Extension News: Marine Ecology and Aquaculture Archives

Project will locate, collect, and recycle marine debris

When it's full, the dumpster will be hauled to a waste-to-energy plant, where the debris will be burned to make electricity.

The ceremony launched The NH Marine Debris-to-Energy Project. Funded by a grant from the NOAA Marine Debris Program, the project aims to:

• Better characterize the sources and distribution patterns of ocean-based debris, especially "derelict fishing gear" (DFG)--nets, lines, pots, and other fishing equipment that has been lost, abandoned, or discarded in the marine environment. DFG is an extremely dangerous form of marine debris.
• Develop protocols for undertaking a unique underwater cleanup program to identify and remove DFG and other debris.
• Continue to investigate the sources of land-based debris.
• Mitigate the problem through education and outreach.

On hand at the Seabrook kick-off ceremony were the project's primary investigators: Ken La Valley, commercial fisheries specialist with UNH Cooperative Extension Sea Grant, and Jenna Jambeck, a UNH research assistant professor of civil/environmental engineering, as well as representatives from partner organizations: Jen Kennedy, director of the nonprofit Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation, and Alan Davis, district manager for Waste Management.

In his remarks, La Valley noted that getting the help of local fishermen 'wasn't a tough sell."

New Hampshire Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter congratulated the project coordinators and Waste Management for joining forces, noting it showed a maturation of the environmental movement by demonstrating, "we can find the answers by working together."

Main project activities

• Researchers will make an initial assessment of the volume of underwater marine debris using sonar for the first time for this purpose in New Hampshire.
• Commercial and recreational fishermen will become actively involved in removing DFG at sea and collecting it in the Waste Management dumpster at the Yankee Fisherman's Co-op.
• Fishermen will have access to bins where they can discard their fishing line for recycling.
• Anyone collecting marine debris will be able to report it online via an easy Web interface.
• Cleanups along the New Hampshire coastline will expand, involving more volunteers and creating more aesthetically-pleasing, healthier and safer beaches.
• Members of the public, schools, and scientific researchers will have access to interactive marine-debris data and GIS maps.
• Teachers and their students across the world will have access to marine-debris data to use in their lessons, and local schools will be able to work directly with project investigators and partners in viewing data, participating in cleanups and contributing to the database.
• Project staff and others around the world can use the data and protocols developed in this project to target further pollution-prevention and outreach efforts.
• The quantities of debris in the ocean and on the shore, potentially harmful to wildlife, people, vessels, and the economy, will diminish.

Project timeline

Spring 2008 Develop and launch Web-based system (developed at UNH Cooperative Extension) for reporting of marine debris, install the dumpster at the cooperative, and install monofilament recycling bins at several fishing locations along the coast from Durham to Seabrook.

Summer 2008 Conduct underwater mapping, start collecting data from fishermen and cleanup volunteers through the project's Web site.

Fall 2008 Publish a best-management-practices manual, hold a public workshop about the project, and offer training for best practices for dealing with marine debris.

Throughout the project, organizers plan to conduct shoreline cleanups and conduct informational sessions for fishermen, the public, and schools in the area.

More information

NH Marine Debris to Energy Project
Get involved!




Posted April 24, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack

New Hampton fisherman David Goethel remembers grumbling a few years ago to [UNH Cooperative Extension educator] Rollie Barnaby and [fisheries specialist] Pinguuo He, “that the people who write the text of the regulations are up in their offices dealing with a topic they have no direct experience of, without any idea of the impact the words they write will have on the people they regulate. I had 20 talking points I’d been using when giving testimony before various committees involved with fisheries regulation. My last point was that people who write the fishing laws ought to spend a week a year on the boats they regulate. That always drew a laugh.

“But Rollie said, ‘Well, we can write a grant to do that. We’ll call it Fishing for Non-fishermen. So Pinguuo wrote the grant and that’s how it started last year.”

This past summer half a dozen officials and staffers from the National Marine Fisheries service and from the offices of U.S. Sen. John Sununu and Judd Gregg and U.S. Rep. Jeb Bradley, a few state regulators, and others spent three days in late August learning about commercial fishing from Goethel and other veteran New Hampshire fisherman. The workshop featured a day of land-based lectures and demonstrations and two days at sea on commercial fishing vessels.

“More and more people without any commercial fishing experience: fisheries managers and staff members who work for various committees, councils and commissions, federal and state fisheries departments, funding agencies supporting cooperative research on fisheries, congressional staffers, and representatives of conservation organizations are involved in fisheries management processes and debates,” says Ken La Valley, the UNH Cooperative Extension commercial fisheries specialist who organized the second Fishing for non-fishermen workshop with funding from the National Marine Fisheries Service.

“Last year we had eight participants, but word of mouth alone attracted 23 people this year; 18 of them stayed the entire three days,” La Valley says.

Regulatory burdens on fishermen increase
“Fishermen are overburdened with regulations,” La Valley says. “Their days at sea keep diminishing, along with their daily quotas. Their permits are restricted. More and more areas are closed to fishing. What’s more, the regulations change constantly. There hasn’t been the rebounding in fish stocks they’ve been promised since the 1980s. In the past three years, we’ve lost a third of the total fishing industry workforce in New Hampshire, with more losses to come.”

While regulators, legislative staffs, funding agencies, and conservation leaders “have various strengths in their respective professions, they lack hands-on experience with fishing gear and commercial fishing operations,” says La Valley. “To improve communication these groups of people need to have better knowledge and understanding of commercial fishing gears and their operations. But key decision makers and regulators haven’t had much opportunity to go to sea on fishing trips. We designed the workshops to overcome this gap. Attendees increase their technical understanding of how the policies and regulations they adopt will impact the fishermen. The fishermen and regulators have a mutual information exchange and begin to understand the others’ points of view.”

A day on land, two at sea
The first day of the event, billed as “teaching non-fishermen what goes into being a fisherman,” participants met in a classroom at the Urban Forestry Center in Portsmouth, where they learn about fishing gear types and their operation, fish behavior and conservation issues involved in harvesting operations. They have opportunities to see and handle the gear on land and get instruction in net-mending techniques,

“On days two and three, participants went to sea to experience a day each of fishing with trawl gear (mobile gear) and gill net (fixed gear) fishing, “says La Valley. “There they learn first-hand that it’s a lot more than ‘Hey, let’s get a boat and throw a net into the water.’ Fishermen are highly skilled individuals. They work with an impressive amount of technical gear on board: fish detectors, satellite Internet, navigation equipment, temperature and depth detectors, mechanical and hydraulic equipment, radios and satellite phones. They need to know about fish behavior and biology, meteorology, and the ocean itself.”

 La Valley adds, “Fishermen in general get a bad rap. But fishermen are conservation-minded and future-oriented.”

A regulator’s enthusiasm
George Darcy, assistant administrator for the Sustainable Fisheries Division of the Northeast regional office of the National Marine Fisheries Service headquartered in Gloucester, Massachusetts, attended the workshop with several members of his staff. Trained as a marine biologist, Darcy says, “Although I’ve spent 25 years in fisheries management, I’d never actually been on a commercial fishing boat. The workshop was valuable and enjoyable, really fun.”

“I learned about how gear is configured and set. [Seabrook trawler captain Joe Jurek] showed us how small changes in the way gear is rigged can make a big difference in what the gear catches.

“I’d worked with [fisherman instructors] Eric and David through formal meetings of the regional councils and committees,” Darcy says, “but those are very formal occasions—it’s almost like you’re on stage. You have to be very careful about what you do and say; there’s always a little bit of gamesmanship involved.

“But in the workshop setting, I was able to get to know those two guys in a way I never did before. It was more casual, more collegial outside our normal roles.”

Darcy identifies two beneficial aspects to the workshop for him and his staff: “The first is technical. Seeing and holding the gear and seeing how and why it’s rigged is valuable to me when I’m discussing, reviewing recommendations, writing regulations. I’ll have a better idea of just how a suggestion is going to affect the guys with the boats.

“Second, there’s the personal side of it. We established a better rapport, leading to more empathy with what fishermen go through on the water.”

U.S. fisheries regulation
The Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 and its subsequent amendments created eight regional fishery councils, comprised of commercial and recreational fisherman, marine scientists and state and federal fisheries managers, who combine their knowledge to prepare Fishery Management Plans (FMPs) for stocks of finfish, shellfish and crustaceans. to manage the living marine resources within the U.S. economic fisheries.

“The council system is the only thing like it in the United States’ government, maybe even the world,” Darcy says. “All stakeholders have representation on the councils, which hold meetings every two months and pass recommendations along to the regulators who translate them into regulations.

“Such openness and flexibility is a double-edged sword,” he continues. “On the one hand, it enables us to fix things that are wrong. But it also leads to frequent changes in regulations so there’s no long term stability for fishermen. Every time they get into a groove, we change it. That’s difficult, even when fishermen themselves have pushed for changes.”

“I’m surprised at how many fishermen actually do have a good grasp of the regulations. They’re extremely complex,” says Darcy. “Unlike with agricultural crops and livestock, researchers and fishermen can’t see fish and count them. It makes the science inexact.”

A fisherman-instructor’s perspective
“The reality is, there’s only so many fish in the ocean, so the fisheries can support only so many fishermen,” says commercial fisherman David Goethel. “When I started 20 years ago, the mandate was, “Go forth and harvest as many fish as you can catch.”

These days, he says, “I have [a book of fisheries’ regulations that] looks like the Encyclopedia Britannica on the dashboard of my boat, and I’m known as the guy who knows them all. At 4:30 a.m., the government offices aren’t open, so I’m likely to get a call from another fisherman.”

He adds, “Even if a regulation makes no sense at all, you don’t fool around with any gear experiments without permission. The penalties for breaking fisheries regulations are harsh. They start at $10,000 and go to $1 million.”

Goethel has served as a fisherman-instructor at the fishing for non-fishermen workshops both years. He says of the three-day event, “This is a vital service—a combination of world class scientists like Ken and Pinguuo, plus fishermen with hands-on experience. It’s one thing to have an idea like I did for making regulators spend time on commercial fishing vessel, but another thing to pull it together. That took UNH Cooperative Extension. A ton of work went into this event. It’s the perfect mixture of art and science.”
 
“What I’ve learned from the workshops is that people who come out here without a suit coat on seem much more human. They want to know how things work. They ask a lot of questions. They want to increase their knowledge of the ocean. [The fishermen instructors] are four people in their Rolodex, who, when they’re writing regulations, they might pick up the phone and ask, “Hey, does this make sense to you?”

One thing all parties agree on: UNH Cooperative Extension should continue organizing the annual workshops and members of environmental groups with an interest in fisheries should attend.

 “I hope they keep doing these workshops. I have other staff I’d like to send,” says Darcy. “Some of the environmental groups should send representatives. Many environmentalists don’t have any idea at all of what happens on the water. They’d have more credibility, particularly with fishermen, if they knew more.”

Professional cooks and diners who’ve sampled the blue mussels New Castle fisherman Andy Lang will soon begin marketing proclaim them the best they’ve seen or tasted: huge, tender and flavorful.

Lang, a commercial fisherman for more than 20 years, has expanded into aquaculture—seafood farming—with his first-in-the-nation offshore blue mussel farm. His business emerged from more than a decade of research, collaboration, innovation, and experiment by a team of UNH marine biologists, engineers, Extension staff, and local fishermen. It’s part of UNH’s Open Ocean Aquaculture Project to research, develop, and transfer to commercial operators the technology for farming various species of finfish and shellfish in offshore waters.

Meeting demand for seafood, expanding economic opportunities for fishermen
“The U.S. currently imports 70 percent of its seafood, and 40 percent of that comes from aquaculture. Global demand for seafood continues to grow, and harvests from wild fish stocks can’t keep up,” says Rollie Barnaby, a Sea Grant and Extension marine resources educator and a former commercial fisherman himself. “Expanding aquaculture in the U.S. could help meet consumer demand, while improving the economic situation for the region’s fishermen.”

Barnaby spent years looking at aquaculture operations in other parts of the U.S and world. He discovered that “most aquaculture takes place in protected fjords, harbors, and bays. But most of our inshore and near-shore waters are already overcrowded with other users. I realized that to make commercial aquaculture viable in New Hampshire, we’d either have to grow fish in warehouses on land, or take to the open ocean.”

“But the problem was that we didn’t have models in the U.S. for aquaculture in the extreme conditions of the open ocean, with its winds and 12-foot waves,” says Barnaby. “We had a long list of engineering and biological questions.”

Moving aquaculture to the open ocean
So, in 1996, Barnaby found grant funding to organize the nation’s first open-ocean aquaculture conference. The Portland, Maine, event attracted more than 200 people from 13 countries. “We focused on these questions: What do we know? What do we not know? What do we need to know to move off-shore?” says Barnaby.

The meeting fired up a group of UNH faculty and researchers that included marine biologists, ecologists, ocean engineers and others, who set to work on tackling the engineering, ecological and economic challenges of seafood farming in the open ocean.

Founded in 1998, funded by grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and strong support from U.S. Senator Judd Gregg, the UNH Open Ocean Aquaculture Demonstration Project has piloted techniques for offshore culture of finfish and shellfish. The shellfish component of the project, led by Dr. Richard Langan and Forbes Horton, focused on developing techniques for mussel culture.

Why blue mussels?
“The blue mussel is a native species that’s hardy, readily seeds itself in the wild, requires no feeding, and provides nutritious and tasty human food,” says Barnaby. “Submerging the lines offshore, with its deeper water, stronger currents, colder water and superior water quality apparently produces a superior mussel of unparalleled taste, size and quality.”

The mussel larvae, or “spat,” seed themselves by attaching to “collector ropes” that are set out in the spring and fall Crews later strip the ropes and run the baby mussels through a machine that stuffs them into a tubular cotton mesh that holds the seed mussels to specialized grow-out ropes. . After a few weeks, the cotton mesh biodegrades, leaving the mussels attached to the grow-out ropes. More than 2,000 feet of growout rope can be suspended from each 600 ft. longline, eventually yielding 12,000 to 15,000 lbs of market-size mussels. Secured by 4,000-lb granite anchor blocks, the longlines sit three to five miles offshore, about 35 feet below the surface—far enough down that other boats won’t interfere with the lines and out of reach by starfish and other predators who live closer to the bottom.

Bringing open-ocean aquaculture research to commercial fishermen
Barnaby says he saw in open-ocean aquaculture “an opportunity for the region’s commercial fishermen, who had the boats, the boat-handling skills and the knowledge of the ocean environment and conditions.” In addition to the ongoing research, he says, “We also hosted meetings, wrote fact sheets, produced a video, and talked to commercial fishermen about the opportunities.”

Andy Lang “came to one of those meetings about three years ago and picked up a fact sheet about blue mussels. It seemed like a sound idea, although I knew it was a heavy investment in terms of equipment,” he says.

Before he’s finished, Lang says he’ll have invested about $100,000 of his own money into the project. He plans to continue his other fishing operations, filling in with sustainable 5000- to 6000-lb. monthly harvests of mussels.

“My own decision to make the heavy investment in equipment [for blue-mussel aquaculture] was predicated on the fact that the people involved were smart, skilled, knowledgeable, and committed,” says Lang. “If I had a problem, I’d know the people I’d be dealing with to help me solve it. UNH is a world leader in open-ocean aquaculture research. Cooperative Extension is the lifeblood of the University, always there for the general public when you need them.”

“Offshore mussel farming is an up-and-coming industry,” Lang says. “A lot of other fishermen are looking at it to see if it’s going to be reliable.” And as for consumers, “You don’t know what you’re missing ‘til you’ve tried these mussels.”

By Peg Boyles, UNH Cooperative Extension writer/editor

		Learn more: Growing Seafood in the Open Ocean: Offshore Aquaculture in the United States Shellfish photo gallery - Click on “Photo Gallery,” then on “Shellfish Aquaculture”

People often ask me about ponds they think are “dying,” or better yet—have “gone bad.” Of course, what they’re really referring to is a pond becoming increasingly nutrient-laden or eutrophic. These ponds become more and more shallow, and more and more vegetation grows both in and around the pond.

However, these ponds aren’t dying or “going bad.” The ponds’ owners may not like the way their ponds look, but there is nothing wrong with them. They’re simply aging. And that, unfortunately, is something we all go through!

Given enough time, all ponds will eventually fill in with vegetation and turn into marshes. The time needed depends on the pond and its location. Some ponds last 50 years or more, while others fill in within a few years of being built. However, for every pond, the aging process is inevitable.

So, how does a pond owner slow down the aging process? Most pond owners would like their pond to stay looking like a pond indefinitely. After all, who wants to build a pond just to have their investment turn into mud and cattails?

The most important thing a pond owner can do to prevent excessive growth of weeds and vegetation in a pond is to control (stop) the inflow of nutrients to the pond. Like land plants, growing aquatic vegetation needs nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, along with various micronutrients. It is a simple fact of nature that where there are nutrients, soil and water, plants will grow.

Common nutrient sources for ponds include lawn fertilizer, manure from livestock and/or wild birds and animals, fallen leaves, leaking septic systems, and bare soil. Be sure to consider what's taking place upstream and uphill from your pond, as well as on your own land.

Unfortunately, people often find they have no control over the nutrient source. For example, this can happen when there’s an upstream nutrient source, or when the pond itself is the nutrient source.

Many ponds built by the USDA Soil Conservation Service (SCS) in the 1960s and 1970s are now much shallower because of the 30-plus years’ accumulation of leaves and sediment. These ponds are now huge, wet compost piles. The only real remedy for a pond like this is to have it dredged. For a maintenance dredge, a permit is needed from the Wetlands Bureau of the NH Department of Environmental Services (271-1969). Your county Conservation District can help you with the permit application, as well as provide you with a list of excavators in your area.

Luckily, most ponds don’t have that much muck on the bottom and aren’t completely overloaded with nutrients. For these ponds, I remind people that where there are nutrients, there is vegetation. This means you need to think about which aquatic plants you like the most, or for some people, which plants they hate the least.

Aquatic vegetation can be roughly divided into two groups. There are the macrophytes, a higher order plant that look like, well … plants! The other group is the algae, the green slimy stuff that slips through your fingers. Algae can spread quickly, and can form floating mats of dead or dying material, commonly referred to as pond scums. I have to admit, a pond covered with slimy mats of brown, dying algae truly does appear to be “going bad.”

Macrophytes commonly found in New Hampshire ponds include cattails, pickerel weed, water lilies, duckweed and rushes, along with submerged plants like coontail and bladderwort. All these plants compete with algae for nutrients. There are also several plants with attractive flowers and/or wildlife value that can be planted at the edge of your pond. Both Blue Flag iris and Cardinal Flower make beautiful, colorful additions. Shrubs are particularly good at taking up excess nutrients. Native shrubs that also help provide food for wildlife include buttonbush, nannyberry, wild grape and winterberry holly.

Good sources for these plants include your county Conservation District (many have spring plant sales) and the NH State Forest Nursery , which sells many native plants, and even has a special wetlands package.

By J-J Newman, UNH Cooperative Extension Aquaculture Specialist

The volunteers of Great Bay Coast Watch (GBCW) call them “bad guys,” scientists call them harmful algal blooms (HABs), and the press and public generally use the term “red tide.” But whatever the name, the worst bloom of toxic algae in decades arrived in the spring of 2005.

Since June of 1999, GBCW volunteers have been sampling coastal waters to capture, examine, and identify the renegade single-celled algae that create these toxic blooms, whose presence may necessitate shutting down shellfish harvesting operations to protect public health.

This spring, data collected by GBCW volunteers gave a heads-up about an emerging bloom to New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services (NHDES) Shellfish Program personnel. Ideally, volunteers find the toxic algae cells before shellfish ingest enough to become toxic; however, this spring’s HAB arose so quickly and at such high concentrations, volunteer sightings coincided with elevated toxin levels in shellfish tested at the state NHDES laboratory.

Good things in small packages
Phytoplankton, the common term for single-celled marine algae, provide the ultimate example of a “good thing in a small package.” Cells are so small that they are invisible to the naked eye, yet so exquisitely beautiful artists have copied them in stained glass. Individual species take several forms, among them: opalescent ovals punctuated with thousands of tiny holes, pill-box-like chains with protruding spines, and plated-and-grooved “spaceships” with flickering flagella. (See figures 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6).

Millions of phytoplankton can exist in a single drop of sea water, inhabiting a tiny world all but invisible. Through the process of photosynthesis, microscopic “meadows” of single-celled plants sustain the entire food web of the oceans. The lives of all animals that live in the sea depend on phytoplankton for energy and minerals. Phytoplankton photosynthesis is a key element of the global carbon cycle, which regulates the temperature of our planet and produces life-sustaining oxygen. Perhaps no other group of organisms plays such a major role in maintaining life on Earth.

Toxic “blooms
A “bloom” happens when conditions allow algae to multiply very fast and accumulate in dense, sometimes visible patches. Blooms of toxic algae (HABs) are what GBCW volunteers look for.

Like handsome strangers wearing black hats, the presence of toxic cells spells trouble. Scientists don’t know why these “bad guys” out of an estimated 20,000 different phytoplankton species produce toxins. When toxic cells are abundant in the water, filter feeders like shellfish will consume them and concentrate the toxins, which can then be passed along the food chain. Humans who eat the now- contaminated shellfish can get sick or even die.

Of the six types of potentially toxic cells that GBCW volunteers look for, Alexandrium species are always toxic and are the culprits that caused this spring’s event.

People who eat shellfish harboring elevated levels of Alexandrium-produced toxins can suffer Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (PSP). PSP symptoms range from tingling of the lips to, in rare cases, respiratory system arrest and death. Coastal states spend millions of dollars annually to identify HAB-contaminated shellfish before the shellfish can be sold and endanger public health.

Volunteers as early warning system
Using volunteers to act as an early warning system for HABs began in California in 1991. Theorists opined that since it was possible to train citizens as enemy plane spotters in WWII, it was also possible to train people to use simple methods (e.g., plankton net and field microscope) to identify incoming toxic cells before the filter-feeding clams and mussels became contaminated.

In 1999, supported by a grant from the New Hampshire Coastal Program and with training provide d by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, New Hampshire became the third U.S. coastal state to use volunteers as citizen scientists to collect data on harmful algal blooms.

Many people briefly harbor a desire to be a scientist and “go where no man has gone before” or travel the seas as Jacques Cousteau did on the Calypso. Few pursue it because they think scientists are smarter, braver, or somehow different. The GBCW phytoplankton program allows all its volunteers to be scientists. The work is exacting and sometimes tedious, but rewards volunteers with small discoveries and, on rare occasions, a breakthrough. Comrades work side by side looking for the” bad guys.” Weeks and months go by without an observation—then there is a tidal wave of sightings and everyone becomes recharged.

Training volunteer phytoplankton monitors
Training volunteers to collect water quality information, fill out data sheets, and use microscopes to identify the six toxic or potentially toxic cells out of the thousands possible presents challenges. For some, just looking through the eyepiece of a microscope and seeing more than their eyelashes is the first step.

GBCW trains all its new volunteers first in the classroom at UNH’s Kingman Farm, then in a cooperative training, then with their Maine counterparts in April at the Darling Marine Center in Walpole, Maine, and finally in the field.

Although the process may seem intimidating at first, most volunteers quickly learn identification methods and develop an eye for spotting anything unusual in their samples. One of us (Cooper) has developed photo-ID sheets to help in the process.

Each volunteer then becomes part of a team assigned a sampling site along the New Hampshire coast. Each team collects data weekly and sends it to the GBCW office at Kingman Farm. Potentially toxic cells observed are immediately reported to the coordinator, who relays the information to the N.H. Shellfish Program personnel ultimately responsible for the management of shellfish beds.

GBCW communicates with other scientists and with the public
During this year’s substantial HAB event, GBCW established daily communication and shared observations with scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Water Resources Administration monitoring team, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Maine Department of Marine Resources, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Office of Seafood Safety.

GBCW also seeks to educate the public about marine issues. The world of phytoplankton is a wonderful means of introducing students and adults to ocean food webs, the impacts of coastal pollution, and the use of satellite imagery to determine ocean productivity. Home-schooled students hav e become monitors; other students have used their phytoplankton data for science fair projects. Phytoplankton monitoring has been offered as a school enrichment activity. GBCW volunteers have for three years presented programs about phytoplankton to all the fifth grade students at the Portsmouth Middle School and to other school groups through Cooperative Extension’s Marine Docent Program.

You can learn more about the dangers of HABs from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

By Candace Dolan, Phytoplankton Monitoring Program Coordinator, and Steve Cooper, GreatBayCoast Watch volunteer.

Phytoplankton photos by Steve Cooper; at 400x magnification. Other photos by Candace Dolan.

The Great Bay Coast Watch(GBCW)
The Great Bay Coast Watch (GBCW) was founded in 1990 as part of the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension/Sea Grant citizen outreach and education program. More than 100 adult and teenage volunteers work to protect the long-term health of New Hampshire ’s coastal environment through volunteer water monitoring. Additional program funding and phytoplankton project support is provided through grants from the New Hampshire Coastal Program (NHCP) and New Hampshire Estuaries Project (NHEP).

NHDES Shellfish Program
Since 2001, GBCW has been helping NHDES manage a paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) sampling site at Star Island, Isles of Shoals. Since blooms of toxic Alexandrium species tend to move in from offshore waters, the Star Island site is ideal as it is six miles from the NH coast. Because there are few easily accessible mussels at the island, volunteers collect mussels from the plentiful mussel beds in Hampton Harbor and place them in mesh bags that are transported out and left to hang from the Star Island docks. Left to filter-feed for at least a week, the mussels collect whatever toxins may be present. Volunteers then collect and transport the mussels to the NHDES laboratory in Concord for testing.

Phytoplankton Photo ID
Identification of phytoplankton species is difficult, especially using portable field microscopes. The images aren’t as sharp as those of lab equipment, and field scopes are subject to harsh field conditions.

Two years ago, the only field aids available to GBCW volunteers were marginal black-and-white photos and small line drawings, both vastly different from the images one sees in the field. Today, volunteers have full-color, lifelike photo-ID sheets that make their job much easier.

These sheets, developed by long-time GBCW volunteer Steve Cooper, evolved slowly. According to Cooper, “In 2003, I was involved in a UNH project that required volunteers to analyze once-per-week ocean samples by determining plankton species and quantities in a fixed amount of seawater. I began taking photographs in the lab to help identify many off-shore species I had never seen before. It soon dawned on me that this concept could be useful for our coastal samplers.”

Cooper combined photos taken in the lab with others he took in the field using coastal samples. He used these photos, along with a few from other sources, to design a pictorial document to be used in the field.

The fun part? “It soon became a real quest to get good photos of all the species that the volunteers see,” Cooper says. “Sort of a Peterson’s Guide to Phytoplankton. Even better is the thrill of seeing beautiful phytoplankton structures under the microscope. Such diversity—the intricacies and beauty embodied in nature never cease to amaze me.”

A boat anchors over the deep spot of the lake and the passengers start lowering something into the water watching its descent through a long viewing tube to check water clarity. Then one person slowly reels out a weighted line reading off numbers while the other writes down these measurements that sound like water temperatures (they are!). Then they take what looks like a garden hose and use it to fill a large dark bottle. They pull up anchor and head back to process the samples onshore.

Perhaps you witnessed a scene something like this the last time you visited a New Hampshire lake. If so, you were watching a volunteer lake monitor in action. For more than 25 years, New Hampshire residents who live on or near a lake and care about it have put in tens of thousands of volunteer hours conducting this type of activity. Their work has led to a much better understanding and appreciation of the state’s lakes. It has also allowed local citizens to inform their local communities to better protect, preserve and improve lake water quality.

The New Hampshire Lakes Lay Monitoring Program (NH LLMP), founded in 1978, was conceived by University of New Hampshire (UNH) faculty as a way to involve local residents in collecting baseline lake water quality data for detecting long-term trends and locating problem areas.

Our original outreach intentions were twofold: to provide unbiased data for informed local lake management, and to create an opportunity for participants to gain hands-on understanding of water resource concepts and issues. We didn’t anticipate that our statewide “army” of volunteer scientists would prove invaluable in advancing applied research important to lake and watershed management decisions, or that our model of citizen science would spread to 35 states and a dozen foreign nations.

Volunteers’ questions spur new research
After working as lakes monitors for awhile, our volunteers began raising some very interesting questions about the health of the lake and its wildlife. Questions like how increased boating activity affects our lakes, or if there been a change in the health of lake fisheries. After consulting with state agencies and researchers, we devised methods to start addressing these questions and others, using our volunteers to provide the lion’s share of the person-power needed to monitor the waters.

Working with researchers from the UNH Center for Freshwater Biology, NH LLMP volunteers documented fishery health in a wide range of lakes, reporting the data to our N.H. Fish & Game Department partner in the project, who used it in their own assessments.

We also found that motorized watercraft can have very different levels of impact, dependent on the lake characteristics like bottom composition and water depth, as well as how and in what areas the craft operate in.

On the statewide scale, NH LLMP data demonstrated a relationship between the nutrient phosphorus and algae growth, in support of a ban on phosphate-containing detergents. LLMP water clarity data demonstrated the economic impact to property values when water quality declines.

NH LLMP data delivers a range of powerful impacts
Using volunteers to help conduct intensive studies of a lake’s watershed (the drainage area around the lake) has allowed for very cost effective monitoring. Such a study on Lake Chocorua gained national attention, as the resulting information led to the reduction of pollutants coming from roadway runoff next to the lake.

The Lake Chocorua project is not the first major success story of the NH LLMP. Over its 25 plus years of operation, the program has chalked up many accomplishments:

• In-lake nutrient samples were used to call for improved landscaping practices, reducing impacts of a shoreline condominium development.
  
• Lake monitoring efforts were a major reason for highway route changes around a wetland bordering a lake. NH LLMP monitoring results has allowed lakes to receive federal and state assistance.
  
• Sewer system bonds have been passed using NH LLMP monitoring information.
  
• Vegetated buffer zones and shoreline setbacks were expanded for a lake at risk.
  
• Poorly planned, high-impact development projects have been scuttled by communities using NH LLMP results.
  
• “No-rafting” zones (prohibition of dense congregations of moored boats) have been posted in shallow bays, based on weekend- versus-weekday nutrient level monitoring by LLMP volunteers.

• The Lakes Lay Monitoring Program
• UNH Center for Freshwater Biology
• National Volunteer Monitor Newsletter Article on the Lake Chocorua Project (page 4)
• EPA Non-point Program success story on Chocorua Project
• National Volunteer Monitor Newsletter on Participatory Research in more detail (page 22)
• USDA CSREES National Volunteer Monitoring Website
• USDA Regional ( New England ) Water Quality Website
• Lakes Appreciation Month
• Recent research on water clarity comparisons (see page 17)