Coastal Environmental Baseline Program - New Brunswick
Learn about how local organizations are working to better understand the coastal environment near the Port of Saint John. 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
The Coastal Environmental Baseline Program
Saint John Harbour, New Brunswick
Bethany Reinhart
Aquatic Science Biologist, Maritimes Region
Coastal Environmental Baseline Program
Fisheries and Oceans Canada
The Coastal Environmental Baseline Program is a Fisheries and Oceans Canada initiative, where they look at characterizing key coastal ecosystems across the country, specifically focusing on areas with high marine vessel traffic or increasing vessel traffic and development. The program was initially formed to characterize these key coastal ecosystems create baseline information that will better prepare us to detect changes over time and support marine conservation for the future and really inform management decisions for these coastal ecosystems. Two of the projects that are funded through the Coastal Environmental Baseline Program include a project by Fundy North Fishermen's Association and Anqotum Resource Management.
Lillian Mitchell
Executive Director
Fundy North Fishermen’s Association
Fundy North Fishermen's Association is a community organization based in St Andrews, New Brunswick. We represent harvesters from Saint Martins all the way down the coast of southwest New Brunswick, including Deer Island and Campobello Island. We wanted to look at capitalizing on the information that harvesters have about near-shore currents to help improve oil spill response planning.
We are basically using experimental drifter data and ground truthing it with fishermen's knowledge to see how well they align and what we can learn from both.
An oil spill has the potential to impact the fishery, so we certainly want to be aware of where oil is likely to travel so that we can protect those areas.
We work with one of our captains who volunteers to take us out to the area where there's the greatest chance that an oil spill may occur. We've got two different styles of drifters. One is a disc drifter, and that sits in the very top layer of the water and it's meant to capture the influence of wind and a little bit of influence of how the wind pushes that top layer of water.
Our second type of drifter is what we call our long drifter. That one sits deeper in the water column, and that's meant to capture how the tide and current moves that first several feet of water and is slightly less influenced by wind.
By knowing where those two different drifters go. It gives us an idea about how those two different factors are kind of working together to move things through the water. So every 5 minutes they update their position and as those drifters are moved in the currents and moves based on the influence of the winds, we can see how those drifters move across the Bay of Fundy. And that gives us an idea on if there was an oil spill, how that oil would travel.
Fishermen are coming and explaining near-shore currents to us based on 30, 40 years of working on the ocean and the drifter work is really a snapshot in time. So marrying those two different timescales of data has been really interesting.
Ethan Augustine
Senior Biologist
Anqotum Resource Management
My name is Ethan Augustine. I am the project lead on the American Eel Project here in the Saint John Harbor. And what we're doing this year is we're collecting glass eels to assess them for this invasive swim bladder nematode called Anguillicoloides that's infected a lot of adult eels up to 95% in the main river.
This parasite infects their swim bladder, and because eels are highly migratory, they need a well-functioning swim bladder to migrate out to the Sargasso Sea to spawn.
Mike Duffy
Associate Professor
University of New Brunswick
And it's not just a linear migration. They actually migrate vertically in the water column during this migration. So at night they go down as low as 800 meters into the water column. And then once daylight comes, they resurface, they have a white belly and when predators are looking up, they can't see the eels, so they don't eat them. But of course, if you're going to have an animal that needs to migrate vertically, you know, between two and 600 meters every day, they're going to need that organ for buoyancy. So since the parasite causes damage to the swim bladder, it's believed that a lot of these eels don't make it back to reproduce.
Ethan Augustine
And so we're trying to determine whether or not there's a life stage, that they are parasite free. And so our best guess is when they're first coming in as glass eels.
If what we think is true, then we have a source of parasite free eels that we can stock above the Mactaquac dam which it acts as a barrier for the Eels and theoretically prevents the spread of parasites up above the dam so they will have a parasite free refuge to grow up in and then eventually go out to sea to spawn.
Bethany Reinhart
The collaboration that I've seen while working under the Coastal Environmental Baseline Program has been incredible.
To be able to see so many researchers from many different sectors coming together and the amount of data that is being produced out of the Saint John Harbor right now is pretty incredible.
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We respectfully acknowledge this work spans land and water situated on the unceded territory of the Wəlastəkwey, Peskotomuhkati, and Mi'kmaq peoples.
Special thanks to
Fundy North Fisherman’s Association
Special thanks to
North Shore Micmac District Council
Anqotum Resource Management
The Coastal Environmental Baseline Program was established as a key initiative under the Government of Canada's Oceans Protection Plan.
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