Tools for Action

Monitoring Coordinators Network

To fulfill the goals of its CCMP, MassBays relies on citizen monitoring carried out by community-based environmental organizations for help. In fact, nonprofit, citizen-led efforts are the primary source of current water quality and pathogen data for most of our region.

Our goals:

To bring volunteer-generated data—which in many cases have been inaccessible to decisionmakers—to bear on policy and management decisions.
To support citizen monitoring groups in meeting their own goals for volunteer recruitment and training, data collection and analysis, and long-term sustainability.

Initiatives

Over the past few years MassBays has been developing tools to assist communities, nonprofits and their volunteers in conducting their tasks (including monitoring, restoration, conservation) and helping them succeed. Importantly, these successes need to be shared with the communities in order to garner more support for future work, such as removal of a dam, building fish passage, replacing damaging culverts, and designing and construction stormwater BMPs to improve water and habitat quality. With the dedicated partners MassBays aims to evolve the monitoring coordinators’ network into an effective means for collaboration. We have several initiatives underway or completed and many others planned.

Accessing Community-based monitoring data for decision making

With funding from EPA's Exchange Network Program, MassBays is building tools to support community-based monitoring. MassBays presented a poster about the first phase of this project during Restore America's Estuaries' National Coastal and Estuarine Research Summit in September 2020.

MassBays is producing a suite of tools and trainings to help community-based monitoring groups collect data that can be used for decision making, and for our own State of the Bays reporting. Completed components include:

An online application, AquaQAPP to help project managers develop quality assurance project plans that are considered pre-approved by MassDEP and should be acceptable to EPA Region 1.
A web-based Ecohealth Tracking Tool for visualizing water quality and habitat conditions and trends.
A circuit rider program to provide one-on-one technical support, develop and present training workshops, and connect local groups to national resources.
Training to facilitate uploading community-generated data to WQX, EPA's national data management and archiving system.

Check out the MassBays Tools for Environmental Monitoring Programs above to see the growing suite of innovative, cool and user friendly tools we have been developing to support groups collect meaningful and scientifically robust data to share with their audiences.

MassBays' YouTube channel is a great resource for webinar recordings, training, and other resources pertaining to community-based coastal monitoring.

6/9/23: Open-Source Data Tools for Water Quality Monitoring Groups. This presentation provides background information and a demo of two data quality tools produced by MassBays NEP: AquaQAPP and MassWateR.
3/24/23: MassWateR Training - R Tools for Water Quality Data Analysis. MassWateR is an R-based data analysis tool built by MassBays to help environmental groups conduct quality assurance and analysis of their surface water quality data, and prepare data for upload to the national Water Quality Portal.
8/25/2022: Eelgrass Photo-interpretation Training. MassBays' Coastal Data Scientist Jill Carr trains project partners remote sensing concepts and demonstrates how to map eelgrass in imagery from satellites, airplanes, drones, and side scan sonar platforms. This training is part of the PSM Eelgrass Mapping study, a MassBays/CZM project funded by NOAA.
6/10/20: Emerging contaminants - Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products MassBays and CZM hosted a webinar to provide an overview of various PPCPs that may be detectable in our waters and discussed the field protocols used in sampling.
4/28/20: Data Quality Resource - Ask Me Anything MassBays and Citizen Science Association hosted a webinar to introduce a new compendium of guidance documents, manuals, and workbooks on data quality/management for citizen science research.
4/21/20: Citizen-Based Aquatic Field Sampling in the Time of COVID This MassBays and University of Vermont presentation was a “brainstorm” session for watershed groups to discover and share best practices for field work during the COVID-19 outbreak.
3/31/20: Water Quality Exchange (WQX) Data Framework Beginner's Training This MassBays and EPA webinar provided beginner-level training for EPA's Water Quality Exchange (WQX) data framework including creating an account, formatting data, submitting data, and more.

Monitoring Programs Across MassBays

Click on the pins to find out what monitoring programs are underway in your embayment and information about the program and how you can help.