Part of the work on the Eastern Shore has involved developing cultural models relevant to environmental management.  With funding from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Maryland Sea Grant, Michael Paolisso and his team have worked with Bay watermen (commercial fishers), farmers, scientists, resource managers and policymakers to promote dialogue among blue crab stakeholder groups. The project is particularly interested in how cultural models are generated, shared, and implicitly present in environmental discourses and whether their presence is a source of agreement or disagreement about the cause and solution of environmental problems.  Several aspects of this research are discussed in the links below.