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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe small crowd clustered in the dirt parking lot of Jamiels Park in Warren, RI. High tide waters swirled up through the storm drain behind them, running from Belchers Cove and under the parking lot into the adjacent field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Butch Lombardi, a member of the Warren Conservation Commission says, \u201cI was here for Hurricane Carol, and this whole area was underwater. If you look at the topography of Warren, there\u2019s not much elevation anywhere \u2026 I think the Hurricane Carol flooding is probably symbolic of what\u2019s going to be normal around 2050.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lombardi was referring to the 1954 hurricane that unleashed a devastating storm surge up Narragansett Bay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cProjects like this, I think, will hopefully get people to understand that, you know, this is real. It\u2019s going to happen, and it won\u2019t happen in my lifetime, but it\u2019s going to happen in my grandkids\u2019 lifetime,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lombardi spoke to the group gathered this past fall for the Warren Resilience Walk, an event sponsored by Rhode Island Sea Grant, the University of Rhode Island Coastal Institute, and other partners. Participants compared at locations threatened by sea level rise with those developed with resilience in mind. Walk leaders talked about URI research and outreach projects taking place in Warren, including the National Science Foundation-funded \u201cRisks, Impacts, and Strategies for Coastal Communities: Advancing Convergent Science to Support Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience\u201d project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Emi Uchida, professor and chair of the Department of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics and principal investigator of URI\u2019s $1.5 million portion of the grant, said in a press release that \u201cfinding solutions to this very complex problem requires \u2026 a range of expertise\u201d to support communities in decision making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rhode Island Sea Grant coastal resilience specialist Eliza Berry, one of the co-leaders of the walk, is the outreach specialist for that project. She synthesizes the experiences and points of view of Warren residents from varying backgrounds, business owners, nonprofit organizations, and municipal leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Berry connects with groups like the East Bay Community Action Program\u2019s Warren Health Equity Zone (HEZ). The HEZ Safety and Community Resilience Work Group consists of residents engaged in conversations around flooding and community resilience. Berry worked with the group to bring URI researchers, community members, and town employees to their August meeting to weigh in on flood mitigation strategies they would like to see further evaluated through URI research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWarren and its residents are still trying to get their hands around the scope of the flooding problem along Market Street,\u201d says HEZ director Kristin Read. \u201cIt is the heart of the city\u2019s business district. Our workgroup has been trying to understand the complexities of sea level rise, wetter weather, and inadequate drainage, and how can we share knowledge about adapting to living in a flood zone. Eliza and her colleagues are committed to listening carefully to the knowledge and experience of our neighbors, which is evident in the way they have matched technical support to available resources.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Berry and Casey Tremper, also a Rhode Island Sea Grant coastal resilience specialist, are often tapped to serve as liaisons between researchers and communities. In another NSF-funded multi-institution research project, Brown University\u2019s Sol Cooperdock, research associate in Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, developed sensors that detect even slight increases in water levels and can be placed over rivers, parking lots, or roads to help identify flood-prone areas. Tremper talks to community groups about the project and the sensors to identify places that could benefit from their installation.<\/p>\n\n\n Austin Becker, URI Department of Marine Affairs professor and chair says, \u201cRhode \u201cRhode Island Sea Grant plays an essential role in bridging the research conducted at URI and Brown with community needs. Tremper and Berry understand the technical side of the research efforts around coastal resilience and help researchers understand how our work can best be tailored to address the challenges Rhode Island decision makers face in emergency management and long-term resilience planning.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rhode Island Sea Grant, one of the 34 university-based programs around the U.S. that make up the National Sea Grant College Program, supports a healthy coastal environment and economy through funding top-notch research, extension, workforce development, communications, and a legal program that is based at Roger Williams University School of Law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to coastal resilience work, other extension team members focus on fisheries and aquaculture and the blue economy\u2014that part of the economy that relies on marine resources for business and industry, research and development, energy resources, national defense, culture, or recreation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rhode Island Sea Grant also provides students with the opportunity to have hands-on experience in research, extension, communications, and policymaking.<\/p>\n\n\n One of those students was Joe Langan, who completed his Ph.D. with Graduate School of Oceanography Professor Jeremy Collie, a fisheries scientist funded by Rhode Island Sea Grant to study the decline of winter flounder in Narragansett Bay. While at URI, Langan also completed an M.S. in statistics with Associate Professor Gavino Puggioni.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe found that the population decline of winter flounder in Rhode Island was due largely to increasing juvenile mortality. We were able to identify a few different factors that appear to be involved, most having to do with climate change. Our research became part of a broader suite throughout the region that was actually used to change how the regional winter flounder stock was managed,\u201d Langan says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Langan says this opportunity gave him a chance to \u201cwork with state biologists, biologists from other states, other universities, as well as interface directly with fishermen, which I thought was also really valuable to get their perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n His research assistantship led to a National Marine Fisheries Service\/Sea Grant Population and Ecosystem Dynamics Fellowship, and from there to a staff position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), where he is currently a research fish biologist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Emily Patrolia, founder and CEO of ESP Advisors, a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm, also forged her career with Sea Grant support. Patrolia came to URI\u2019s Marine Affairs program for a Rhode Island Sea Grant-funded research assistantship with Professor Rob Thompson to study human uses of Rhode Island\u2019s coastal salt ponds through observational mapping and interviews. The goal of the project was to support state policymaking around aquaculture and mixed uses of the salt ponds.<\/p>\n\n\n Patrolia received her M.A. in marine affairs in 2016 and followed that up with a Sea Grant Knauss Fellowship, which gives highly qualified graduate students an opportunity to spend a year working in Congress or the legislative branch on federal policy issues affecting marine and coastal resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She worked for Sen. John Thune, the chair of the Commerce Committee, which oversees NOAA. She was given the opportunity to draft what she calls a \u201csmall\u201d piece of legislation on illegal fishing that eventually made its way into a larger maritime security bill and became law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After her fellowship, Patrolia worked at large firms on sustainability issues for major corporate clients, but her heart was still with the nonprofit organizations in the coastal and ocean world that couldn\u2019t afford to work with D.C.\u2019s premier lobbying agencies. This led her to start her own smaller firm, ESP Advisors, \u201cto see if I could bring some of the more sophisticated lobbying activities back to the ocean space at a more approachable price point for those groups.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n She encourages graduate students to consider Knauss Fellowships, \u201cif you want to grow and learn and change the way you think and see the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat you learn,\u201d she adds, \u201cis context.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Context is key to Sea Grant work as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe research we fund,\u201d says Rhode Island Sea Grant Director Tracey Dalton, \u201cis rigorously reviewed not only for scientific merit, but also for relevance. Our home at URI, as a Land Grant and Sea Grant university and an R1 institution, allows us to call on world-class experts to address issues from the seafood supply chain to sea level rise, and to bring them together with communities to effect real change.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been at URI for more than 50 years, and we look forward to many more to come.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Monica Allard Cox The University of Rhode Island was designated one of the first four Sea Grant Colleges in the U.S., thanks to the leadership of Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell and URI\u2019s founding Oceanography Dean John A. Knauss. \u201cDr. John Knauss and Senator Claiborne Pell were visionaries who teamed up to create the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5436,"featured_media":6816,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[37,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-momentum-spring-26-featured","category-momentum-spring-25-body"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/momentum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/momentum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/momentum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/momentum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5436"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/momentum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6751"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/momentum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6820,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/momentum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6751\/revisions\/6820"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/momentum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/momentum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/momentum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/momentum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u201cRhode Island Sea Grant plays an essential role in bridging the research conducted at URI and Brown with community needs.\u201d<\/blockquote>Austin Becker<\/cite><\/div><\/section>\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/momentum\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2226\/DSC_6902_edited.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\u201cThe research we fund is rigorously reviewed not only for scientific merit, but also for relevance. Our home at URI, as a Land Grant and Sea Grant university and an R1 institution, allows us to call on world-class experts to address issues from the seafood supply chain to sea level rise, and to bring them together with communities to effect real change.\u201d<\/blockquote>Tracey Dalton<\/cite><\/div><\/section>\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/momentum\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2226\/Emily-Patrolia-Tracey-Westgate-Photography-2025-15_edited.jpg\")
Founder and CEO of ESP Advisors<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n