Quick Dives: Communicating Changes in Estuarine Water Quality

Wrapping up our year...

Highlighting the work of the Northeast Coastal and Barrier Network in FY24.

NCBN coastal parks are home to dynamic estuarine systems that rely on healthy aquatic resources to sustain these complex ecosystems. These waters experience detrimental effects of estuarine nutrient enrichment, largely from human activities, that impact water quality.

More than 18 years of monitoring data collected from these systems have been synthesized into annual resource briefs in the form of web articles, providing historical analysis and current conditions. This is the first set of the articles that have been produced for all our parks, and were put together by new staff member, Michaela Compo, and Holly Plaisted, NCBN Water Quality Protocol Lead.

Our aim is to provide parks with a range of accessible science communication materials for a variety of audiences, from park resource managers and superintendents to the public.

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Scroll down to view the series of web articles for each of our network's park.

Our monitoring data also supports our newly developed Water Quality Dashboard, which offers an opportunity for park staff to interact more closely with our data in an efficient and engaging way. We developed a trial StoryMap for Cape Cod National Seashore to illustrate recent conditions and used interpolated surfaces to illustrate our findings across the systems of interest. At this time, the dashboard is public, while the StoryMap is available only to NPS employees.