What’s stunning, statewide, and captured last March? No, not mountain lions — Connecticut’s new aerial imagery! And, while it may not be quite good enough to help you find your car keys, it’s probably good enough to allow you to identify the car in your driveway. Here are some key facts about this great new […]
Programs
Build a Rain Garden this Spring with NEMO’s New App & Website
February 20, 2013 Presented by David Dickson & Michael Dietz, UConn CLEAR Rain gardens are depressions in the ground that collect and soak up stormwater runoff from roads, roofs, driveways, and other hard surfaces. They are relatively simple to install, are beautiful additions to the landscape, and help prevent water pollution. And now NEMO has […]
NEMO’s New Rain Garden App Getting the Attention it Deserves
It should come as no surprise how excited we are to show off NEMO’s new Rain Garden App (see past blog posts), not to mention the fact that it’s the first UConn app created for the general public. However, we are equally excited about all the attention it is getting. Most recently, NEMO Director Michael […]
Dietz Gets Sappy About Water
It’s funny sometimes how seemingly unrelated events help to congeal an idea in your head (or in my case remind you of an idea that you had thought about before, and then forgotten…I am 40 after all!). Earlier this week I finally checked out the NPR story that Don Waye from EPA had sent, that […]
We Got Your LID Examples Right Here!
Interested in Low Impact Development (LID), but want a better sense of what it looks like? Well, have we got the tool for you – the National NEMO Network’s National LID Atlas contains nearly 850 examples from 28 states! For the uninitiated, low impact development (LID) practices include rain gardens, pervious pavement, green roofs, rain barrels, […]
Rain Garden App!
I’ve only had my iPhone since May 2011. It’s not that I didn’t think they were cool and useful (I had bought one for my wife a year before), I just was trying to delay joining the “in crowd” for a while longer. Now it seems like I have had it forever, and it is […]
What the Heck is the Land Use Academy?
As a local land use commissioner you are faced with making decisions about how your community will grow, reviewing and approving applications for a variety of projects and balancing growth with natural resource protection. Sometimes court decisions change the rules, you receive conflicting advice, the information you have to work with is incomplete or you […]
NEW! Land Cover for the Long Island Sound Watershed
You may have heard of the Connecticut’s Changing Landscape project and website that provides basic land cover information through five directly comparable land cover datasets, from 1985, 1990, 1995, 2002 and 2006, allowing us to look at, and quantify, landscape change in Connecticut. Now, thanks to the support of the Long Island Sound Study, we […]
New Rain Garden "How To" Website for Homeowners
CLEAR’s NEMO program recently partnered with the Connecticut Fund for the Environment‘s Save the Sound program to create a rain garden “how to” website, focused on helping Connecticut and New England homeowners build their own rain garden. The Rain Gardens website is meant to be a companion site to both the CT NEMO website and Save […]
NEMO Monitoring Project Looks at Nitrogen Processing by Bioretention
Last week CLEAR’s NEMO Program broke ground on a new monitoring project focused on the Low Impact Development (LID) practice of bioretention. Bioretention is the practice of reducing the quantity, and increasing the quality, of runoff by directing it to a depression filled with plants. This is the same concept as the more widely recognized rain garden, […]
CLEAR/DEEP Team Wins Award for "CT ECO" Mapping Website
The CLEAR and CT DEEP team responsible for the development and operation of the Connecticut Conditions Online, or CT ECO, website has won the 2012 Public Service Award from the Connecticut Chapter of the American Planning Association. CT ECO is a highly advanced internet mapping site that provides access to the state’s natural resource data. […]
CLEAR’s Newest Geospatial Technology Course Focuses on Land Trusts
CLEAR’s Geospatial Training Program (GTP) has partnered with the Connecticut Land Conservation Council to develop a new course for land trust staff and volunteers. The first workshop was held on a sunny Friday in September. The one-day course is designed to teach participants how to use a handheld GPS receiver to map property boundaries and […]
NEMO U8 A Tentacular Success
UConn CLEAR, in partnership with the Northland NEMO program, held the 8th NEMO University (a.k.a NEMO U8) conference in Duluth, MN last month. The conference brings together outreach professionals from around the country, primarily from programs modelled after the CT NEMO program, to share innovative approaches and ideas to working with communities on land use and water […]
Climate Change Adaptation
September 18, 2012 Presented by Bruce Hyde, UConn CLEAR and Juliana Barrett, CT Sea Grant Hurricane Irene showed just how vulnerable we are to damage from storms and tidal inundation. The impact of climate change on coastal municipalities is likely to result in heavier downpours, more vulnerable coastlines, and increases to the amount of land […]
Demonstration of ArcGIS.com
July 18, 2012 Presented by Emily Wilson, UConn CLEAR Interactive web maps are powerful tools for organizing and disseminating information for public consumption. For years, Google has led this revolution in online mapping by making it easy for practically anyone to create a custom web map of their own using Google Maps and Google Earth. […]
Community Food Security in Connecticut
July 10, 2012 Presented by Jiff Martin, UConn Cooperative Extension and Adam Rabinowitz, UConn CANR Most residents in Connecticut have consistent, dependable access to enough food for active, healthy living. Yet each year there are households that experience limited access to food due to a lack of money or other resources. Between 2008 and 2010, […]
The National NEMO Network’s 8th NEMO University
NEMO University, or NEMO U, is the national conference of the NEMO Network. The main focus of the conference is on providing opportunities for NEMO program leaders, partners, funders and NEMO friends to network with one another, share successful approaches and learn about new technologies and techniques. Since 2000, there have been 8 NEMO Universities […]
Rain Garden App Coming Soon!
Several CLEAR programs (o.k., since you asked, it’s the CT NEMO, National NEMO Network, and the Geospatial Training Programs) have teamed up to develop a “rain garden” app for smart phones. A rain garden is a vegetated depression that accepts and infiltrates runoff from a rooftop, driveway of other impervious surface. Unlike many “Low Impact […]
NEMO’s Rain Garden Demonstration Site
The NEMO team has just completed its second rain garden demonstration site at the Middlesex County Extension Center in Haddam (CLEAR and NEMO’s home-base). Rain gardens are shallow depressions in the landscape that typically include plants and a mulch layer or ground cover. Their purpose is to help retain water runoff during a storm event, allowing […]
ArcGIS.com: A User-Friendly Tool for Creating Maps Online
May 8, 2012 Presented by Cary Chadwick and Emily Wilson, UConn CLEAR Interactive web maps are powerful tools for organizing and disseminating information for public consumption. For years, Google has led this revolution in online mapping by making it easy for practically anyone (even you) to create a custom web map of their own using […]