DURHAM, N.H. - New Hampshire Sea Grant has made available a new online tool for residents of the Lamprey River watershed who want information on land use in their communities. Available on the N.H. Sea Grant web site (http://seagrant.unh.edu/lampreyrwmaps.html), these maps provide details on cultural resources, conserved public land, and subwatersheds.

Intended to encourage dialogue within and among the 14 watershed communities to focus on ecosystem-based, watershed-scaled land use planning, the maps will be valuable to a range of constituents: town boards, committees, commissions and citizens, as well as land use planners and conservation commission members.

University of New Hampshire alumna Erika Washburn (Ph.D., 2009) created maps detailing the land uses in each of the 14 towns within the watershed. Her dissertation research, which led to the creation of these maps, included significant outreach and participatory research with the communities in the watershed as well as collaborations with the Great Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (GBNERR) and its Coastal Training Program, N.H. Sea Grant and other organizations. Washburn's research was funded by UNH and a NOAA National Estuarine Research Reserve Social Science Fellowship, and funding to print the maps was provided by N.H. Sea Grant and GBNERR. Each town has received a printed copy of its map and a copy of a larger regional map for the use of town boards, committees and citizens.

For more information about the maps or the research, contact Erika Washburn at erika.washburn70@gmail.com.

The University of New Hampshire, founded in 1866, is a world-class public research university with the feel of a New England liberal arts college. A land, sea, and space-grant university, UNH is the state's flagship public institution, enrolling 12,200 undergraduate and 2,300 graduate students.

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