Environmental Monitoring
Detection and interpretation of climatic variability in Canada's coastal ocean is of vital importance to the protection and wise use of its resources. Significant long-term fluctuations have emerged from investigations of hydrographic variability over the past several decades and some linkages have been established with global climates of both the ocean and atmosphere. The coastal ocean climate, in turn, has important impacts on shelf ecosystems, fisheries, circulation, sea ice, sediments and environmental quality.
The goals of this project are:
- to monitor climate variability in the coastal ocean;
- to develop economical means for conducting this monitoring in a way that will detect meaningful time trends or events;
- to understand the causes of this variability;
- to develop methods of forecasting and hindcasting this variability;
- to assess the impact of environmental change on sensitive areas of the marine environment.
A main component of the environmental monitoring program is the sampling of physical, chemical and biological variables at Prince 5 (located in 100 m of water just east of Campobello Island), Canada's oldest routinely sampled oceanographic station. Since the early 1920s, Prince 5 and 6 (at the mouth of the St. Croix estuary) have been sampled once a month, and are presently sampled twice a month. This effort is part of DFOs Atlantic Zonal Monitoring Program.
During each sampling, a profile of water temperature and salinity is taken. Recently, researchers started collecting profile data on fluorescence, an indicator of the abundance of living phytoplankton, dissolved oxygen and optical backscatter, an indicator of the amount of suspended material in the water. Samples of zooplankton are also taken with a plankton net towed vertically through the water column. Water samples are taken with opening and closing water bottles. These samples are analyzed for nutrients and phytoplankton.
The hydrographic data is processed and stored in a database and sent to the National Marine Environmental Data Service for archiving and dissemination on their web site. All of the hydrographic and biological information is contributed to DFO's annual Status of the Oceans Report.
Fred Page and Randy Losier check a mussel cage.