Save the Sound Dispatch

By Jamie Vaudrey, UConn; Kevin O’Brien, CT DEEP; and Anthony Allen, Save the Sound On January 14, 2022, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that a network of state-owned properties in southeastern Connecticut and portions of the surrounding waters was designated as the nation’s 30th National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR). The NERR System is a network of coastal sites across the country designated to protect and study estuarine systems. Established through the Coastal Zone Management…

By Anthony Allen, Save the Sound Assistant Director of Ecological Restoration After the exceptional challenges of the annual Connecticut Coastal Cleanup in 2020, a record-breaking 2021 cleanup season brought a welcome dose of energy and reason for hope. The statewide cleanup effort, coordinated by Save the Sound and led by volunteers each year since 2002, held a limited number of in-person events and pivoted to a hybrid model that included “virtual” cleanups in 2020. The volunteers came…

Five Years of the Unified Water Study By Peter Linderoth, Director of Water Quality, Save the Sound The completion of the 2021 Unified Water Study season marks the fifth anniversary of this Long Island Sound-wide water quality monitoring program and the collaboration continues to grow! Launched by Save the Sound in 2017, the Unified Water Study (UWS) is a groundbreaking water quality monitoring program developed so groups around the Sound can collect comparable data on the environmental…

By Louise Harrison If names like moss animal and dog whelk sound counterintuitive, or if blood ark, skeleton shrimp, and spider crab seem mildly disturbing, would you be surprised they belong to creatures found around Plum Island, New York, home of a federal animal disease laboratory? Would you be relieved to know they’re perfectly normal marine animals in a healthy ecosystem in Eastern Long Island Sound? We know these and many other species live in Plum Island’s…

By Siddarth Motwani, LI Sound program assistance, and Laura McMillan, director of communications Tropical Storm Elsa made landfall in the early hours of Friday, July 9, 2021 dropping up to 5 inches of rain on New York and Connecticut in less than 12 hours. It was the earliest named hurricane on record, but the season was just getting started: a few weeks later, Henri came ashore at the Connecticut-Rhode Island line with blustery winds and heavy rains….

By Javier Roman-Nieves, ecological communications specialist At the time of this writing, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the world’s leading authority on climate science—had just issued its latest report on our ongoing climate catastrophe. More than eight years in the making and based on the peer-reviewed work of hundreds of researchers around the world, the report’s findings are the direst yet. The 2015 Paris Agreement goal of stopping temperatures from rising more than 1.5° C, or between…

Data is the key to understanding how we are doing at protecting our coastal waters. Thanks to the ongoing weekly water quality monitoring at our beaches, Save the Sound can review a deep dataset and build an understanding of water conditions and pollution sources and drivers. The biggest take-away from our beach data analysis is always how hyper local water pollution impacts are. The mapped grades show how beaches with “A” water quality can be situated within…

By Bill Lucey, Long Island Soundkeeper at Save the Sound and member of the Long Island Sound Blue Plan Advisory Council It happened at 12:21a.m. May 14, 2021. After twenty years of discussing the need for a plan that provides data and pathways to protect Long Island Sound from haphazard development while supporting recreation, aquaculture, shipping, and other uses, the Long Island Sound Blue Plan unanimously passed both chambers of the Connecticut General Assembly. But before that…

By Martin Hain, Communications Specialist, Save the Sound We are so fortunate that Long Island Sound is encircled by hundreds of beautiful beaches. Millions of people visit many of these beaches each year, supporting our coastal economies and forging personal bonds with the Sound estuary. However, the sad reality is that a lot of these beaches—including many of the best—are fenced off and inaccessible because they have become privately owned. Many others are restricted to local residents…

A joint dispatch from the UConn Schultz Fish Lab and Save the Sound   The term “river herring” is commonly used to refer to two species: alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus) and blueback herring (Alosa aestivalis). Unassuming in nature, these fish are best known for their difficult yearly spring migration from saltwater to freshwater spawning grounds, a type of migration made by only 1% of all fish species. There, the females lay around 100,000 eggs each. Once hatched, juveniles…