North Carolina Sea Grant develops varied techniques and technologies that address water quality issues. Research teams study the ability of restored wetlands to control runoff, test new sensor technology to monitor water quality in tidal marshes, and verify that fish ear bones, known as otoliths, can identify early-life habitats of fish.

With funding from Sea Grant and other agencies, Euan Reavie, Senior Research Associate with the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Natural Resource Research Institute, and his colleagues have been examining sediment cores to reveal the extent to which they have captured the story of Great Lakes water quality over the past several centuries.

Looking to improve water quality both locally in the river and as part of a regional effort to restore the Chesapeake Bay watershed, the town of Laurel, Delaware is reimagining its historic riverfront with help from the Delaware Sea Grant College Program and University of Delaware landscape design faculty and students.

Mike Whitney, PhD and Penny Vlahos, PhD, Associate Professors of Marine Sciences at the University of Connecticut, are a physical and chemical oceanographer team that are funded by Connecticut Sea Grant to research the source perfluorinated compounds or PFCs in Long Island Sound.

It might seem incongruous to talk of traffic disputes and costly collisions in an area as vast as the waters off the Pacific coast. But that’s the situation that afflicted the coast’s tribal and commercial crab fishers and its tug-and-barge and shipping operators for decades as they shared the same sealanes.