Oregon Chapter Network
Dedicated to the protection and enjoyment of Oregon's ocean, waves and beaches - More Details
Coos Bay Chapter Awards 2016 Blue Water Scholarships
The Coos Bay Chapter of Surfrider recently awarded over $3,000 in scholarships to Coos County students headed to college this semester who’ve demonstrated strong leadership in their community for the protection of oceans, waves and beaches. The scholarship program was initiated in 2003 by local Marshfield High School science teacher George Tinker and since the Coos Bay Chapter officially took over the program in 2013, they’ve grown this annual opportunity by seven times it’s original offering!
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2016 Cascadia Conference Presentations + Videos
Big shout out to all our staff, volunteer and chapter member presenters who provided two days of great information, stories, and ideas. See below for links to all the presentations and presenter contact information.
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2016 Cascadia Conference Recap
The Surfrider Foundation’s Cascadia Conference is an annual event anticipated by activist veterans, staff, and emerging leaders new to the Surfrider family. This year’s Cascadia Conference was held in Newport, OR and activists from Washington, British Columbia, and Oregon all showed up in force, with record numbers (71 attendees and 10 chapters represented) and a high level of engagement, passion and dedication from our chapter leaders.
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Ocean Renewable Energy Rulemaking Underway
The ocean renewable energy industry is approaching the finish line for the siting of projects such as wind or wave energy devices in Oregon’s nearshore ocean. After years of planning and multiple rounds of legislation for the placement of renewable energy projects in Oregon’s ocean waters, the Department of State Lands (DSL) has now begun the home stretch rule-making effort to establish a process for siting these projects. While many research and other energy projects have found a way to experiment in our waters in the meantime, this final process will establish the path for the energy industry more broadly.
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Shifting Sands: Oregon Analyzes Policies on Beach Preservation and Coastal Armoring
Each El Nino year that passes, the Oregon coast, most importantly our beaches and dunes, suffer increased susceptibility to storm activity and erosion. Dune and cliff erosion, when in concert with coastal development are too often met with Trump-like wall building solutions (a.k.a “coastal armoring”) to hold back mother nature, but can rob the public’s beaches of sand and potentially access to the beach altogether. On the hand, where sand leaves one location it often piles in another, eliciting equal responses of dune grading and sand-removal, often without a permit. These combined actions and responses to erosion are not only contrary to Oregon’s famed Beach Bill, but they threaten the very existence of our beaches. From 2013-2015, Oregon state agencies worked with a NOAA Coastal Fellow to perform an inventory of coastal armoring along our coast and analysis of the current and potential future policies for managing our beaches and dunes.
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Monitoring Ocean Acidification in Oregon’s Marine Reserves
Researchers and community groups are teaming up on a new project along our coast to help monitor pH for detecting and characterizing the progression of ocean acidification in Oregon’s Marine Reserves. The collaboration, spearheaded by Oregon State University (OSU) and the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans (PISCO), is teaming up with marine reserve community groups up and down the coast, including Surfrider’s Newport Chapter, to not only fill geographic gaps in scientific monitoring, but to also engage citizens in making measurements in their local coastal ecosystems to better understand this complex issue.
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Today's Coastal Factoid
Got Sick? Share Your Story
Have you ever gotten sick after visiting the beach? Now there’s a place to share your story and see where others are getting sick.