WPIX and NY1 Coverage of “Cocoa Coast”

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Erik Baard

HarborLAB is grateful to Greg Mocker of WPIX and Tanya Kilch of NY1 News for sharing our “Cocoa Coast” work with fellow New Yorkers. You can click through to read and view NY1 story, “Student’s and Volunteers Use Cocoa Beans to Restore Queens’ Shorelines.” Gallery below by Erik Baard.

Both reporters did a great job of showing HarbotLAB, MAST Brothers Chocolate Makers, and Hunters Point Community Middle School are combining environmental service with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) learning. HarborLAB will be conducting classroom activities to build upon this field experience in late winter and early spring. The method we chose to generate soil in situ is called “lasagna composting.”

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Cocoa Coast on the Newtown Creek

Posted on February 9, 2016 by Erik Baard

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

HarborLAB: Erik Baard

917-697-9221

baard@harborlab.org

www.harborlab.org

MAST Brothers: Tim Monaghan

917-675-4374

tim.monaghan@camronpr.com

A CHOCOLATE VALENTINE TO THE NEWTOWN CREEK

HarborLAB and MAST Brothers’ “Cocoa Coast” Brings Habitat to Superfund Waterway

When: Wednesday, February 10: 2:25PM-2:55PM

Where: 53-21 Vernon Boulevard, LIC, NY 11101

Reporters are also welcome to join HarborLAB volunteers as they pick up hundreds of pounds of cocoa husks from two MAST Brothers factories. Typically Wednesday and Sundays, 3PM-5:30PM.

Event:

HarborLAB and MAST Brothers Chocolate Makers have partnered for the past two years to turn tons of deliciously fragrant cocoa husks from the company’s bean-to-bar factories in Brooklyn into clean, fertile soil on the Long Island City waterfront of the Newtown Creek. This growing shoreline slope and berm at HarborLAB’s canoe and kayak launch is now home to an expanding habitat of native flowers and fruits for butterflies and birds. Chocolatey love for a long-unloved creek!

“We’re excited to rescue organic material from landfill to create a beautiful, clean landscape of native flowers and orchards in a place that needs love, on Valentine’s Day and every day,” said Erik Baard, founder of HarborLAB. “Our volunteers are grateful to MAST Brothers and to Queens Community Board 2 Environmental Chair Dorothy Morehead for building this offbeat, fun, and useful relationship.”

Check with organizers for updates regarding public officials who might speak.

Photo opportunities each Wednesday and Sunday (including Valentine’s Day):

Students and volunteers spreading cocoa shells and burlap bags on the waterfront.
Bag stamps: Madagascar, Tanzania, Peru, Venezuela, Papua New Guinea.
HarborLAB waterfront and Manhattan skyline from Pulaski Bridge.

DETAILS:

The Newtown Creek is a place New Yorkers usually associate with the smells of sewage, petroleum spills, and the sulfuric gases of anaerobic bacteria. The MAST Brothers’ husks, along with other plant matter, compost into rich and healthy soil in an area deprived of it. And for a time the place smells delicious!

Our soil creation technique is commonly known as “lasagna composting,” in which alternating layers of carbon and nitrogen-rich materials interact. The husks cover volunteers’ kitchen scraps, tea bags, etc. Cocoa husks have a desirable 3:1:3 fertilizer ratio of Nitrogen: Phosphorous: Potassium. Burlap bags are made from jute plants, a type of mallow. With a small amount of additional soil and beneficial invertebrates and bacteria, a rich humus forms. Broken bricks rescued from landfill form a substrate mimicking our region’s glacially transported rock.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation encourages natural shoreline stabilization that relies on root systems instead of always building bulkheads. Growing at HarborLAB’s kayak and canoe “GreenLaunch”: Milkweed (on which Monarch butterflies depend), goldenrod, pokeberry, serviceberry, American persimmon, beach plum, hackberry, fig trees, Kazakh and other apples, Asian pears. The native seeds were gathered by HarborLAB volunteers, CUNY and NYC Public School students, and provided by the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation’s Greenbelt Native Plant Center. Trees provided by New York Restoration Project, US Department of Agriculture, and Cornell University. Coming soon: fruiting vines and native spartina saltmarsh grass (for the intertidal zone).

About HarborLAB: Student and volunteer-run HarborLAB operates from a 125’ shoreline in Hunters Point outside the Circus Warehouse, a school for big tent performance arts, thanks to Schuman Properties. HarborLAB volunteers serve communities throughout the Hudson River estuary and watershed with free environmental education programs. HarborLAB provides educational kayaking and canoeing tours, paddling to shores that volunteers and students and clean and plant with native species, and open introductory paddles in parks. HarborLAB also enriches NYC public school curricula with field trips and activities in libraries and classrooms.

About MAST Brothers Chocolate Makers: MAST Brothers is a New York-based chocolate maker with flagship locations in Brooklyn and London. Founded by pioneering brothers Rick and Michael in 2007, is introducing chocolate to the world with an obsessive attention to detail, meticulous craftsmanship, groundbreaking innovation, and inspirational simplicity.

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2015 Gantry Plaza State Park Water Quality

Posted on January 6, 2016 by Erik Baard

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2015 Citizen Water Quality Testing Program Report

by Josue Silvestre, Engineer in Training
HarborLAB Water Quality Sampling Coordinator

HarborLAB takes part in the Citizen Water Quality Testing Program (CWQTP), an initiative of the New York City Water Trail Association that coordinates weekly grassroots monitoring of metropolitan area waterways for a 20-week period from May through October. I had the opportunity to lead HarborLAB’s participation in 2015. Our focus was again Gantry Plaza State Park, where we serve cumulatively thousands of children, teens, and adults through public paddling programs and special partnerships with organizations serving disadvantaged youth.

We received training from The River Project and a research team at Columbia University’s Earth Institute on water sampling at docks and shorelines. The sampling season launched on May 28 with 38 sites from Yonkers to Jamaica Bay. We measured nitrate and phosphate with in-situ testing kits and brought chilled samples rapidly to five labs to test for Enterococcus, a gut bacterium indicative of sewage. While nitrate and phosphate levels are immediately registered, bacteria must be incubated for more than 24 hours.

Gantry Plaza State Park is on the East River, a tidal strait within the Hudson River Estuary. The CWQTP concerns itself with wastewater contamination of the East River due to past and recurring contamination from combined sewer outfalls (CSO) and malfunctioning of wastewater treatment facilities. Paddling groups and nonprofit littoral ecology experts assert that because NYC Department of Environmental Protection surveys sample in deeper water, official statistics don’t account for bacterial colonies near shore, where human contact and wildlife activity is greatest. NYC Department of Health water testing focuses on swimming beaches, not kayak and canoe launches.

HarborLAB cancels programming at Gantry Plaza State Park on days following significant rain as a precaution against CSO contamination.

Enterococcus levels are presented as a Most Probable Number (MPN), or the number of colonies per 100 ml of water counted after incubation. These numbers set thresholds for recommending public notifications or temporary closures. New York City Department of Health Enterococcus standards for swimming are as follows:

MPN <35 = acceptable for swimming

MPN between 35 and 104 = unacceptable if level persist

MPN >104 = unacceptable for swimming

Throughout the 2015 CWQTP season (see figure 1) lab results showed that the presence of Enterococcus at Gantry Plaza State Park usually measured within acceptable conditions for swimming. It was observed that on three occasions Enterococcus levels at the site were unacceptable for swimming. Similar results were obtained in the previous 2014 CWQTP season (see figure 2) with one measurement exceeding the limit acceptable for swimming.

These spikes might correlate to rainfall prior to measurement (with one of the three a possibly anomalous result), as seen in figure 3, provided by the Riverkeeper organization through the citizen testing data web tool hosted on its website. That is, a wetter season in 2015 may be the cause for having have three peaks in Enterococcus counts compared to one peak in 2014. The amount of rainfall in the 2014 season, from May 22 to October 02, was 14.76 inches, according to the National Weather Service Forecast Office. That was 1.59 inches less than the 2015 season’s 16.35 inches for a same period (May 21-October 01).

Nitrate (NO3) and Phosphate (PO4) in-situ testing was new to the 2015 season. Nitrates and phosphates from urban runoff can cause eutrophication, a process that depletes lakes, streams, and rivers of oxygen. The procedure for in-situ testing was straight forward. The test kit consisted of two small tubes with nitrate and phosphate reactors and a small cube (see figure 4). Each tube would absorb water from a small cube of the sampled water. The tubes would change color after a few minutes indicating the level of NO3 or PO4 respectively. Throughout the season, low concentrations of Nitrate and Phosphate testing were recorded and these remained constant.

For me, as an international student with an engineering background in water resources, and an advocate of sustainable water management, constant monitoring of water bodies is of utmost relevance. It informs environmental regulators whether the water body supports a healthy aquatic ecosystem. While participating with HarborLAB collecting water samples, I came to appreciate the importance of keeping New York City’s waterways pollutant free. It helps revitalize shores once plentiful with aquatic life and maintain a balance in the ecosystem. In addition to revitalizing shores, effectively protecting our water bodies from pollutants creates an increased public interest in recreational water activities.

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Fig. 1 2015 CWQT Season Enterococcus test results

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Fig. 2 2014 CWQT Season Enterococcus test results

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Fig.3 Enterococcus count and rainfall correlation. (Extracted from Riverkeeper.org/water-quality/citizen-data.)

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Fig. 4 Nitrates and Phosphates in-situ testing kit

African Americans in Marine Sciences

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Erik Baard

African Americans have made contributions to maritime history and the sciences from the colonial period forward. The first wave of academically credentialed African American marine scientists, however, would not be born until toward the end of the 19th century. HarborLAB serves budding African American scientists through its youth programs each year, and for Black History Month honors trailblazers from years past.

Outstanding among the first generation of African American university scholars in the marine sciences were Ernest Everett Just and Roger Arliner Young, both born in the 1880s. Both went to prominent universities and did field-shaping research at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, but white students were deprived of their gifts as teachers because of racial bigotry. Fortunately Dr. Just and Dr. Young received faculty appointments at historically black institutions where they inspired new generations of scientists.

Ernest Everett Just

Dr. Just was renowned as a master designer of experiments. Though he died before the discovery of DNA, Dr. Just focused on eggs, especially those of marine invertebrates, because he saw them as the key to understanding life as an emergent complex system. An excellent biography of Dr. Just is Black Apollo of Science, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Roger Arliner Young

Dr. Young was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in zoology. She studied under Dr. Just and they both shared a mentor in Frank Rattray Lillie, a founder and first president of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She performed cutting edge experiments on the effects of radiation on marine eggs. Her radiation work, study of cellular salt regulation, and dehydration and rehydration of living cells can be seen as a precursor to today’s booming field of extremophile studies. Understanding the extreme tolerances of terrestrial organisms aids astrobiologists searching harsher worlds for signs of life.

Despite the achievements of the generation of Dr. Just and Dr. Young, and those who followed, even today to be a black marine biologist or oceanographer is pioneering. Dr. Ashanti Johnson, oceanographer, shares her experiences and inspiration in the video above. Students entering the field will likely have few or no black professors. HarborLAB’s message to these students is a simple one: Please, don’t be discouraged. Don’t allow yourself to feel excluded. We need as many bright young people as possible to study these fields because with fish stocks crashing and coral reefs dying, and ocean acidity increasing due to carbon dioxide pollution, advancement of marine sciences is a matter of survival.

A great resource for students of color seeking careers in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields is the Institute for Broadening Participation’s Pathways to Science program. HarborLAB strongly recommends studying with our Natural Sciences partners at CUNY LaGuardia Community College and CUNY Baruch College. And of course, HarborLAB volunteers serve students by introducing them to the greatest teacher of all: Nature. As Dr. Just describes his first classroom, it was not with four walls:

“[It] was full of birds and flowers, especially in the spring, when the wrens awakened to the smell of wisteria and dogwood. Azaleas and camellias blossomed along the ditches where tadpoles swam, and Spanish moss gleamed from the trees…”

If you are part of a school or community group and want to join HarborLAB in environmental service learning on our boats or ashore, please email edu@harborlab.org.