Designation of essential fish habitat requires a detailed understanding of how species-specific vital rates vary across habitats and biogeographical regions.

Poster: Drones can revolutionize research and monitoring…can’t they? (NERRS/NERRA Annual Meeting 2020)

Project Lead Brandon Puckett (North Carolina National Estuarine Research Reserve) gives an introduction to "Bridging the Gap between Quadrats and Satellites: Assessing Utility of Drone-based Imagery to Enhance Emergent Vegetation Biomonitoring," aka "Drone the SWMP," a catalyst project funded in

The 2020-2022 catalyst project  Bridging the gap between quadrats and satellites: assessing utility of drone-based imagery to enhance emergent vegetation biomonitoring conducted a regionally coordinated effort, working in salt marshes an

The 2020-2021 catalyst project Refining Techniques for High-Frequency Monitoring of Chlorophyll in the NERRS brought together twelve biogeochemically diverse reserves to compare results from new YSI in situ sensor technology with ex

Monitoring plays a central role in detecting climate and anthropogenic stressors and associated changes in wetlands. There is a need for wetland monitoring programs to bridge the gap between ground-based surveys, which can miss important spatial heterogeneity and cause wetland disturbance, a

A multi-Reserve study explored the feasibility of including high frequency, in situ chlorophyll a monitoring in the National Estuarine Research Reserve System-wide Monitoring Program (NERR SWMP).

With funding from the NERRS Science Collaborative, scientists from 12 biogeographically diverse Reserves compared fluorescence measurements taken by the YSI EXO TAL sensor to extracted chlorophyll concentrations processed in the lab.

Standardized protocols for sensor-based chlorophyll monitoring are now available for use by staff around the system to implement high frequency chlorophyll monitoring at their reserves.

Recommendations for the NERRS SWMP, summarizing outputs in an archivable format deemed useful by end users (NERRS research staff).