IN THIS SECTION
Great Bay’s monitoring program provides baseline data to help track changes in the environment, identify new threats, and assess the effectiveness of management. We support and manage efforts to monitor water quality, habitats, and species throughout Great Bay. We also participate in the NERRS System-Wide Monitoring Program (SWMP), a national effort that tracks water quality, weather, and habitats. As a result, our data can be used locally to nationally to compare estuarine conditions.
In partnership with the University of New Hampshire’s (UNH) Jackson Estuarine Laboratory, we operate four SWMP water quality stations and one weather station. Water quality stations are outfitted with a datasonde that records temperature, dissolved oxygen, salinity, turbidity, and pH every 15 minutes. We also track dissolved inorganic nutrients, suspended solids, particulate organic matter, and chlorophyll-a monthly. Our nearby weather station helps us to interpret water quality data, collecting air temperature, precipitation, barometric pressure, relative humidity, photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), and wind speed and direction. All of this data can be found on the NERR’s Central Data Management Office.
Water Quality Report Cards
- 2024 Report Card
- 2023 Report Card
- 2022 Report Card
- 2021 Report Card
- 2020 Report Card
- 2019 Report Card
Habitats: We monitor key estuarine habitats through biological field surveys and geospatial mapping. Our staff annually monitors saltmarsh health to track impacts from climate change. We record information on plant community, hydrology, elevation, porewater and other environmental parameters. We also work with partners to monitor mudflats, eelgrass, and oyster beds.
Species: We monitor several species of importance to track population health and identify emerging threats to our Estuary, working along with UNH and agency partners. These species include fish communities and biodiversity through environmental DNA (eDNA), range-expanding blue crabs and fiddler crabs, lobsters, macroalgae, horseshoe crabs. Reserve lands and waters also host other studies of species like saltmarsh sparrows, anadromous fish, and Blanding’s Turtles.
For details on other habitats and species, visit NH Fish and Game’s webpage.
What makes these creatures so unique? Horseshoe crabs have existed mostly unchanged for the past 450 million years! They are vitally important to human and ecosystem health. Their eggs provide food for many migratory birds, sea turtles, and fish, and their blood is an integral part of the biomedical industry. Their blue, copper-based blood quickly clots in the presence of bacterial toxins, which allows medical researchers to use it for testing intravenous drugs, vaccines, and medical devices to ensure they are free of bacterial contamination. For more information on Horseshoe crabs, click here.
What can you do to help? With the help from volunteers, GBNERR staff monitor horseshoe crabs each year to help assess population trends that are linked to large drivers such as climate change, water quality and harvest. Working with scientists and staff from Plymouth State, the University of New Hampshire, and PREP, we collectively count horseshoe crabs during the spawning season (typically May thru June). For more information on how to get involved, click here.
Monitoring precision water levels enables better modeling of basic hydrology and allows us to examine the effects of rising seas on saltmarshes and other sensitive habitats as well as on species we monitor in Great Bay. We partner with NOAA to measure precision tidal data at multiple locations in NH, including the southern end of Great Bay and the Piscataqua River.
Monitoring a system the size and complexity of Great Bay involves many partnerships. We work closely with the Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership, which sponsors additional water quality monitoring stations on Great Bay, supports a coastal watershed data portal, and coordinates a periodic State of Our Estuaries Report. We also work closely with the NH Coastal Program and NH Sea Grant.
Our Reserve participates in regional networks, including the Gulf of Maine Council’s EcoSystem Indicator Partnership (ESIP) and the Northeast Regional Association of Coastal and Ocean Observing Systems (NERACOOS). The University of New Hampshire, a NERACOOS partner, provides additional water quality data at the Great Bay Coastal Buoy website. We are also part of a collaborative monitoring effort for climate change and related stressors let by the Northeast Regional Ocean Council (NROC) and NERACOOS.
