Session Lead: Patrick Neale (SERC)

Co-Lead(s): Alison Cawood (SERC); Maria Tzortziou (CUNY)

Session Format: Oral and poster presentations

Session Description:

Ensuring that restoration efforts are making adequate progress in meeting the goals of the Chesapeake Bay Program throughout the bay and associated watershed ecosystems requires comprehensive monitoring with both high temporal and spatial resolution. Many federal, state and local organizations, governmental and non-governmental, are presently contributing to wide-ranging efforts to meet these monitoring requirements. Nevertheless, there remain aspects of the Bay program goals where better monitoring will improve confidence that progress is being made. Examples are frequent and/or event-based sampling of streams, rivers and small embayments not typically included in standard programs, and spatially extensive campaigns to relate conditions in a wide area to long-term data from sparsely distributed monitoring stations. On the other hand, there are many residents in communities around the Chesapeake Bay who are motivated to help improve the Bay and are capable of participating in research programs, i.e. citizen science. The challenge is to how to channel their efforts productively to make bona fide contributions to monitoring databases.

In this session, we invite presentations about how groups are using volunteers to acquire data, what training tools, strategies and platforms have been shown to be effective, how data is managed, and case studies in using this data to evaluate changes in the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem and to support management and decision making. We look forward to having a diverse set of participants including government organizations, community groups and individual volunteers to contribute their perspective on engaging, managing and utilizing volunteers for citizen science on the Chesapeake Bay and its watershed.

Presenters:

Monaca Noble – How to turn a long-term survey into a citizen science program

Patrick Neale – Chesapeake Bay Water Quality: Fidelity of Citizen Science Methods to Standard Measurements

Min-Sun Lee – Chesapeake Bay Water Quality: Satellite Remote Sensing Applications using Citizen Scientists’ Data

Alfonso Tapia – Spatial and temporal characterization of nutrient inputs due to tidal flooding

Derek Loftis – Real-Time Validation of an Operational Flood Forecast Model using an Active Remote Sensing Network and Citizen Science

James Neilan – Using Telepresence to Further Marine Science Monitoring and Education

David Parrish – Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative’s Chesapeake Data Explorer: A Platform to Centralize, Manage, and Communicate Community Science Monitoring

Julie Vastine – Integrated monitoring: the role of community volunteers in filling data gaps and assessing tributary health