Updates

The Buzzards Bay Coalition in January 2025 took over the lead role in continued measurements of the discharge and nutrient concentrations in 12 streams and rivers that discharge to Buzzards Bay. This project, begun by Chris Neill at Woodwell Climate and Casey Kennedy at the University of Massachusetts Cranberry Station in 2021, will ensure that this major source of nitrogen to Buzzards Bay in rivers continues to be monitored closely.

Woodwell Climate and the Buzzards Bay Coalition signed a new five-year contract for laboratory analysis of Baywatchers water samples through 2029. The laboratory analyses will be conducted in the laboratories on the Woodwell Climate campus in Falmouth and overseen by Woodwell Climate scientists Chris Neill and Scott Zolkos. The Baywatchers monitoring will continue to be led by COMBB project collaborators Tony Williams and Rachel Jakuba at BBC.

The entire Buzzards Bay Coalition board and staff got a behind-the-scenes look at COMBB Project corporate partner Onset Computer Corporation’s production facility in Bourne, MA. Onset Computer is a leader in the production of affordable and easy to use dataloggers. Bourne is close to both Woodwell Climate in Falmouth and the BBC’s headquarters in New Bedford. 

The COMBB project team had an all-hands in person meeting on November 6 at the headquarters of the Buzzards Bay Coalition in New Bedford. The team focused on integrating the Project’s estuarine and social science components and laid out a timetable for expanding datalogger deployments and interviews with Buzzards Bay community members in 2025.

The COMBB Project’s Emily Caruso of the University of Massachusetts conducted a survey of Baywatchers Volunteers to understand their motivations and experiences of water quality volunteers explore how to integrate new technologies into the volunteer experience. Emily got more than 100 survey responses and a very high nearly 80 percent response rate. She will analyze the data as part of her PhD project, which aims to understand the motivations of volunteers who contribute to citizen science around the country.

All of the Onset Computer Corporation salinity and dissolved oxygen loggers are now collected after their summer-long deployments and stowed safely away for the winter. The data from these instruments helped COMBB scientists Rachel Jakuba, Lara Gulmann, Kristin Huizenga, and Lilia Bartolotta and University of Massachusetts Center for Data Science’s Ethan Plunkee develop a data processing pipeline to quality check and store the incoming data.

Maya Weiss of the University of Virginia joined COMBB as an NSF REU fellow for the summer of 2024. Maya brought expertise in stream hydrology and water quality monitoring. She worked on analyzing the chemistry of dissolved nitrogen and phosphorus in rivers flowing into Buzzards Bay and modeling seasonal and annual water and solute fluxes in these rivers. Maya is now working on a Distinguished Major’s Program senior thesis project entitled, Hydrology and Nutrient Fluxes of Rivers in the Buzzards Bay Watershed, under Chris Neill and Professor Todd Scanlon of UVa.

Jordan Verret of the University of New Orleans worked with the COMBB as a summer 2024 intern in the Woods Hole Partnership Education (PEP) program. Jordan assembled and analyzed long-term data on temperature and precipitation gathered from weather stations around Buzzards Bay. He found contrary to expectations that since 1990 summer temperatures have warmed more than winter temperatures. Jordan’s final presentation in the 2024 PEP symposium was entitled, Climate Data Analysis of Falmouth and Surrounding Areas.

Kristin Huizenga, Lara Gulman, and Lilia Bartolotta led the deployment in late May of six new Onset Corporation salinity and oxygen loggers at stations across Onset Bay. They had logistical and support from Stuart Downie and the Buzzards Bay Coalition’s staff at the Onset Bay Center.

Sensor calibration, maintenance, and quality control are critical to producing good long-term sensor-collected data. Before collecting any data, we first needed to develop a database that could collect all of the continuous measurements from the sensors and enable potentially anomalous data to be identified and discarded.

Project team members Tom Bernardin, Tanmay Agrawal, and Lara Gulmann led the development of a database that accepts Onset oxygen sensor data and replicates the calculations and adjustments that the Onset logger software (HOBOware) makes to oxygen measurements based on the water’s salinity and temperature. This ensures that we can compare our data with other communities of water quality monitors that use these same high-quality and widely available data logging sensors. The new database makes it easier for us to identify data collected in the field that does not pass data quality standards.