Route Specific Environmental Awareness

For the past two months, I (Emma Janson, LTC boat captain and safety officer) have been working on creating a StoryMap about route specific environmental awareness for the Annapolis to Newport race, and I am excited to announce that it is finally complete! The storymap brings together the scientific and human dimensions of environmental issues along the A2N race route in a unique and engaging way.

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/fdc6cf23280d49859c108663d7ee2572 (for best viewing I recommend moving through the Storymap on a computer or tablet, rather than a phone)

I am currently in graduate school at the University of Rhode Island completing my Master of Arts in Marine Affairs. This project started off as an assignment for one of my classes and transformed into something much greater as it was being created. One of the goals of our campaign was to create route specific environmental awareness materials for the A2N race for both fellow competitors and sailors at large. Creating this Storymap was an awesome experience because it allowed me to tie together both my academic knowledge and skills with my passion for sailing and my desire to make ocean stewardship a key part of being a sailor.

The Storymap takes you through four different sections. It begins with information about the Annapolis to Newport race itself then takes you through the environmental issues along the Annapolis to Newport race route and the way sailors contribute to these issues. Next, it walks you through different aspects of future marine spatial planning along the race route. This section was my favorite to create because I find that it is the section most sailors know the least about. Almost every sailor I talked to about potential offshore wind development had no idea the scale and scope of development to come along the east coast. I hope this Storymap can educate sailors on how our oceans will potentially be developed so that they can become stakeholders in the matter if they choose to. Learning more about the proposed Hudson Canyon National Marine Sanctuary was also interestingfor me because I knew nothing about it prior to this project. Finally, the Storymap ends by bringing it all together to discuss why it is important that sailors are educated on these topics.

As sailors, we owe our continued ability to compete in this sport to the health of our oceans. If we don’t have awareness of theenvironmental issues where we sail, or how we as sailors contribute to those issues, we won’t be able to change our behavior to better protect our oceans.

To my fellow A2N sailors, see you on the racecourse in 3 days!