Project Purpose

The COMBB Project aims to understand how deploying continuously-recording sensors and dataloggers can produce more detailed information about water quality, but can also create challenges for volunteers and community groups who do much of the nation’s current water quality monitoring.

Project Partners

This project is a partnership among the Woodwell Climate Research Center, the Buzzards Bay Coalition, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Onset Computer Corporation.  

Project Scope

COMBB focuses on measuring dissolved oxygen. That’s because water’s dissolved oxygen content is critical to estuarine ecosystems—if the level drops too low, even for a short time, it can stress or kill marine life.  Dissolved oxygen is strongly influenced by inputs of nutrients from land. 

COMBB will deploy continuous dataloggers to measure dissolved oxygen, temperature, and salinity across multiple bays and estuaries around Buzzards Bay. We will compare these measurements to those that have been made as part of the Buzzards Bay Coalition’s Baywatchers Program that has been measuring water quality by traditional grab sampling since 1992. Baywatchers has a remarkable continuous record from more than 220 stations around the Bay.

We are using relatively low cost and reliable dataloggers produced by Onset Computer Corporation, a project partner located in Bourne, MA within the Buzzards Bay watershed.

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Award No. 2317235. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.