Did you catch SoMAS in the News? Here’s a few headlines featuring our students, faculty, and staff!
Congratulations to Dr. Sara Hamideh, on her NSF CAREER Award, entitled “CAREER: Affordable Versus Vacation Housing Resilience: Mechanisms that Shape Housing Vulnerability and Recovery in Coastal Communities”, in the amount $578,991, for the period 6/15/21 – 5/31/26
CAREER: Affordable Versus Vacation Housing Resilience: Mechanisms that Shape Housing Vulnerability and Recovery in Coastal Communities
Overview
The PI’s long-term career goal is to develop an interactive research, education, and outreach program to transform our understanding of the mechanisms that cause disparities in vulnerability between affordable primary housing (APH) and second homes-vacation rentals (SHVR) in United States coastal areas and create actionable knowledge in the form of new policies that can support equitable housing. In many coastal areas of the United States, affordable primary housing is shrinking, aging, and deteriorating while seasonal vacation housing is growing and improving. With the increasing frequency of coastal hazards, affordable housing is disproportionately damaged by storms, while the tourism industry, the largest employer in the marine economy, loses revenue. The research goal of this CAREER project is to transform our understanding of the mechanisms that cause disparities in vulnerability between APH and SHVR, examining three critical elements: the local tourism sector, local development policies, and disaster funds. The four areas selected for conducting this project include Galveston, TX; Long Beach Island, NJ; Naples-Immokalee-Marco Island Metropolitan Area, FL; and Sayville-Fire Island, NY. The research objectives are to (1) Measure the disparities in disaster vulnerability between SHVR and APH; (2) Identify the disparities and relationship between recovery of APH and recovery of SHVRs and the tourism industry (3) Discover the mechanisms by which local development policies, disaster funds, and the tourism sector each shape the disparities in disaster vulnerability and recovery between SHVRs and APH. I will adopt a convergence approach that focuses on the pressing problem of coastal housing vulnerability, enables integration across disciplines, and seeks to find solutions to this problem.
My educational goal builds on my long-term career goal of actionable knowledge to support equitable housing resilience by preparing students from underrepresented groups as well as students drawn from affected local communities for disaster convergence research, outreach, and policy development and guide disaster practitioners and policy makers through this research. In pursuit of this goal, the educational objectives of this CAREER are (1) developing and teaching a new service-learning studio course on coastal housing resilience (2) mentoring students in disaster research and outreach to share our findings with the broader public and policy makers (3) partnering with housing and disaster organizations to prepare and advise student researchers in translating findings of the study into actionable disaster program guidelines and policies.
Intellectual merit
Housing and disaster studies have rarely identified or explained disparities between APH and SHVR. Without this knowledge change in policy is hindered. To address such a critical gap, this CAREER project adopts a convergence approach by integrating theories and techniques from housing and disaster studies in urban planning, sociology, economics, and structural engineering to explain how development policies and funding mechanisms within the context of tourism economies create and exacerbate disparities in housing vulnerability. I emphasize the distinction between the two housing submarkets within the context of the local tourism economy to examine their interactions and consequences for housing vulnerability. In addition, this study will develop and apply a holistic multidisciplinary vulnerability metrics framework to combine physical, sociological, and economic assessment of housing vulnerability.
Broader impact
Housing serves as a foundation for the resilience of households and communities, both as a critical element of the built environment and a household’s largest financial investment. Affordable housing is essential for sustaining the coastal residents, many of whom work in the tourism sector, the largest employer in the marine economy. Generating transformative knowledge on the mechanisms that shape housing vulnerability disparities and partnering with practitioners to translate and disseminate that knowledge will support policy makers in addressing the challenges of housing vulnerability in coastal areas. Teaching and mentoring students in outreach, so they can teach others, especially those who represent the communities that are disproportionately affected by disasters, will provide skills and knowledge to empower and prepare them for working alongside community advocates and practitioners on pressing challenges of housing vulnerability in coastal areas in the face of climate change.
Congratulations to Dr. Hyemi Kim has received a new award from Chonnam National University in support of the project entitled: “Developing bias correction methods for subseasonal prediction using deep learning techniques.”, for the period 4/1/21 – 12/31/21, in the amount $40,380.
Abstract
The main purpose of this research project is to develop bias correction methods for better predict the dominant mode of subseasonal variabilities in the tropics. Both linear empirical models and deep learning approaches will be applied to subseasonal hindcast experiment outputs from both S2S and SubX, and those that will be developed during the project by the sponsor’s institute. The research team led by Hyemi Kim at Stony Brook Univ. has developed a subseasonal prediction verification metrics in the previous years, which will be applied to evaluate the prediction skill improvement and success of the newly developed methods.
We are pleased to announce that PhD Student Luis Medina Faull has been selected to receive a Presidential Dissertation Completion Fellowship, which will provide a full stipend for the 2021-22 academic year. This is the first year for President McInnis’ new initiative.
Engadget Fukushima’s nuclear meltdown hasn’t been the environmental calamity we feared
- “All life has existed — even before humans appeared on this planet — on a radioactive planet in a radioactive universe,” Dr. Nicholas Fisher, Director of the Consortium for Interdisciplinary Environmental Research at Stony Brook University, noted to News Brig. “You were born radioactive, and you are radioactive right now. I am radioactive just as much as you are. I drank radioactive water this morning for breakfast, as did you. The radioactivity in your body is all natural.” Also ran in News Brig. Yahoo Entertainment, Gamers Grade, Daily Magazine
27east/Southampton Press: Georgica Pond Management Plan Touts Success, Demands More
- The management plan drafted by the Friends of Georgica Pond and Stony Brook University researchers the group hired in 2015 says that the use of a floating tractor to remove dense growths of aquatic weeds and the regular opening of the “cut” between the pond and the ocean appear to have kept the blooms of toxic algae that plagued the pond for several years in check and argues for its continued use — which is currently under review by the town and state Department of Environmental Conservation.
Propublica: The Climate Solution Actually Adding Millions of Tons of CO2 Into the Atmosphere
- Weeks later, when CarbonPlan completed a draft, we sent it to several outside scientists for a detailed review, including Heather Lynch, Professor of Ecology & Evolution at Stony Brook University, and a member of ProPublica’s data advisory board; Dan Sanchez, who directs the Carbon Removal Laboratory at UC-Berkeley; and David Valentine, Chair of the Department of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.
Sag Harbor Express: Thousands Of Fish Dying In Local Bays; Scientists Suspect Bacteria
- “We’ve sent samples to the Stony Brook Marine Animal Disease Lab and they’re doing research on whether this is something new or something we’ve seen before,” said Jim Gilmore, director of the DEC’s Division of Marine Resources. “These bacteria can be cyclical and they’ll be prevalent and then go away for a while and then pop up again.”
Times Beacon Record: SBU’s Julie Stepanuk connects humpback habitat use, vessel strikes around LI
Newsday: LI baitfish die-off, part of a larger fish kill, is tied to bacteria
- Samples collected by the DEC and processed by Stony Brook University’s Marine Animal Disease Laboratory “confirmed the presence of Vibrio bacteria in both live and dead fish,” the DEC said in a statement to Newsday.
Smart Energy Decisions: Stony Brook University Receives $5 Million for Offshore Wind Research
- A joint partnership with developers of New York’s Sunrise Wind offshore wind farm, Ørsted, and Eversource will include a commitment of $5 million to Stony Brook University’s research and advancement of offshore wind technology through the university’s Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center (AERTC).
Newsday: A new ‘set it-and-forget it’ crop may help LI’s aqua farmers — and its bays, too
- Michael Doall, associate director for bivalve restoration at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine & Atmospheric Sciences, has been monitoring kelp beds such as McCormick’s for the past three years, and is finding encouraging signs. He called such operations “restorative farming.”
Newsday: Town, baymen at odds over shellfish restoration plan in Great South Bay
- Islip’s plan could work, said Christopher Gobler, a Stony Brook University professor who studies marine sciences. But it’s hard to tell how long it might take, he said. “There’s not a magic number because every site is different,” he said.
Seafood News.com: Long Island Aqua Farmers Look to Kelp, Seaweed for New Businesses
- It’s the end of April, just weeks before harvest, and the weight of the underwater line and the long, curled ribbons of green-brown kelp show it’s a bumper crop. Indeed, the growth is so strong that the Stony Brook University marine team that helped plant it and…
The Atlantic: The Surprise Hiding in the DNA of Pet Fish
In particular, the genetic spillover from domesticated to wild suggests that humans can end up changing wild fish without meaning to. In aquaculture where fish are bred for food, tipping the sex ratio has long been an industry obsession in order to increase the number of males or females, whichever are bigger depending on the species. But these domesticated fish can escape and breed with wild populations, thereby changing those fish too. “You’re not really returning to the wild the same genetic structure,” says David Conover, a fish biologist at Stony Brook University. What happens in fish tanks doesn’t stay in fish tanks. Also ran in MSN.
In case you missed them, here are the latest SoMAS Seminars available online:
- Why Have Hard Clam Landings Increased by 1000% in Shinnecock Bay During the Past Decade?
- Host Pathogen Interactions in a Changing Ocean: From Disease Emergence to Solutions?
- Waste on Wednesdays – Transportation of Waste
- Threats of accelerated sea level rise to coastal wetlands & strategies to build resilience
