The municipalities within the Great Bay Watershed vary in size and their capacity to address watershed management and infrastructure issues related to water quality, creating a need to strengthen connections across social science research and its applications to outreach, education, technical assistance, and engagement. As local social science studies emerged that could inform new and existing community engagement, outreach, and education programs in the watershed, practitioners – including training and education staff at Great Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and partners working on outreach, engagement, and education related to water quality – asked for help identifying, interpreting, and applying this research.

To help address this management need, a science transfer project team worked to gather, categorize, and summarize available relevant human dimensions research and explore the findings through workshops and interactive peer learning sessions that brought together researchers and practitioners to discuss the practical implications of the research as well as build capacity to interpret existing and design new research. In this webinar, the project team will provide an overview of the approach used to build stronger connections, provide highlights of key takeaways on how to use findings and theoretical frameworks from social science research, and discuss proposed next steps that were inspired by this transfer grant with the goal of learning from and facilitating connection across those working on related topics in other watersheds.