Marine researcher is a human database
Archived article from Oct 22, 1999
By Douglas Frank
Michael Kennish, a marine scientist at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences (IMCS), has been a busy researcher during the past 15 years. Since 1984, he has produced more than 80 publications, including nine books and numerous journal articles in various marine-science areas.
His first book, "The Ecology of Barnegat Bay" (Springer-Verlag), led to his involvement in the National Estuary Program, which is the subject of his latest work, "Estuary Restoration and Maintenance" (CRC Press).
Here, Kennish, an expert on marine pollution, details the workings of the federally funded program overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that deals with impacts on estuaries and with management plans to help them remain healthy and productive for future generations.
The book analyzes four estuaries: Long Island Sound, Galveston Bay, San Francisco Bay and, close to home, Delaware Bay, presenting exhaustive data on population, land and water use, water quality, toxic substances, vegetation, fish and shellfish populations, birds, plankton and marine mammals.
In between the two books are numerous publications, most notably the "Practical Handbook of Marine Science" (CRC Press), a huge volume first published in 1989, revised in 1994 and due for its third printing next year.
The handbook, which is in widespread use in the United States and abroad, provides a host of data gathered from journals, government reports and other scientists, and covers the areas of marine biology, marine geology, marine chemistry, physical oceanography and marine pollution.
According to Michael DeLuca, senior associate director at IMCS, Kennish's works are "masterpieces that require intense discipline to amass. They are wonderful reference books for people in the field, useful both to scientists and resource managers." Kennish's early work on Barnegat Bay is a "standard for those who are working on that system," DeLuca adds.
Kennish, a member of IMCS since 1990, feels he is ideally suited, both by temperament and by training, to undertake the encyclopedic task of compiling large amounts of data that other scientists might find useful in their research.
Describing himself as a "poster child" for a Rutgers education, Kennish notes that he graduated from Rutgers-Camden with a degree in geology and earned his master's and doctoral degrees in geology at the New Brunswick campus with an emphasis in the marine area.
"This was during the 1970s when there was a distinct attempt to cross-train scientists in different fields," he says. "I'm particularly suited to this work because I have a multidisciplinary background, for which I'm indebted to Rutgers." His next project will be to examine the restoration and revitalization of human-affected estuaries and coastal systems.
In addition to his research and publishing, Kennish is a member of the graduate faculty and teaches a course on deep-sea biology and geology.
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