Bringing citizen science efforts into coastal acidification monitoring
Abstract
Nearshore environments and the communities that rely on them are uniquely vulnerable to ocean and coastal acidification, yet we lack comprehensive monitoring at spatial and temporal scales requisite to providing actionable information. While there are a small number of existing long-term, decadal and climate-scale coastal acidification monitoring sites, including National Estuarine Research Reserves, crowdsourcing monitoring through broad collaborations of water quality stakeholders offers an opportunity to vastly expand monitoring of nearshore conditions of acidification. Many existing volunteer and citizen science water quality monitors in the Northeast United States are already measuring carbonate chemistry and are well positioned to collaboratively investigate coastal acidification processes alongside traditional priorities for marine habitat protection, nutrient pollution and watershed management. Based on the 2018 publication of the new EPA "Guidelines for Measuring Changes in Seawater pH and Associated Carbonate Chemistry in Coastal Environments of the Eastern United States", we conducted a series of on-line and hands-on workshop trainings in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine with stakeholder groups and more than 40 community water monitoring programs, focused on approaches for calibrating pH measurements and expanding sampling of total alkalinity and dissolved inorganic carbon. Here, we report on the findings from these efforts and summarize work facilitated by NECAN (Northeast Coastal Acidification Network) to establish these new frameworks for regional ocean and coastal acidification monitoring that link citizen science activities with Federal, State, and private research capacity.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMPA23C..03S
- Keywords:
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- 9810 New fields (not classifiable under other headings);
- GENERAL OR MISCELLANEOUSDE: 1920 Emerging informatics technologies;
- INFORMATICSDE: 1964 Real-time and responsive information delivery;
- INFORMATICSDE: 4352 Interaction between science and disaster management authorities;
- NATURAL HAZARDS