Just off of Route 16 in Portsmouth, across from the softball fields at Pease, there is a shallow, cold stream, nearly hidden by thorny bushes. Green grass has sprung up all around after a week of drizzle.
Heidi Wachter, Sarah Flynn, and Taylor Scarponi, students at Great Bay Community College, are wearing boots to keep the wet and the chill out. In the center of the stream is a tall white tube marking the site of two probes that monitor the rise and fall of the water and its conductivity and temperature. Wachter stands midstream, twisting the cap off the first probe and handing it to Scarponi, who dries it and downloads the data into a shuttle, to be uploaded onto a computer back at the lab.
Candace Dolan, the leader of the project, hands Scarponi a set of directions to re-set the probe’s clock. Scarponi opens a laptop computer, placing it on a patch of thorn-free grass near the side of the stream. While he re-sets the clock, Wachter and Flynn fill two vials with stream samples.
“I’m really really proud of the work these kids are doing,” Dolan says, as she watches Flynn filter water carefully and rinse out the plastic vial three times.
“These kids” are citizen scientists, and they are three of hundreds gathering the data from probes across the state from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. this Tuesday morning, May 14. This is the first of three state-wide “snapshots” taken to monitor water quality through a project called the Lovo TECS (which stands for temperature, electrical conductivity, and stage, three measurements of water), funded by the National Science Foundation and coordinated by Plymouth State University.
For a few hours of time, as often as once a week, or as rarely as once a year, citizen scientists contribute to the creation of huge data sets. Citizen scientists are volunteers trained to do everything from gather water samples to record bird sightings to count phytoplankton under a microscope. Dozens of citizen-scientist-powered projects take place each year in New Hampshire and Maine, allowing researchers to gather far more data than staff alone could, over a longer period of time.
“We never have enough resources to do what we want to do,” says Ted Walsh of the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Science. Forty percent of the data the DES submits to the Environmental Protection Agency, which gathers it to monitor water quality across the country as part of the Clean Water Act, is from citizen scientists.
Becky Suomala of New Hampshire Audubon coordinates 1,500 volunteers in a yearly winter bird count, where for one weekend in February, participants observe birds that fly through their yards. “They can observe for 15 minutes or 15 hours,” she says. All of the data goes to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and becomes part of an international database of birds (found at ebird.org).
“(Each observation) may be only a small piece of information,” Suomala says, “but when you add it together,” the data set is gigantic. And over years, the database can be used to find long-term trends. “That’s where the value is,” Suomala says.
Suomala also coordinates Project Nighthawk, which tracks the activity of nighthawks across the state, and Swallow CORE, a colony registry that monitors nests of swallows. Teaching observers what they are seeing and what to record will hopefully lead to conservation of these birds. Currently, the population of nighthawks is decreasing, and no one knows why.
In an era of budget cuts, citizen science is an increasingly popular tool for long-term, state-wide and regional studies like this.
“The data (citizen scientists) collect is valid,” says Walsh at the DES. “It stands up to any sort of scrutiny.”
And by spreading out the work of science, and breaking an experiment into dozens of steps, it’s possible for even a newbie citizen scientist to be accurate.
Ann Smith, a retired Portsmouth teacher, used to bring her fourth grade classes to the North Mill Pond to help plant grasses and seed mussels through a project at the Jackson Estuarine Laboratory run by the University of New Hampshire. The students planted grasses and put a mussel next to each blade, so that the mussel would latch on and filter the water. The project has continued, and New Franklin School fifth graders seed mussels each spring.
UNH Sea Grant is starting a new program this summer. Coastal Research Volunteers will monitor horseshoe crabs and glass eels, help with oyster and sand-dune restoration, and evaluate microplastics on local beaches.
While volunteers provide important results to larger organizations, they also gain skills and experience.
Wachter is a freshman studying environmental science at Great Bay Community College. She isn’t sure yet what she wants to do with her degree. “That’s why I wanted to join in on this project,” she explains. “To see if water was my thing.” At the end of the summer, Wachter and her fellow participants in the project will present a poster at a conference.
Flynn, in her third semester, already knows she wants to work in water. “It’s my dream,” she says. She grew up on the Chesapeake Bay estuary in Virginia, which has many similarities to Great Bay in New Hampshire. “I’ve always been interested in how to fix the bay,” she says.
Citizen science contributes to large data sets, but also poinpoints what’s happening with local ecosystems.
Wachter, Flynn, and Scarponi are working with Dolan to monitor the effects of pollution in the area, much of which comes from storm water. Portsmouth is the site of many polluted streams and rivers, as 38 percent of its surface is impermeable—paved—meaning that water can’t filter down through the earth into underground aquifers, but instead runs off roads, driveways and parking lots straight into waterways, carrying toxins and debris along its way.
The Portsmouth probe site, bearing the ignominious name “Newfields Ditch,” is part of a larger watershed that includes other streams in the former Pease Air Force Base, including Hodgson Brook, a heavily polluted waterway that drains into the tidal North Mill Pond. The watershed also includes the Piscataqua River and Great Bay. The data will help determine what portion of the pollution in Hodgson Brook comes from this particular stream, and eventually help determine what course of action can be taken to improve the water quality of the area.
This is the most exciting aspect of citizen science to Dolan, who runs several water-related environmental projects as the Hodgson Brook Watershed Coordinator, a position funded by several local and national organizations, including DES, the EPA, and the city of Portsmouth.
“I want the experiences to connect (participants) to the larger picture, empower them to be part of the research and solution,” she says. Recently, she coordinated with United Way to get nearly 50 volunteers to build four rain gardens, which help slow storm water flow into streams, in the Pannaway Manor neighborhood of Portsmouth, near Pease and Borthwick Avenue.
“That’s 47 people who know how to make a residential rain garden,” she says. The goal is to encourage and prepare participants to add a garden to their own yards, or at least think of their yards differently when considering what to plant.
Walsh at DES works with roughly 30 different groups like Dolan’s around the state to monitor water quality as part of the Volunteer River Assessment Project and the Volunteer Lake Assessment Project. DES occasionally offers training to new group leaders, who coordinate their own volunteers and report data back to the state. But many volunteers and volunteer coordinators become expert enough to teach their peers.
Citizen science has a long history. Until fairly recently, nearly all scientists were citizen scientists. The scientific method that we all learned in grade school—hypothesis, experiment, analysis—was only solidified in the late 1800s.
Though schools like Great Bay and Somersworth High School, which recently started monitoring Salmon Falls River, participate in local projects, many volunteers are retirees, who have time to contribute regularly to ongoing studies.
Richard Rush, a retired architect, began counting phytoplankton to monitor red tide in Hampton Harbor each week after he became interested in oysters. Red tide happens when a certain species of phytoplankton (alexandrium) comes too close to shore and filter feeders such as oysters eat them. The phytoplankton become concentrated, and if people eat these toxic oysters and other shellfish, they can die.
Rush found a call for volunteers on UNH’s website, and his interest expanded from his oyster knife collection to marine biology.
He’s been working with various marine-biology-related organizations, including Dolan’s, for six years. “It’s an exciting, fun thing to do,” Rush says.
Though the phytoplankton counts done by Rush and about 100 others across the state do not contribute to the “official” counts done by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who have buoys out in the ocean to track it, they are an important “early warning system” for the scientific (and local) community.
The counts also provide another opportunity for residents to learn about their community ecosystems, and to gain valuable skills. The water samples used in the phytoplankton counts are tested by students at Great Bay.
The students collecting stream water samples at Newfields Ditch agree that hands-on learning helps them learn. It’s more than going through the motions; they are doing science, right now, that will have real results.
Scarponi closes up the laptop and the group gathers their materials to move onto the next site. Scarponi didn’t know much about storm water pollution before he started volunteering with the group. Now, he believes runoff is one of the most important issues facing residents in the Seacoast. Working for clean water just makes sense.
“It’s my community,” he says.
—Alicia de los Reyes