Blue Innovation Day 2024 Workshops Announced
We are excited to share the list of informative workshops focused on ocean health and coastal resilience that will be taking place at Blue Innovation Day 2024! This annual event, dedicated to fostering innovation and advocacy for our oceans, coastlines, and water sources, will feature expert speakers from UC Santa Cruz, the City of Santa Cruz, Scoot Science, and Wovoka.
Don't miss this opportunity to learn from leading experts and gain valuable insights into the pressing issues facing our oceans and coastlines. These workshops are the perfect place to learn from industry experts and connect with like minded individuals. Tickets are now available for purchase. Looking to attend all the workshops? Grab the workshop package and save $$!
Blue Innovation 2024 Workshops
11:00AM-11:45AM | Workshop 1: Managing Ocean Risk in Aquaculture - Jonathan LaRiviere
The modern fish farmer must weigh many, often conflicting, factors when making operational decisions on a farm site. They're balancing sales needs, resource limitations, and complex animal husbandry issues with a constantly changing set of ocean conditions on each farm. In this talk we’ll look at how a group of oceanographers from UCSC built software tools to translate the raw ocean observations into data-driven actions and behaviors to improve fish health and welfare on the farm sites.
12:00-12:45pm | Workshop 2: Coastal Erosion - Professor Gary Griggs
The coastline has been eroding for thousands of years and this will continue well into the foreseeable future, driven by a gradually rising sea level, but more importantly in the short term, extreme events such as we experienced during the past two winters. Very large waves arriving simultaneously with extreme high tides are the conditions when most coastal storm damage and erosion have occurred historically. Our options for responding to these events are limited, but we need to look forward and make decisions on how we will adapt to a different future. Gary Griggs is a Distinguished Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.
1:00PM-1:45PM | Workshop 3: Building Coastal Resilience - Tiffany Wise-West
The City of Santa Cruz’ 4.5 mile coast has taken a beating the past two storm seasons. While the City has undertaken significant coastal climate adaptation efforts in recent years to address episodic storm events and slower impacts from sea level rise, coastal storm damage in the winter of 2023 created a new community imperative to address coastal change. Sustainability and Resiliency Officer, Dr. Tiffany Wise will share the City's approach to building coastal resilience proactively and collaboratively.
2:15PM-3:00PM | Workshop 4: Restoring Mangrove Habitats for Community Resilience and Climate Action - Lee Pearson
In this workshop, Lee Pearson, CEO of Wovoka, will explore the crucial role of coastal ecosystems like mangroves, seagrasses, and peatlands in carbon sequestration and marine biodiversity. As a leading carbon project developer in the Philippines, Wovoka identifies degraded land and assesses its carbon storage potential through habitat restoration. Learn about the innovative tools used to locate abandoned fish ponds for mangrove restoration and how Wovoka secures financing to restore over 5,000 acres of vital habitat. Discover the science behind these efforts and how they seek to benefit both local communities and the global climate.