If you have visited Wreck Pond recently, you may have noticed white poles at various locations in the pond. These are the 6 monitoring locations for the new Citizen Science Monitoring Program. To become a volunteer monitor,  training takes place at Wreck Pond where Julie Schumacher of the American Littoral Society educates participants on the Society, the fish passage restoration project, leads a tour of the six monitoring locations, and supplies each individual with access to monitoring equipment including: a refractometer, thermometer, handbook, data sheets, and bird guides.  

There are two components of this program: bird monitoring and water monitoring. Volunteers have a choice between them and are more than welcome to do both. Bird monitoring involves observing the Spring Lake and Sea Girt beach (Wreck Pond is the border between the two towns) and documenting the different species seen. For water monitoring, we ask each volunteer to adopt one of the six locations to record water level, temperature, salinity, and general site observations. We also encourage volunteers to take pictures of species seen and anything interesting observed.

We ask that each volunteer does an assessment at least once every two weeks. Currently, we have 14 volunteers with 10 awaiting training. The Littoral Society will be holding a Monitor's Meeting for all current and interested volunteers sometime in early January. If you are interested or would like more information on this meeting, or the program in general, please contact: Julie Schumacher, julie@littoralsociety.org

All of us  at the American Littoral Society would like to wish you a happy and safe holiday season!

The fish passage culvert is open. This act is the culmination of years of hard work by the American Littoral Society and other project partners who have and continue to work towards improving the ecological health of Wreck Pond and the resiliency of the surrounding communities. The culvert was first opened on Wednesday this week. Both the new culvert and the existing pipe will remain fully open while engineers from Leon S. Avakian assess the impact of the culvert on the hydrodynamics and water level of the pond.
 
To assist in this process, Monmouth University will be installing two water meters in Wreck Pond. These meters will measure water level and salinity in the pond over the next several weeks. The data from these meters will be cross referenced with data collected from the Society’s own water meter, as well as data collected by our citizen science program.
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Additionally, next week, the American Littoral Society will be traveling to New Orleans to attend the Restore America’s Estuaries 2016 summit. While there, the Society and US Fish and Wildlife Service will be presenting on our work done at Wreck Pond.