Monitoring Programs

 

SEAFLOOR HABITAT RECOVERY MONITORING PROGRAM
The southwest corner of the Western Gulf of Maine Closed Area (WGoMCA), which overlaps the SBNMS for a total of 132 square nautical miles, or 22% of the Sanctuary, presented the opportunity to study seafloor habitat recovery following anthropogenic disturbance by bottom-contact mobile fishing gear (such as trawls and dredges).

The Seafloor Habitat Recovery Monitoring Project (SHRMP) was initiated in April 1998, one week prior to the closure of the WGoMCA, to investigate the recovery rates in the SBNMS following impacts from fishing. In August 2001, several sites along the route of a new fiber optic cable and in adjacent areas were added to the existing SHRMP stations to investigate the recovery of seafloor habitats following the laying of the cable by plow. The SHRMP is a collaborative effort between the SBNMS and scientists at the Pfleger Institute of Environmental Research (PIER), the National Undersea Research Center at the University of Connecticut (NURC-UCONN), the US Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the University of Maine, and Brown University (Brown participated from 2001-2003), with database management provided by Perot Systems.

ARU icon   PASSIVE ACOUSTIC MONITORING

In its 2003 report, the US National Research Council's (NRC's) Committee on the Potential Impacts of Ambient Noise in the Ocean on Marine Mammals recommended the establishment of "noise budgets", defined as the sum of the relative contributions made by identified sound sources to the total sound field, for marine areas of concern (National Research Council of the National Academies, 2003). After a two-week pilot project in 2004, in January 2006, a collaborative group of researchers from the SBNMS, NOAA Fisheries (Northeast Science Center and Regional Office) and Cornell University's Bioacoustics Research Program began a year-long passive acoustic monitoring project to characterize the Sanctuary's noise budget between 0-1000 Hz. Acoustic data from this research will be used to study acoustic densities and distributions of vocalizing whales within the SBNMS, as well as to examine the relative inputs of noise from vessels and other sources.

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WATER QUALITY MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT
Understanding water quality in the SBNMS is important to overall management of the biological resources within the sanctuary.

While the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) in conjunction with its Harbor and Outfall Monitoring program supports some water quality monitoring with the sanctuary, the spatial and temporal coverage of the effort is limited to six surveys on the western side only. Concern about possible effects of the MWRA outfall in Massachusetts Bay prompted the SBNMS to pursue an expanded sampling program in the sanctuary after the outfall went online in September 2000. Under a contract with the SBNMS, Battelle has been sampling additional stations in the sanctuary since late summer of 2001. In addition to providing data to assess possible outfall effects, sampling has provided new water quality information about the eastern boundary of the sanctuary.



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Revised June 01, 2006 by Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary Web Group
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