Huron Fringe Field Naturalist Club learns about coastal centre

United by their interest in the natural world, nearly 50 members and visitors of the Huron Fringe Field Naturalist Club met at the Pine River United Church, Tuesday, to hear Matthew Hoy, executive director (above right, with club member Bob Simpson), speak about the work of the Lake Huron Centre for Coastal Conservation.

The centre was founded in 1998 by scientists Geoff Peach and Patrick Donnelly as a non-profit environmental organization to focus on conservation and stewardship of the Lake Huron coastline. With a storefront office on the square in Goderich, it now supports four full-time staff and is open to the public.

The organization’s central mission is to educate the public in support of environmental advocacy and protection along the entire Lake Huron shoreline from Sarnia to Tobermory. It provides education and resources to municipal governments, individual landowners and groups such as cottager associations. The centre prioritizes its leadership into the four main areas of biodiversity, climate change, coastal processes and water quality. The website is extensive and provides access to a great number of resources.

Funding is often project-based and comes from a variety of sources, including municipal, provincial and federal government grants, corporate partners and individual donations.

Programs include Coast Watchers, Butt-Free Beach, Invasive Species Management, and Shoreline Clean-ups. There are many opportunities for citizen science and volunteer participation.

Hoy highlighted the centre’s Coastal Action Plan, a project aimed at developing environmental management strategies for the Lake Huron shoreline, and invited attendees to provide input by completing the survey at www.lakehuron.ca.

He ended his engaging and passionate presentation with a question-and-answer period that included such wide-ranging topics as pollution on beaches and micro plastics in the lake to comparisons and contrasts between Canadian and American environmental science funding policies.