Dear ROSA Community,

I hope that you had a good summer and are looking forward to a productive fall, as we are at ROSA. We made great progress this summer on key initiatives, including data standardization and databases that will help with research prioritization (read more below). In addition, we have been working hard on a new website, which we will be launching in the fall.

Please join us for our next advisory council meeting (details follow) at which we will be discussing a number of priority projects. Thanks to the hard work of ROSA’s dedicated volunteers, we are successfully advancing a number of projects that are central to our mission.

Save the Date: Next Advisory Council Meeting to be held October 28

The next advisory council meeting, which is open to the public, will be held on October 28 from 12-2:30 pm EST. The agenda for the meeting will be posted in early October on the advisory council page of our website; a meeting summary from the June advisory council meeting can now be found on this same page. As you know, collaboration is at the heart of ROSA’s mission, and these advisory council meetings provide us with a great opportunity to discuss and work together on critical initiatives. I hope you are able to participate in this fall’s meeting.

Database Project Highlights Research Gaps

As part of its work on the regional framework, ROSA hired contractor WSP to build and compare two databases: one that synthesizes existing research priorities and one that compiles research being undertaken by programs along the East Coast. The analysis of data in these databases highlights gaps in research that can inform future research prioritization.

The databases are currently in draft form, and the consultant is putting together an instructional manual on how to use them. The manual and databases, in a spreadsheet format, will reside on ROSA’s website when they are completed. ROSA would like to convert the databases into a more polished, searchable online database if we can secure funding to undertake this effort.

If you are interested in previewing the databases, please reach out to me at lyndie@rosascience.org.

ROSA intern Will Shoup (L) with ROSA Research Director Mike Pol and ROSA Executive Director Lyndie Hice-Dunton at the American FIsheries Society annual meeting in August.

ROSA Intern Conducts Research on Data Standards

Over the summer, ROSA’s first intern, Will Shoup, undertook research on standards for fishery data being collected to measure the potential impact of offshore wind development. Will requested data from numerous fishery research programs along the East Coast and discovered that data fields are collected inconsistently: no two entities are collecting even essential data such as date and time in the same manner. Understanding the status of data standards is helpful to ROSA, as it works to encourage standards uniformity to enable data comparison across studies.

Will also supported ROSA’s involvement in the New York State Energy and Research Development Authority (NYSERDA) State of the Science meeting, as well as the symposium that ROSA co-hosted at the American Fisheries Society annual meeting.

“This internship was a great learning opportunity for me,” says Will. “Lyndie and Mike gave me a window into the life of a scientist leading an important initiative. One of my key take-aways is the importance of building relationships, so that people with diverse interests feel comfortable coming together at a meeting like the NYSERDA State of the Science meeting.” Will came to ROSA with a keen interest in stakeholder engagement and, based on his experiences in the internship, is now exploring career paths that might allow him to work with stakeholders involved in offshore wind.

ROSA is grateful to Will for his important contributions this summer. “Will really expanded our capacity and advanced our work on data standards,” says Mike Pol, ROSA’s Research Director. “We greatly appreciated his commitment, intellectual curiosity, and initiative – and wish him the best in his future endeavors.”

Will is a master’s student at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences, and his advisor is Dr. David Rudders, a member of ROSA’s Research Advisors and an active participant in ROSA’s work.

Best Regards,

Lyndie Hice-Dunton, Ph.D.

Executive Director, ROSA

lyndie@rosascience.org