Coastal Environmental Baseline Program – Placentia Bay
Learn about the various methods used to monitor environmental changes in Placentia Bay. The Coastal Environmental Baseline Program (CEBP) was established in 2017 as one of the initiatives under the Protecting the Marine Environment pillar of the Government of Canada’s Oceans Protection Plan.
This Program contributes to coastal and waterway protection by providing funding for scientific activities that help us learn more about Canada’s coastal ecosystems.
Transcript
Nadine Templeman: The Coastal Environmental Baseline Program was established in 2017 to inform better decision making in areas of existing high or increasing vessel traffic. The objectives of the program are to determine the physical, chemical and biological baselines at six sites across Canada, and those are in the coastal zone.
Lindsey Freeman: Placentia Bay is one of the few bays in Newfoundland that's considered to have ice free shipping year-round. And this is part of the reason that it was originally selected as the main pilot site for the baseline program.
Dr. Rachel Sipler: Placentia Bay is a really good starting point for Newfoundland, especially because there's a lot of both economic and cultural significance in the area, and we can see that there's going to be an economic upturn, you know, in the future of using Placentia Bay. It gives us the opportunity both to learn about it scientifically, but also to give us again that starting point to understand how it may be changing in the future.
Olivia Dillon: I'm looking for a spatial distribution of microplastics in Placentia Bay. We're looking at microplastics concentration, methane concentration as well as zooplankton dynamics. The baseline project will give us a level understanding of in the future, how are things changing over time due to different environmental impacts.
Colleen McBride: For my part of the project, we did a zooplankton sampling net, basically I use this 200 micron mesh net and then I drag it through the water and the net catches anything that's greater than 200 microns. Generally, we consider that to be zooplankton. Zooplankton are really important because they play this really key connector between the very bottom levels of the food chain like phytoplankton and bacteria. And then to higher levels of the food chain like fish.
Ian Woolfrey: ACAP Humber Arm is a non-profit environmental organization, we focus on marine monitoring and restoration. Today we were doing some marine vegetative surveys looking for eelgrass, but also different types of rock, aquatic weeds and ascophyllum. And we also surveyed for some aquatic invasive species just looking for presence and absence.
Greg Moore:We recently acquired an ROV to do marine vegetative surveys, so what we did, we powered it up through the shoreline. We have 140 meters of cable that we can use to go all around from the shoreline and document how much eelgrass is there and the distribution of it. And we can also record what we see. We can use that in the baseline project as well.
Dr. Rachel Sipler: So we are applying a lot of different tools, but by having a lot of different groups working together, we're able to apply a lot of different techniques all at once. And that gives us this really distinct snapshot.
Colleen McBride: It's really exciting for me to be able to help develop this work and this baseline data for future generations of researchers.
Olivia Dillon: I would like to use my engineering background and my new marine biology degree to create a mechanical system that will help clean up the ocean from microplastic and other trash and debris.
Greg Moore: It's very important where a lot of our economic growth is generated from the water. I think it's extremely important to take a stewardship approach and take care of our oceans.
Ian Woolfrey: Being a Canadian we have the seas surrounding us from sea to sea to sea. A lot of those seas contain very important marine resources for a lot of different people, whether it be fish stocks, marine mammals, that's a different type of habitat found both near shore and offshore. This program has been able to collect data to create that preliminary baseline to be able to detect trends that occur in the future.
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