This project aims to improve federal and state programs so they can more successfully help New England communities become river-smart. Our major product is a policy recommendation report, Supporting New England Communities to Become River-Smart: Policies and programs that can Help New England Towns Thrive Despite River Floods.
Funding: US Army Corps of Engineers’ Institute for Water Resources.
RiverSmart Principal Investigator for Policy and Institutional Research
Associate Professor, Geography
Associate Professor, Geography
Department of Geosciences
University of Massachusetts Amherst
In this project we are looking at the role of federal agencies in flood prevention and remediation in New England. We're especially interested in flood hazard prevention/mitigation work that is designed to work with natural fluvial-geomorphological processes, and in examples of successful partnerships and support between federal agencies and state, local and nonprofit agencies.
Our goal is to be able to put together narratives about successful federal collaborations, that both tell stories and also offer analyses about what works, what the positive outcomes are, and why/how.
We will obtain information from municipalities in the Deerfield river watershed regarding their experience with recent floods. Next, we will bring our revised findings, informed by local residents and officials around the watershed across the two states, back to federal and perhaps state and regional agency staff and legislative staff and get their take on what's possible/realistic, and what would be possible/realistic with some changed legislation or regulatory authority.
Finally we'll bundle all of that into a set of recommendations in the form of a white paper and a presentation roadshow to get this out to a range of people and offices.
Lead Investigators
- Eve Vogel, Assistant Professor, UMass Amherst Geosciences
Past Research Graduate Students
- Nicole Gillett, Peter Huntington, UMass Amherst Geography
Past Research Undergraduate Students
- Laurel Payne, Smith College Environmental Policy and Science
- Daphne Chang, Mt Holyoke College Environmental Studies
UMass Project Support Team
- Marie-Françoise Hatte(link sends e-mail), Outreach, Water Resources Research Center
- Jerry Schoen (retired), Project Manager, Water Resources Research Center
We learned that there is much collaboration between communities and local organizations as well as state agencies, and published Supporting New England Communities to Become River-Smart: Policies and Programs that can Help New England Towns Thrive Despite River Floods to describe successful collaborations and give five policy recommendations.