Your September Update

• Check out four new projects from Smart Great Lakes Initiative partners and friends.
• Make sure you're on the list for the Seagull Public Beta release.
• Read about the new five-year funding agreement with IOOS.
• Say goodbye to our fantastic intern Xiaofan.

What is “smart?” Four more projects from Smart Great Lakes Initiative partners

Reminder: Until Sept. 24, the “Common Strategy for Smart Great Lakes” will be available for public comment. The strategy charts a course for innovation in science, technology, data, information, policy, and management. Learn more and review the document.

When it comes to Smart Great Lakes, one of the core questions is: What does “smart” mean?

Last month, to help answer this and inspire our imagination, we published five short pieces from Smart Great Lakes Initiative partners covering current and future projects that illustrate what it means to be smart.

Here are four more:

Long-term Monitoring of the St. Louis River Estuary by Tom Hollenhorst, EPA Office of Research and Development, Toxicology and Ecology Division

‘Smart’ approaches to address water security by Mike McKay, University of Windsor

Seagull–A Platform for Great Lakes Data and Information by Kelli Paige, GLOS

Establishing A Citizen Science PFAS Monitoring Program in Oscoda, Mich. by Jennifer Hill, National Wildlife Federation and Cathy Wusterbarth, Need Our Water

Seagull Public Beta will be released soon

In the coming weeks, the Seagull Beta will be opened up to anyone who wants to make an account.

Over the summer, dozens of volunteer beta testers were given access to a private, limited release of the Seagull Beta.

Through their feedback, the GLOS team, along with technology partners at SpinDance and Dig, squashed a few bugs, made dozens of improvements, and slated many more for future releases.

GLOS begins new five-year funding cycle

As the Great Lakes regional association of the Integrated Ocean Observing System, we operate with funding made available through NOAA via competitive five-year cooperative agreements.

This five-year cycle influences the timing of nearly everything we do, from the projects we take on, to the people we can hire, and the improvements we make to apps.

Recently, IOOS renewed our agreement and announced funding levels for the next fiscal year, which began July 1.

We are excited to begin this new chapter in GLOS history and are grateful for the ongoing support from our community and congressional representatives who make this funding possible.

Saying goodbye to our cyberinfrastructure intern Xiaofan

Two weeks ago, we said a reluctant goodbye to our intern, Xiaofan Zhang.

Xiaofan joined our team in the spring, through a collaboration with Orange Force Marine (OFM), and from lockdown in London, Ontario, got right to work.

Though first and foremost a business data analyst, she gracefully pivoted to the world of environmental data to work on a number of bathymetry data and metadata analysis projects.

Xiaofan is now in the final semester of a masters in business analytics at Western University in Ontario. You can see her work in the forthcoming Great Lakes Needs Assessment and lake mapping blog posts, along with future GLOS/OFM crowd-sourced bathymetry efforts on Seagull.

From our team:

“With limited assistance from team members guiding her, Xiaofan was able to pick up new technologies, apply her analytical skill sets and help us solve problems. Her presence will be felt for a long time to come.” - Tim Kearns, Chief Technology Officer

“In Xiofan's time with GLOS, she was able to contribute excellent work on multiple projects, including Crowd Sourced Bathymetry and the new GLOS platform, Seagull. I personally appreciated her willingness to dig into concepts and flesh them out as completely as possible.” - Joe Smith, Cyberinfrastructure Engineer

“Xiaofan knocked it out of the park this past summer. She merged her background with statistics and programming with new skills in spatial data analysis techniques to help us finish projects like the Great Lakes Needs Assessment!” - Linden Brinks, Geospatial Analyst

“Xiaofan was an absolute pleasure to work with. She led the data migrations on Seagull, and her contributions to the project were tremendous. I have no doubt in my mind that she will go on to do great things!” - Sneha Bhadbhade, Senior Advisor

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