GTM Reserve’s System-wide Monitoring Program

(SWMP – pronounced swamp)

The National Estuarine Research Reserve System-wide Monitoring Program (SWMP) tracks short-term variability and long-term changes in estuarine waters to understand how human activities and natural events can change ecosystems. It provides valuable long-term data on water quality and weather at frequent time intervals.

The reserve system currently measures physical and chemical water quality indicators, nutrients and the impacts of weather on estuaries. One aspect of SWMP is the measurement of basic physical water quality parameters. Each of the twenty-six reserves in the National Estuarine Research Reserve System uses special dataloggers called datasondes with an array of sensors that record temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, pH, and water depth every 30 minutes at four separate sites. These parameters are important indicators of habitat quality for numerous estuarine species and to determine health criteria and human uses. To learn more about these parameters check out http://nerrs.noaa.gov/Monitoring/Water.html. The four water quality monitoring sites at GTM NERR are located as follows: Pine Island, San Sebastian River, Fort Matanzas and Pellicer Creek.

More information about the National Estuarine Research Reserve System-wide Monitoring Program can be found at the Centralized Data Management Office (CDMO)http://cdmo.baruch.sc.edu/ Data from the GTM Reserve and all the other Reserve sites can also be accessed from the CDMO once the data has been checked for errors and submitted.

The GTM Reserve’s Weather Station

No, that’s not a UFO that has landed in the marsh. That’s the GTM NERR weather station, the newest addition to the System-Wide Monitoring Program. The 10-foot tall aluminum tower serves as a backbone for the attachment of environmental sensors that record air temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, and photosynthetically active radiation (the solar energy that plants use in the process of photosynthesis). An additional instrument devised to measure rainfall levels is situated approximately 2 feet away from the tower. Both the tower and rain gauge are mounted to a 5-foot high wooden platform located at the water’s edge within the Princess Place Preserve near the mouth of Pellicer Creek. The location of the weather station is optimal in the sense that it is within the aquatic system that we are striving to understand (in the salt marsh with a distant tree line verses a nearby upland area) and within close proximity to our Pellicer Creek water quality monitoring station.

The addition of the weather station to the System-Wide Monitoring Program is a crucial component in clarifying the natural processes in our estuaries. Once incorporated into our water quality data, we will learn how these meteorological parameters affect our waters. Like the water quality instruments, which record at the top and bottom of each hour throughout the year, the majority of the meteorological sensors record data every 15 minutes throughout the year. Some parameters, such as rainfall and photosynthetically active radiation, are totaled on a daily basis. GTM NERR researchers visit the weather station to download the meteorological data to a palm pilot and clean the sensors to ensure the validity of the data. As with the water quality data, meteorological data will be available (after our annual submission) on the web for use by interested locals and scientists around the world. If you have any questions about the weather station you can contact our research assistant Jonathan Brucker by email at: jonbrucker@bellsouth.net