The Center for Student Coastal Research (CSCR), is the regional leader in actively engaging students in authentic, community-based, hands-on, environmental research. We enable students to build an understanding of our coastal ecosystem that inspires them to stewardship of our community resources. At the forefront of environmental education, we encourage independent thinking and innovation as we nurture future leaders of our fragile planet.
What’s New at CSCR?
Saturday, Jan 7 was “Drone Day” for an ambitious student research team whose work we’ve previously shared with you in this newsletter. Dr Andrew Bennett of MIT Sea Grant, and his incredibly talented research partner, engineer and roboticist, Silas Hughes provided an in-depth presentation on drone software, programming, and flight. Thanks to our partners at Hingham High School, the crew assembled in a Hingham classroom to learn about the functionality and performance features of 3 drone models, and how each might serve the student research goals at hand- to turn the labor intensive work of collecting 500 data points documenting % coverage of dune grass per square meter into an AI computer model that calculates that same % coverage by “learning” how to translate the pixels of images collected by drone. The student group is working at the cutting edge of conservation science by mastering tech competencies that support preservation management of fragile ecosystems.
Summer 2022 By the Numbers
What a summer! Close to 80 students from 4 towns (Hingham, Hull, Cohasset, and Scituate) representing 6 schools (public and private) were deeply engaged in more than a dozen research projects: conducting bacteria counts, monitoring water quality, measuring biodiversity, engineering salinity sensors, surveying dune grass, and harvesting and transplanting eel grass to investigate wasting disease, among numerous sub-projects and tasks that constituted full research efforts unto themselves.
It was wild- and students collectively crushed the state benchmark of 990 hours of direct student engagement in meaningful, content-driven work co-created and managed by 10 teachers and 5 interns. What a summer, indeed!
Over 300 bacteria samples were collected and analyzed, more than 5000 oxygen, salinity, temperature, and pH data points were plotted in the Gulf River, Cohasset Harbor, Bassings Basin, the Glades, and Straits Pond, among other sites! In addition, research expeditions to the eel grass beds of the Bassings Basin occurred by the dozens!
We are proud to be working with communities and school partners as one regional collaborative building answers to our question, “How might we credential the valuable community-based summertime research in which our students are engaged?”
Dive into some details about Summer 2022 at the CSCR blog!
Spring 2022
Our annual State of the Harbor event was featured in the Patriot Ledger! Read all about it.
The event on 5/18/22 featured a sneak peek of “Zostera”, a documentary filmed here in Cohasset by freshman Owen Gurtz, as well as numerous presentations about water quality data (such as Team Watershed, pictured to the right).
