New England NEMO (Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officials)
Educational Programs and Training
Faculty at New England Land Grant Universities often incorporate their research and Extension activities into the classroom. For example:
UConn regularly taps the graduate student talent
pool to expand the applied
research base for their Extension water quality programs. Each year, the
Connecticut Space Grant program
sponsors a graduate fellow to work with the
UConn Geospatial Technology Program
on projects investigating the use of remote sensing and GIS for better
landscape characterization. The 2003 Fellow looked at the
use of remote sensing for identifying areas of the invasive reed
Phragmites australis
.
Other grad students working with the NEMO program have conducted research
on such topics as the use of pervious pavements in cold climates and the use of census and land cover data in tandem to predict watershed
impervious coverage.
UNH Cooperative Extension works with university students through the
Community Environmental Outreach Program (CEOP)
by matching student teams to community requests for assistance with
environmental projects such as natural resource inventories.
URI Watershed Hydrology
course incorporates field and demonstration
labs on a variety of water quality topics including geospatial analysis of water quality risk indicators for community-based watershed management.
The CSREES integrated project with URI, UConn and ASU is creating new curricula and training opportunities for undergraduate (URI Coastal Fellows Program ) and graduate students (NSF funded IGERT PhD training program at URI) to provide insights into watershed nitrogen dynamics and understanding of the rigor required to develop accessible decision support tools for coastal decision makers. Both programs have outcome assessment structures to determine educational value for these efforts.