Part of the mission of Vermont EPSCoR, through its Center for Workforce Development and Diversity (CWDD), is to train upcoming young scholars who are now undergraduate students in scientific fields in which RACC works. Each summer, a group of interns joins the team and pursues a range of projects. As part of that effort, the students, either in teams or individually, and with mentoring from current RACC faculty, postdocs, and graduate students, select, design, and execute their own research projects. These projects are designed around RACC research goals, either directly supporting the work of fulltime RACC researchers or pursuing complementary research questions which would otherwise go unaddressed.

At the end of this summer, the interns who worked with RACC’s Question 3 (Governance, Adaptive management, and Landuse transitions), presented the research they had completed to Question 3’s fulltime RACC researchers, Drs. Christopher Koliba, Asim Zia, Yushiou Tsai, and Steve Scheinert. These projects covered a range of issues, including the structure and impacts of the National Flood Insurance Program, cross-border comparison on farm support programs, hazard mitigation planning, tactical basin planning, the economic impacts of algal blooms, and the interdependence of climate change drivers and their subsequent impacts.

You can watch the videos of the end-of-summer presentations here. Final presentations will be given at a symposium in the spring.

• Arelis Enid Girona Davila - Slides - Video:
  The Effect of Lake Champlain's water Quality on Tourism and Recreation
• Cristina M. Gonzalez Rivera - Slides - Video:
  Adaptation Levels of Town Towards Flood Hazards Responses in the Winooski River Basin
• Danny Baker and Justin Barton - Slides - Video:
  FEMA's NFIP in Vermont
• Michael Deganich - Slides - Video:
  Winooski Tactical Basin Plan Review
• Nancy Luong - Slides - Video:
  Climate Change Scenarios and Adaptation Strategies
• Hanna Aronowitz - Slides - Video:
  A juxtaposition of the Province of Quebec and the State of Vermont's Actions Addressing Phosphorus Loading Problems in Missisquoi Bay