. That’s what we ascribe it to. I think there is also stepped up effort on the part of DFW, their enforcement division, so DFW was also recovering gear which was great. There is a group of fishermen down working out of Half Moon Bay that were also engaged in derelict pot recovery work and so there was some areas that we had worked in the previous year that they had also worked on. But I think that the real issue is that there was not nearly as much gear in the water during the 2015-2016 season.
Q: Thank you and I guess one follow-up, for the gear that you’re pulling up, is there any sense of how long it’s been sitting on the bottom?
A: No, we don’t. Sort of subjectively, we have a sense of whether is was gear from the previous seasons or been out there much longer, depending on how much growth there is on the buoy and the line.
Q: Is there not a year tag on each crab pot?
A: There is, but we don’t record that in our log. So, it would be good bit of information to be collecting going forward for sure.
Great, thank you.
Q: This is Jenna, real quick question. For the whale entanglements, you said you identified 31 out of 47 as Dungeness crab gear…
A: We didn’t, NOAA did, I was just taking the data from their report.
Q: I was just curious what other fisheries you have out there that might be an entanglement issue? I’m not very familiar with the California coast.
A: Well, of course these whales are showing up on our coasts, but they’re not necessarily getting entangled off the California coast. Of course we have big purse-seine fisheries and other trap fisheries, like lobster trap fisheries down in southern California. I can go to my copy of that report and see what they were saying, again, this was West Coast wide. Fishery type: Dungeness crab, gillnets, spot prawns, sable fish, Dungeness crab recreational, spiny lobster fishery were the fishery types they could identify. But by far the most were the Dungeness crab commercial fishery.
Ok, thank you.
Sure.
Any other questions?
Q: I have another question if there is some blank time to fill here.
A: Yes, we have another minute before we switch over so go ahead.
Q: Thank you. One of my challenges with the project we have is the perception of there being a bounty on these traps and the proprietary nature of the fishery. I wondered if you had encountered any of that with the crab fishery – whether they don’t try to lose the gear, but then have to pay to recover it. Just curious if there has been any challenge there. Is it seen as bounty hunt, or begrudging having to pay for their own property.
A: I have heard through the grapevine that there is a certain portion of the fleet is very concerned about us Bill 1287, because they’re concerned about being required to pay for any of their traps that are retrieved, so yes, there is a certain amount of concern and I think that is what the DFW is grappling with as they figure out how they’re going to implement it. But I think it was also the fact that there were fisherman going through the effort of doing gear retrieval and this is all happening outside of the season. When our initial model looked to be going in a good direction in terms of return on investment and making it something that would be somewhat self-sustaining, but in this last go-round, that was not the case and that was in part because there was no requirement that fisherman pay for any of their gear that was retrieved. That was part of the impetus I think behind drafting of the legislation that the Dungeness crab task force advocated for. It doesn’t mean that all crab fisherman were behind that.
Great, thank you so much! I’m going to switch over to Ladd – are you on the line?
Ladd: Thank you guys so much for having me. My name is Ladd Bayliss, I work with the North Carolina Coastal Federation. Today I was going to talk about our lost fishing gear recovery project. This project has gone on since 2014, through various sources of funding. Today, I’m going to focus on our most recent efforts in 2016-2017. But before we get there, just talk through the history briefly.
(next slide)
As I said, this project began back in 2014, with funding from NC Sea Grant and NOAA Marine Debris Program. We basically started this program as a pilot project, we felt we had a lot of concepts to prove and a short time to prove it. So we asked to begin with the basics. We wanted to prove that fishermen could pick up crab pots during the closed period. In North Carolina there is a period in the winter, January 15-Feb 7 where anything left in the water as far as pots go, they are considered illegally set and can therefore be removed. Typically, historically, this is done by marine patrol, which is kind of our marine enforcement body under the Division of Marine Fisheries, which has been efficient as far as anyone can tell, but we believe that if the state would allow agents of the state, as we would call them, i.e. commercial fisherman, to do this work, we would be able to find more pots using both groups. So, with this funding we were able to complete a successful pilot project in the first 2 years, 2014 & 2015 in one part of the state, the northeastern part of North Carolina. After this success we received another round of NOAA Marine Debris Program funding and moved into our second two year set of work.
(next slide)
In 2016, we continued funding and stuck with our pilot area in the northeast part of the state and after the cleanup that occurred in January, we had been working with some politicians in the state government and in the fall of last year, we got news that we had received $100K from the state to continue this pilot program, but on top of the past 3 cleanup seasons, we had the money to expand state-wide.
(next slide)
Before I get into the nuts and bolts of the program and how it works, this is a really good chart to show the background of this project over time. This is a chart that shows how pots, derelict crab pots, have been collected in the state since 2003. As I said before, North Carolina marine patrol is typically responsible for this collection. You can see if you look to the far right column, the total, that number has significantly declined, there’s a declining trend over the years, which is interesting to look at because it basically points to you know, less lost crab pots being in the water, which we attribute mainly to cost. Back in 2003, crab pots were $15/pot, today they are nearly $45/pot. So that increase in cost we believe has led to less fishermen simply leaving their gear out because they would not incur a large financial loss if they did that. The other important part of this that helps to delineate where our program has taken place as the cells that are yellow, they outline the years that this project has been completed. As you can see on the far left column, District 1 which is the northeastern district where the pilot project has occurred for the past four years, obviously it’s been done longer than the rest of the state, which was just competed in that is past January in 2017.
(next slide)
For this program, for the past 4 seasons, we’ve conducted it with basically two components. There is a shoreline cleanup component and then of course the water cleanup. The idea here is to essentially kickoff the project during the no-potting period once the water is closed. Before the watermen get on the water to go and look for pots, we have shoreline cleanups where we get volunteers to go to local popular areas that need cleaning up, as a way to boost the awareness and the engagement of the program outside of the group of fisherman that do the work. Next comes the water cleanup where obviously fishermen go out to retrieve the gear.
(next slide)
This past year in January, the shoreline cleanup as I said, as this project went statewide, we collected over 3.5 tons of gear just on our one-day shoreline cleanup which occurred in 3 different coastal areas in North Carolina. In one day, again, nearly 140 volunteers, which was a great kick-off to the project. As we moved into the water cleanup, we began hiring fisherman as soon as we were sure of our funding in October of last year. The whole point with this cleanup is to let the fishermen decide where their cleanup is going to take place. We obviously have general ideas of where pots are and what areas we need fisherman in and that depends on where we hire fisherman from, but the guiding principle behind this project is that we’re hiring waterman for a reason because of their natal knowledge and inherent knowledge about the waters, the way they move and how that knowledge points them to where most pots end up and can be retrieved. This obviously was an incredible scaling up compared to previous years. The fisherman worked for 2.5 weeks, we hired 72 fisherman whereas past years had been a handful of a dozen. Three districts improved form our three year pilot project of just one district with over a million acres of water covered. We pay fisherman $400/boat/day. We require two fisherman/boat. This year was, as you could see back in the graph that I showed in the beginning, we collected a significant number of pots, over 4000 pots, which is the most that has been collected in over a decade. Again, looking at 2016-2017 numbers, over 35 tons, and about half of that was recycled.
(next slide)
In addition to asking fisherman to simply look for buoyed pots left behind, we have had a side-scan sonar component with money from the NOAA Marine Debris Program, we were able to buy some of these units to give to fisherman. It has been a very interesting piece of this project, difficult in some ways which I will talk about later on. Just so you know, this is one of the technology components that we use to look for pots without buoys that were still on the bottom but not visible from the water’s surface.
(next slide – unable to see)
Another piece of technology that we use, that any of you that are involved in this type of work, if you are looking for some kind of program to help you along in data collection, this has worked really well for us. We have used the Cybertracker program working in conjunction with NC Sea Grant who initially found it. It is a free program that you install on a digital Samsung tablet and it uses the internal GPS of the device and can collect waypoints and any other data that comes from a program that you create in a very simple form and doesn’t require any cell phone signal or Wi-Fi. This program was created in the middle of Africa several years ago to employ native bushmen and give them a career essentially in tracking and translating that local knowledge. So this program has worked really well. As you can see from this map, this free program generates these maps. As you can see, each dot represents a crab pot that was retrieved. So you have great data from the beginning that is all entered and cataloged perfectly as well as tracks. You can obviously see in these different areas, the little lines between the dots is a live GPS track of where each fisherman went to find the pots. It also provides a little bit of accountability as well. As you can a see a closer view.
(next slide – unable to see)
This is the state-wide map for pots that were retrieved this year. As you can see, the previous map covered the depiction of what was found in years past. This is, as you can see, a very large scaling-up of this effort which nearly tripled the amount of pots that we were able to retrieve. Again, each yellow dot represents a crab pot and is difficult to see in areas where there are pots essentially on top of each other.
**At this point, realized that the presentation was not being broadcasted successfully. Ladd finished her presentation orally without visuals**
Question during pause: How many commercial crab fishermen are there in North Carolina?
A: Last time I looked, between 3000-4000, that’s off the top of my head. But again, those are license holders, but not every commercial license is a crabber.
Q: How many pots are they allowed to fish?
A: There aren’t any pot limits in North Carolina currently, so typically there is no requirement when you purchase a commercial license to list how many pots you fish or if you’re going to be using a gillnet or a crab pot. It is very different from other states as there are no pot limits.
Ladd: The average number of pots that were retrieved per boat per district. In the Northern part of the state there is a much greater proportion, by at least two fold, of commercial fisherman, compared to other parts of the state. Because this project has been conducted in that area for the past three years and only expanded state-wide just recently, we basically found very clearly that proportionally, the fishermen in the other two districts were collecting many more pots than our District 1 fisherman because this type of cleanup using fisherman had not occurred ever. We see that as a positive trend. Moving on to the rest of the data we collected using this program. First and foremost, the most important thing we are looking for is waypoint information, where these pots are being pulled so we can gather further information. Prevention moving forward, how we can prevent the loss from occurring. In addition to that, we collected data on the condition of the pot as well as what was inside of the pot. We had about 46% of the pots that we collected did not have any bycatch in them and the majority of crabs that were found in the pots were alive and released. This is depicted in the graphs that you can’t see. Essentially, the successes that we experienced with this project is that technology is important. We experienced that with the Cybertracker program as well as the side-scan sonar to a degree. Again, watermen have inherent knowledge of this type of work that marine patrol agents and the general public don’t have. But when we work with these groups in conjunction - waterman, marine patrol, non-profits, it seems to garner a more successful project. Also, we learned that the state is trying to continue to support this work. Our first round of $100K was not recurring and the legislature is working to make the funding recurring in this session. Some of the challenges, year after year we realize that using the side-scan sonar is difficult with the limited time that we do have. It’s a very great technology but again, but the no-potting period is a very short amount of time comparatively speaking, and the learning curve for the side-scan sonar is pretty high. So we’re trying to find ways to work through that by giving fisherman these units to work with throughout the year. Another challenge, like our first presenter outlined, how do you continually fund this project moving forward, it’s a constant question. Each area of this project is different and it’s hard to manage it moving forward across the state in such different regions. Moving forward, we’re looking at ownership over the long term and how we’re going to make sure that each fisherman continues to get paid and invest in their resource. I’m happy to take any questions right now, sorry that you could not see the rest of my presentation.
Q: Your numbers of recovery are really impressive, I’m just curious what’s the percentage of buoyed vs. unbuoyed pots? You mentioned you started using a Humminbird, which we’re going to end up talking a little bit about, most of our work has used that. Just wanted to hear a little bit more about that and how many of those pots needed to be recovered through those methods vs. buoyed pots.
A: Because of a lot of different factors, mainly weather, the middle of January in North Carolina is often challenging, which makes the use of side-scan sonar difficult. We definitely, by and large, collected more pots with just looking for buoys. The side-scan did not retrieve a large number of pots this year. I can go back and get the number, but it was a handful and we’re using Garmin units this year.
Q: What is the typical depth that you are working in?
A: Up in the northeast, we’re averaging 11 ft. As we move farther south, it’s much shallower, so it’s not a lot of water, but a lot of water movement, if that makes sense.
Jenna: Ladd, thank you so much, we really appreciate it. I’m sorry about the technical difficulties again. Maybe there is a way we can get some of your figures out to the folks that were with us today. We’re going to move on to our last presentation. I’m going to mute the conference. We’re very excited to hear from Dr. Mark Sullivan and Steve Evert from Stockton University about their crab pot removal in New Jersey.
Mark: Great, thanks Jenna. Before we get started, I just wanted to acknowledge the other co-principal investigators that were involved in this project. Of course our commercial crabber partners that we’ve been working with over the last 5-6 years, Stockton University Marine Field Station support, dozens and dozens of undergraduate students have been involved in this project over the last couple of years, and then of course we’d like to acknowledge the generous support from the NOAA Marine Debris Removal Program.
(next slide)
So I think most folks are probably familiar with some of the larger derelict fishing gear projects that have been completed in areas like Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, but sometimes crab pot loss goes undocumented or a little bit underappreciated in smaller estuary systems. Some of the coastal bays that we’ve been working with in southern New Jersey are quite shallow and have a complicated mix of sediment types. Some of these are often muddy or very soft and it’s difficult to pluck some of these pieces of fishing gear out of this sediment type. Most of this loss occurs where recreational boating intersects with commercial and/or recreational crabbing activities. One of the big benefits of this project has been partnering with the commercial crabbing industry. At this point, we’ve recovered upwards of 2200 pots as part of this project.
(next slide)
All of our projects have the same set of objectives so I’ll go through these quickly. Objective 1 is to identify ghost pots with a scientific grade side-scan sonar, map the hot spots that result from that survey, and then create waypoint files that can be transitioned over to our commercial crabber partners. All of our partners are trained on low-cost sonar units, i.e. Humminbirds and other similar systems. And all of our crabber partners are working from their own small vessels, so they tend to be less than 28 feet and they typically don’t have larger A-frames and somewhat limited hauling capacity. Hopefully, in Objective 2, recover ghost pots, identify associated bycatch species, and then recycle/reuse fishable pots and hopefully put some of these pots back in the system for our commercial partners. Objective 3 revolves around constantly trying to maximize the efficiency of our projects, so find ways that we can recover more pots from the water and less time looking for pots. And then the final component of this is educating boaters, recreational and commercial crabbers, as to the various issues surrounding derelict fishing gear and really trying to break the cycle of gear loss so that 5-10 years down the road we don’t have to repeat these recovery efforts again.
(next slide)
Any folks out there that are interested in setting up a similar recovery type project in their own shallow estuary system, we have a couple of steps that we want to share with folks. One is that you have to have a good idea of where the loss is occurring and this can be either commercial or recreational crab pots, but for the most part, most of the loss is occurring around well-traveled waterways, docks, marinas, water-front restaurants, and things of that nature.
(next slide)
But you just can’t go by your intuition so typically you need to do a scientific-grade side-scan sonar survey. This gives you a little bit more confidence in your IDs so that when your commercial crabbers are going out on their recovery efforts, they are targeting actual pots rather than natural debris that might be on the bottom. You always want to have the best position data available so that your commercial crabber partners aren’t spending a lot time looking for the pots. You want to send them out to a waypoint and minimize the amount of time they are spending actually recovering the pots.
(next slide)
Step 3, transfer the waypoints to the low-cost sonar units, Humminbirds, etc.
(next slide)
And of course you have to train your recovery team and preferably you want to work with industry partners. We found this to be a really rewarding aspect of the project over the last 5-7 years. Training involves getting folks familiar with the different pieces of equipment, having preset instruments, limiting the options that are available, spending a good amount of time understanding the imagery so that the commercial partners are able definitively ID crab pots as opposed to some other item that might be on the bottom. And then you also want to end this with on the water training so that everyone gets the sense of issues related to currents and tides and how those can impact recovery efforts.
(next slide)
We’ve really tried to reduce the amount of time that our commercial crabber partners are recording data in the field so anything that you can do to speed up the recovery process and limit the data collection is beneficial. One of the things that we’ve done is we streamlined this to the point where when folks are out in the field, they are taking a photo of the crab pot, a photo of the bycatch and then additional data is typically collected down the road on land, typically by undergraduate students that are involved in the project.
(next slide)
Step 5 is to process your recovered crab pots. We have a crab pot processing day every spring where our commercial partners, scientists, colleagues, volunteers, undergraduate students, get together, disassemble pots that are not going to be put back into the fishery and set aside those pots that are deemed fishable. There’s a nice image at the bottom here of pots that were recovered as part of this effort and are now being deployed back into the fishery with a considerable amount of cost savings involved for the commercial community.
(next slide)
What I’d like to do now is turn things over to Steve Evert and Steve’s going to really get into the nitty gritty about the on the water recovery efforts.
Steve: Thank you Mark and thanks everybody for being with us today, and for Jenna and everybody at NOAA for putting this together.
The derelict gear that we’re talking about here is primarily unbuoyed pots, most of what we’re talking about does have to do with the sonar work, which does present quite a few challenges. But once you get past those challenges, there are some benefits that we’re beginning to realize for the commercial fishermen, which I’ll hit on at the end.
(next slide)
Pretty much all recovery efforts have some common needs. One is that you see, I’d say a strong target, when we’re talking acoustically, we want to be certain that it is a crab pot or a piece of fishing gear, not a piece of sod bank or piece of marsh. There are opportunities in some systems, and I’m sure you’ve seen it in North Carolina and in some of the other states in smaller estuaries, where you do have opportunities with the low tides, blow out tides in the winter, to do some visual surveys, to do some visual recovery of unbuoyed pots that go dry or bare on a low tide. Most of our work has been underwater through sonar recovery. See a target, mark a target. We use a buoy to mark our targets when necessary, and then recover the target. So all of our projects have these common needs.
(next slide)
These are some of the tools that we’ve ended up with. There’s been some modifications over the years for the type of work that we’re doing, for the type of loss that we have in our system. There’s no more valuable tool than the low-cost sonar. We use Humminbird, North Carolina I think you said you’re using Garmin, they’re getting pretty common in the recreational fishing community and they can be pretty valuable instruments. A buoy to mark the target. So when we see a target we will mark it with a buoy. Not much longer line than the water depth you’re working in, and by the way, we’re working in generally 3-4 to maybe 10 ft of water, something like that in most of our areas. Single grapple hooks, literally just a grapple hook, we do bend the hook a little bit vertical than what you get out of the box, with a long amount of line. And then we also use daisy chains of hooks that are rigged through the line. If anybody ends up with questions about this gear, we can talk about it later. We’re more than happy to take calls after today.
(next slide)
See the buoy, whether it’s usually acoustically, mark it with a buoy, so if you see a target at say 10 ft to your starboard side, yell 10 ft or if you see it yourself, throw a buoy. Now you have a visual marker on the surface of the water that is reasonably close to your known target. Some of our partners prefer to use the longer daisy chain method where they’ll circle that buoy. When we hook a pot, usually it just about stops the boat and I’ll talk more about that. Most of our pots are at least in the sediment a few inches if not more. And we’ve also come to start to throw individual grapples. Sometimes we can do that without buoying, especially in dense areas.
(next slide)
So this kind of leads to this, see it and snag it, type of scenario. Best case scenario for a good day of recovery, works especially well in dense areas. Works well with high quality survey data from earlier efforts. Basically we have two grapple hooks ready at the back of the boat, see in the bottom right picture, a grapple hanging there on the transom that has probably 40 feet of line on it. Depending on how many people you’re working with or what you’re boat set-up is, basically you have people ready to throw those grapples. If you are fortunate enough to literally split the pot, which that top left image is just that, where the transducer went directly over top of the target, and you saw it on both sides, you can literally just throw that grapple right off the back and I’d say 7/10 times you’d get it on your first attempt. If its a few feet to the right like the lower image, that is also attainable by just tossing the grapple in that general direction. And I added a little note here, this year in particular we started using a bow mounted transducer, so we took the transducer from a Humminbird, made a basically fold-up wooden, you could do it out of aluminum, whatever, mount that went off of the bow. The advantage of that in doing sonar recovery is that it gives you that 20 ft lead time. So if you’re working out of a 20 ft center consul for instance and you have a bow mounted transducer and you split that pot or come close to splitting that pot, you’re just dropping your grapple hooks off the back and maybe making a little adjustment with the boat or what have you, and that has worked pretty well for us. If anybody wants more information about that, again we’re happy to talk a little bit more after today’s conference, individually.
(next slide)
If we had to sum up some of the keys to our success in recovering these pots using sonar, technique 1 is that we feel it is very important to conduct broad, professional grade side-scan sonar surveys. We do that as the science-side, we do that type of work at Stockton. We’ll spend several days surveying coastal bays and putting together the waypoints and then we do our recoveries at a later date. This helps identify hot spots. If you’re sending commercial partners being paid $300-400 a day to an area that doesn’t have fairly dense pots, they’re going to be looking for an awful long time with a little hummingbird sonar to find a pot. You’ve got to get them good waypoint information to increase that efficiency. Understanding the recovery challenges of some systems. I don’t know if they see this in North Carolina, I suspect they might, but one of the things that we have in these soft sediment systems is our pots are literally in the mud, sometimes a few inches, sometimes half of a pot has vibrated into the soft sediment through storm events. This is especially true of the older legacy pots. Those do not just come right out of the bottom. We’re using small boats, you need to use low speed. If you don’t use these methods, you’re going to end up just ripping through, getting frustrated, not getting the whole pot out of the water. It makes it more difficult, but to truly get the gear out of the water, it’s what needs to be done. That picture in the middle is one of our fisherman towing a pot in a circle to get the sometimes hundred pounds of mud out of the pot before being able to physically bring it on the boat. Now that’s not every pot, but it can be quite a few so it’s important to know that. And as both of the other projects have mentioned, and Mark mentioned earlier, partnering with the commercial community is extremely beneficial. These guys and girls know where the areas of loss likely are, they know what they’re doing on the bay, obviously. We train them on how to use the sonars, we hire them to work on our project. We on our most recent project were paying $350/day for this type of work. But probably one of the best things that has come out of our project and come out of using the sonars is our trained partners, maybe they put in 15-20 days each on the project, they know how to use that Humminbird sonar and as wary of it as they are on Day 1, they love it now because during the season, they’re taking the time to recover probably 80, attempting to recover any of their lost pots and in most cases, recovering about 80% of their lost pots during the season. We believe that is the most effective way 1) to help commercial fisherman by them not losing gear and not losing money, and 2) to break the cycle of lost gear in systems like this. This really hinges on the Humminbird aspect of our work in particular.
(next slide)
Just a couple of things we’ve been able transfer some of these programs to other funded projects in the area. This is just a quick bullet list of some of the benefits. We’ve had two funding cycles through NOAA, kind of a timeline of how we got into all of this. We benefited a lot from the Chesapeake group, Kirk Havens and others. When we first started, we developed a lot of our own techniques, made a lot of partnerships with the fishermen, and there’s some of the numbers. We put about over $60K worth of direct pay or returned gear into relatively small commercial fishing community in south New Jersey, over 2000 pots, other projects, undergraduate research, all sorts of good things have come of this program to date.
(next slide)
This is another thing that’s come from our first project and is being worked on by another group now as well, Jacques Cousteau Reserve, and that’s the WeCrab NJ website. I encourage you to go check that website out, we have some recovery resources on there, videos from our earlier efforts, and that website is actually set to be updated quite a bit in the next little bit and there will be even more recovery resources on that website. Feel free please to reach out to Mark and I if you have questions about working in these types of environments and certainly check out WeCrab and thank you NOAA for today and for the funding. With that, we’ll take any questions.
Jenna: Does anybody have questions for Mark and Steve? I will say that they just had a very successful Earth Day pot processing day where they went through about 600 pots and were able to recycle about 50-55 of them and got a lot students and everything involved. Really great, good successful event. If there are no questions right now, I want to thank all of our presenters for joining us today and we really appreciate you taking the time to share your projects with us. We will be planning to hold another Marine Debris Program webinar probably in the fall to talk about prevention projects. Thank you all for joining, have a great afternoon.