A windswept seashore welcomes visitors to the Marine Heritage Trail. Credit: Marine Heritage Trail
— By Chris Gonzales, Freelance Writer, New York Sea Grant
Contact:
Antoinette Clemetson, NYSG Marine Fisheries Specialist, E: aoc5@cornell.edu, P: (631) 824-4407
A new program aims to educate tourists and the local public about New York’s maritime heritage.
Stony Brook, NY, December 27, 2024 - A new program aims to educate tourists and the local public about New York’s maritime heritage, through a website on the Marine Heritage Trail.
The Marine Heritage Trail presents a page from the history of the clam industry in New York. Credit: Marine Heritage Trail
Map to an Ecosystem
The Marine Heritage Trail covers topics such as oysters, aquaculture, and historic industries such as whaling. The details contained in each topic are about local businesses in these industries and fun facts about different species of fish, shellfish, and other aquatic life of economic importance.
With funding from New York Sea Grant (NYSG), the organizers created the website in order to educate the public and tourists to the local region about the maritime ecosystem around New York City and Long Island.
According to the organizers, the website contains details about locations “from Manhattan to Montauk.”
Buildout
The project was developed by a team of 11 Cornell students taking the Organizational Communication for Engineers class beginning in January of 2022, and was completed later that year.
One challenging aspect of building the site, according to the organizers, was ensuring that all of the images included on the site could be released publicly without having to pay royalties, an aspect of building a website that may not occur to visitors. The site contains many images that are in the public domain.
Visitors to the website can find a world of boats, fish, shellfish, history, and other wonders of our coastal communities.
The website can be found at: www.nyseagrant.org/marineheritagetrail
More Info: New York Sea Grant
Established in 1966, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s National Sea Grant College Program promotes the informed stewardship of coastal resources in 34 joint federal/state university-based programs in every U.S. coastal state (marine and Great Lakes) and Puerto Rico. The Sea Grant model has also inspired similar projects in the Pacific region, Korea and Indonesia.
Since 1971, New York Sea Grant (NYSG) has represented a statewide network of integrated research, education and extension services promoting coastal community economic vitality, environmental sustainability and citizen awareness and understanding about the State’s marine and Great Lakes resources.
NYSG historically leverages on average a 3 to 6-fold return on each invested federal dollar, annually. We benefit from this, as these resources are invested in Sea Grant staff and their work in communities right here in New York.
Through NYSG’s efforts, the combined talents of university scientists and extension specialists help develop and transfer science-based information to many coastal user groups—businesses and industries, federal, state and local government decision-makers and agency managers, educators, the media and the interested public.
New York Sea Grant, one of the largest of the state Sea Grant programs, is a cooperative program of the State University of New York (SUNY) and Cornell University. The program maintains Great Lakes offices at Cornell University, SUNY Buffalo, Rochester Institute of Technology, SUNY Oswego, the Wayne County Cooperative Extension office in Newark, and in Watertown. In the State's marine waters, NYSG has offices at Stony Brook University and with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Nassau County on Long Island, in Queens, at Brooklyn College, with Cornell Cooperative Extension in NYC, in Bronx, with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Ulster County in Kingston, and with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Westchester County in Elmsford.
For updates on Sea Grant activities: www.nyseagrant.org, follow us on social media (Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, Bluesky, LinkedIn, and YouTube). NYSG offers a free e-list sign up via www.nyseagrant.org/nycoastlines for its flagship publication, NY Coastlines/Currents, which it publishes 2-3 times a year.