3-Day conference and training workshop in St Vincent

A 3-day Conference and Technical Workshop on ‘Monitoring and Modelling for Coastal Zone Management’ was held in Kingstown, at the Grenadine House Hotel, on 16-18 Jan 2019. This workshop was a follow-on from the Stakeholder Engagement workshop in March 2018, and many of the original participants attended. It was planned to be a more technical, hands-on workshop, with training and demos in various software packages, using datasets from St Vincent and the Grenadines. The training was provided jointly by NOC, Cefas and Liverpool University, on the use of model outputs, how to view the local wave data collected during July-Oct 2018 and the use of satellite data. 22 participants registered on the 1^st day, bringing their own laptops with pre-loaded software downloads, as instructed.

Apart from the training sessions there was a very valuable two-way discussion on the benefits of evidence-based decision-making and the specific needs of St Vincent e.g. to understand erosion of beaches, threats of sea level rise due to climate change and the recent issue of sargassum being deposited on beaches.

The workshop was repeated by the team in Grenada the following week, 23-25 January, with replacement of relevant local examples.