Going far, together: Collaborative monitoring of estuaries in the face of climate change

Background/Question/Methods

Estuary Monitoring programs throughout the world are key resources for tracking impacts of climate change. These monitoring programs, however, are almost never a single “monitoring program”. Instead, most estuaries are monitored by a diverse collaboration of local and federal agencies, non-governmental organizations, university researchers, and community monitoring. We conducted a survey of long-term monitoring programs in several estuaries around the world to look at their water quality, fisheries, benthic invertebrates, and plankton monitoring programs. We collected background information on the monitoring methods, timelines, and history through publicly available websites, reports, and publications, as well as interviews with local researchers. We also assembled a library of analytical reports and synthesis products produced using data from each monitoring program.

Results/Conclusions

These programs were started to address diverse regulatory mandates, including water quality, fisheries, endangered species, water supply, and human health, though most programs began with either water quality or fisheries monitoring. All of the programs include multiple agencies and research participants. We found that most programs have increased in size over time, but all have had to adapt their programs to changes in regulations and the environment, including reductions in sampling effort and metrics evaluated. Cross-disciplinary synthesis teams were key to translating this monitoring into management-relevant science in all of the estuaries we survived. These long-term monitoring programs are now being used as baseline data for assessing responses to climate change in these rapidly changing estuaries.