The Science and Resilience Institute (SRI) at Jamaica Bay was awarded $3.6 million in July from the Department of Interior’s Hurricane Sandy Mitigation Funding, along with $7.7 million from New York State, giving initiatives that prepare for ecological disasters in urban areas one large step forward.
SRI, a research consortium that is managed by CUNY’s Brooklyn College, concentrates on developing advances in technology that provide resilience to urban coastal regions. These advances are constructed by scientists, managers, policy makers and community leaders in order to manage the capacity of humans and natural system in dense areas, such as New York City.
The grant helps support research projects that further the knowledge on providing recoil in urban coastal areas. SRI will begin to unveil a series of research projects that examine water quality within Jamaica Bay, as well as the resilience of it’s salt marshes, the small islands that pepper the water south of JFK Airport.
The projects will begin immediately and continue through late 2016.
“The Institute’s mission is to increase understanding of how disturbances impact natural and human systems in urban watersheds through resiliency-focused research of Jamaica Bay, and to engage government and community stakeholders in the translation of that knowledge toward a more resilient system,” said Gillian Small, CUNY Vice Chancellor for Research, in a press release by the National Parks Service. “This new funding from The Department of the Interior will significantly advance that mission.”
Core partnerships with SRI include the National Park Service and nine research institutions including CUNY, Columbia University, Cornell, and SUNY Stony Brook University.
