By BETSY COOPER
The Stillwaters Environmental Education Center’s stream and estuary monitors individually undertake a small act every month.
They give up their everyday errands, don old, warm clothes and boots, drive or walk to Stillwaters and spend and hour or two studying a waterway. Sometimes they do it twice a month if they are doing both stream and estuary monitoring.
The “calibrators” — those two or three folks that have to check and adjust the sampling equipment every time it is used, also give one to two hours every month. Then the data recorder volunteers also give some time each to record the data and observations taken the previous week.
These are short bits of time given by many people, but they add up to something very special. These little bits of time and effort give insight into what is going on in parts of Carpenter Creek, the estuary and Appletree Cove. They tell a story.
Just like the pictures you take while your child grows and changes, the long-term monitoring of our Kingston creeks, estuary and all the water bodies we live near, tells the story of natural and man-induced change around us.
Recently the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a report about the amount of nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorous, they and other monitors are observing in our nations waters.
When their scientists collected and analyzed together all the small bits of data collected across the country they saw patterns emerge. They are beginning to see new algae blooms not seen before, or seen at different times than usual; more seaweed in the summer waters; areas of reduced oxygen in the water. There are no clear danger signs in our Central Puget Sound waters but some clear problems in other parts of the Sound and and in other parts of the country.
Another course of study is “status and trends” of nutrients, dissolved oxygen and algal blooms as they correlate with water and air temperature changes. Climate scientists are beginning to predict changes they might expect to see in these measurements if their predictions are right about global climate change. So how would we know if they are on the right track?
Well, it again all depends on collecting the environmental data to compare with models and predictions.
So the scientists keep going out and sampling. The volunteer “citizen scientists” keep going out collecting data for all to consider. Long-term data gives us the tools to look at our world in a way that no single measurement can. It gives us context.
It also lets those of us that put our boots on go out to monitor, see a world that is alive and changing. Sometimes there are fish, sometimes there are birds, sometimes there are sounds of small mammals scurrying by, and other times there is just water, plants and sky.
