$250,000 in Federal Funding Strengthens Science on the Fly’s River Conservation Mission
This spring, Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) succeeded in securing an additional $4.4 million in federal funding for health, education and community-based projects across Cape Cod and the Islands, bringing the total investment in local communities to $8.1 million. As a part of this additional federal funding, the secured $250,000 for Woodwell Climate Research Center’s Science on the Fly project to purchase new equipment and increase staffing to improve the lab’s capacity.
Lab assistant prepping instrument for analysis. This machine will be one of two that will be replaced with a modern instrument.
Thank you, Senators Markey and Warren, for your steadfast leadership and incredible effort in delivering much-needed resources to Science on the Fly and communities throughout our home state!
To know Massachusetts is to know that we are a people and place connected by water. Our rivers and streams weave together rural and urban, mountains and sea, and they spill over state lines to connect our nation. Rivers are the circulatory system of this planet, arteries delivering water to families, providing vital habitat for wildlife, sustaining jobs and ways of life—and they reflect what is going on in the landscape surrounding them. And that’s where we come in.
As anglers, we’re intimately connected to our home waters and we take very seriously our inherent responsibility in safeguarding the streams and rivers we fish. Indeed, that’s how Science and the Fly was born nearly five years ago. We were founded to unite the fly fishing community and river scientists to study, protect and restore rivers around the world—all while they’re already out fishing. More than 150 Community Scientists, 350 locations and six countries, we’re still at it each month collecting the important water samples. And all of those samples our Community Scientists gather eventually make their way back to Woods Hole where our incredible team of scientists translate the nutrients found into data—and ultimately into the stories that our rivers are telling us.
Thanks to the continued courage, leadership and relentless commitment of Senators Markey and Warren, this new infusion of funding allows us to invest in new lab equipment and grow our team to improve our ability to track and share these stories—and if and when we need to, to sound the alarm that a river needs our help. Because as anglers we know that when you protect a river, you protect the whole system.
