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Monitoring the Health of Our Estuaries
Our nation's estuaries are being seriously impacted by the growing pressure of increasing human population and the effects of global climate change. NOAA's National Estuarine Research Reserve System has been monitoring the health of our estuaries since 1995. The System-wide Monitoring Program (SWMP; pronounced “swamp”) tracks short-term variability and long-term changes in estuarine waters to understand how human activities and natural events can change ecosystems. In addition to monitoring physical, chemical and biological components of the individual estuaries and neighboring watersheds, reserves also work on a variety of research projects. Environmental contamination, habitat, degradation, eutrophication, invasive species, declines in fish species, freshwater diversions, sea level changes, and sediment problems are significant stressors to coastal and estuarine ecosystems. It is with these stressors in mind that researchers in the NERRS have focused on five priority ares:
- Coastal management issues
- Land use and population growth
- Habitat loss and alteration
- Water quality degradation
- Changes in biological communities
By understanding how estuaries function and change over time, we can begin to predict how these systems respond to changes in climate and human-induced perturbations. Research is critical to the interpretation of monitoring results and for testing hypotheses generated by monitoring. Whereas monitoring determines whether and how much the environment has changed from its reference state, research helps establish causal relationships.
This Science & Data section of the website aims to give educators easy access to the data, collected by SWMP, and to help educators in the interpretation of the research done at the reserves. This section of the site is still in development, but it will eventually feature a data exploration tool, a series of on-line investigations, and links to other resources currently developed by individual reserve related to using the archived and near-real time SWMP data.
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Last Updated on: 07-24-2008
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