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Volume 3 | Spring 2020
CHWA CESU Newsletter
Spring 2020
Volume 3, Issue 2
Message from the Director

While nearly all of us are teleworking from our homes this spring, thus doing our part to help flatten the coronavirus curve, to keep each other safe, and to reduce the burden of patients on our front-line health care workers, we would like to share with you in this newsletter some exciting activities during the last year by some of our Chesapeake Watershed CESU partners.
Danny Filer isn’t driving the usual miles on the road to visit partner organizations in person, but he and Rhonda Schwinabart are busy keeping up the business and communications of the CW-CESU. With the help of Katie Kline, we are taking this time to update our experts’ database. We’ve moved our annual meeting to the autumn, which will be either virtual or a combination of virtual and in-person. Please stay tuned for more communications about all of these topics.

We wish everyone a safe haven and good health for you and your loved ones in this challenging time.

Dr. Eric Davidson
Director, CHWA CESU
Research Coordinator's Corner

For this edition of the Research Coordinator's Corner, Dan provides a status update for the Network during the COVID-19 crisis, welcomes our new partners, and discusses the upcoming partners meeting and project renewal. We've also included a link to a poll asking for your input on the next CHWA CESU partners meeting.

Use the link below to read his full update.



Help Us Keep the Experts Database Up-to-Date
Launched in early summer 2019, the CHWA CESU Experts Database has proven itself a useful tool for federal agency resource managers seeking research expertise and for research partners seeking collaborators. Read more about a recent database upgrade that allows researchers to review and update their profiles, ensuring the database remains current. Researchers who are new to the database can also learn how to create profiles on the site.

CHWA CESU Project Spotlight
Ethnobotany project at Wind Cave wins student award
A National Park Service project won 1 st place in the student poster competition at the annual conference of the The Natural Areas Association last fall. The project was a joint effort between Elizabeth Green, a graduate student and her advisor, Dr. Sunshine Brosi, at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland. The project involved Habitat modeling of cultural significance plants to the Rosebud Lakota Tribe of South Dakota in Wind Cave National Park and exemplifies a larger effort within NPS to work on plant gathering agreements.

Lynnhaven CESU Project
The Lynnhaven River Watershed represents the largest tidal estuary in Virginia Beach. This watershed includes some of the most important recreational areas in Virginia for fishing, boating, crabbing, bird-watching, and shell fishing. The Lynnhaven is also one of five designated Tier I tributaries within the Chesapeake Bay slated for native oyster restoration in the coming years.  The V irginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) will be working with the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers to begin a phased analysis of the submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) with the intent of full restoration leading toward re-constituting of the oyster beds in the future.