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CITIZEN SCIENCE PROGRAMS
Our citizen science program PENDER HARBOUR COASTAL WATERS MONITORING PROGRAMS
became firmly established in In the Sunshine Coast’s Pender Harbour region, as in other coastal
2017 and has become communities, wildlife, economics, and people rely on healthy coastal
a primary focus of the ecosystems and the valuable services they provide. The watersheds of Pender
Harbour are home to a diversity of both marine and freshwater organisms, but
Lagoon Society. quantitative data on their distribution and abundance have been limited. In this
time of rapid environmental change, it is more important than ever that we
monitor shifts in ecosystem health, to provide sound scientific information that
can inform decisions regarding the future of the community and the natural
environment. By establishing and maintaining community-led monitoring
programs, the Lagoon Society seeks to fill the knowledge gap and obtain a
baseline of biodiversity against which future changes can be compared.
Local volunteers are an integral component to these programs, and they allow
us to collect a large amount of data that could never be achieved otherwise.
Our volunteer program has contributed close to 700 hours to the monitoring
program from more than 70 individuals. Many of these people are retired and
would like to contribute to their community, or are young individuals hoping
to gain some experience to further their careers. A few of our volunteers were
school groups who came out to have their students participate in citizen science.
The information gleaned from these data is directly beneficial to the community
at large, and having citizens collect it themselves increases appreciation for and
investment in the natural environment. Engaging with the community allows us
to provide training and education in a hands-on setting, equipping the next set of
stewards with the skills necessary to care for the natural world around them.
Intertidal Monitoring
The intertidal zone is one of the most productive ecosystems on earth, but it is
also one of the most stressful, and organisms living in this zone must contend
with daily fluctuations in salinity, temperature, light availability, pH, wave-
exposure, and more. Many of these stressors are predicted to get more extreme
with climate change, and this will have an impact on both the distributions of
individual species and the biodiversity of the intertidal in general. Many species
that people and communities utilize for food either come from the intertidal or
rely on species that do, so it is a critical focus of our monitoring efforts.
Our work in the intertidal includes surveys of both rocky and soft sediment
substrates, as these are expected to have highly distinct floral and faunal
communities. This year, teams of volunteers surveyed the rocky intertidal
at Baker Beach in July and November, Irvines Landing in September and
December, and Thormanby Island in February and July. They also surveyed soft
sediment sites at Baker Beach in September and November, Malcolm Bay in
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