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Sea Level Rises...
and Massachusetts communities plan for the future
Municipalities have access to more and more resources -- information, technical support, and funding -- to assess and respond to impacts of climate change.
Over the past two months, MassBays has helped to convene events on the Upper North Shore, South Shore, and Cape Cod, bringing together decisionmakers and scientists to share those resources. Presentations from those events are available online:
Great Marsh Sea Level Rise Symposium, November 6, 2016
South Shore Sea Level Rise Symposium, December 1, 2016
4th Annual Cape Coastal Conference, December 6-7, 2016
Registration is also open now for a Massachusetts Sustainability Conference in Beverly on March 17th. The event is sponsored by Massachusetts Sustainable Communities and Campuses, Salem Sound Coastwatch, and Endicott College, and will include a range of topics relevant to businesses, state and local agencies, and education administrators.
Feel free to contact your MassBays Regional Coordinator if you need help sparking action in your own community.
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Goodbye, Tack Factory Dam
In December MassBays South Shore Regional Coordinator Sara Grady (right) and Massachusetts Rivers Alliance Director Julia Blatt (also a member of MassBays' Management Committee, at left) joined Division of Ecological Restoration staff at the site of the Tack Factory Dam in Norwell. With the dam's removal, herring swimming up Third Herring Brook will have 8.4 more miles to explore this Spring! Check out North and South Rivers Watershed Association's time-lapse video of the dam removal. Photo: DER
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Sources of turbidity in Salem Harbor
Citizen monitoring has documented increased turbidity in Salem Harbor over the past decades – causing concern that the cloudy water conditions are reducing the amount of light that reaches seagrass, increasing water temperature, clogging fish gills, and smothering fish eggs and larvae.
MassBays, the Massachusetts Environmental Trust, and the National Science Foundation provided funding to Salem State University researchers and Salem Sound Coastwatch to determine the source(s) of particulate matter in the Harbor. The team deployed monitoring buoys, analyzed suspended sediment samples, and cross-referenced meteorological data over 2 years (2012-2014).
In a peer-reviewed paper published in this month in the journal Science of the Total Environment, Brad Hubeny and colleagues report that “[r]esults reveal a complex system in which multiple sources are associated with particulate matter. Weight of evidence demonstrates that phytoplankton productivity in the water column, however, is the dominant source of particulate matter associated with elevated turbidity in Salem Harbor.” Riverine inputs and resuspension of harbor sediments around boat moorings contributed to a lesser extent.
See Figure 6 from the paper, below.
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