Partners for a Healthy Padilla Bay

In Washington’s Salish Sea, healthy estuaries sustain wildlife, communities, cultural traditions, recreation, and the state’s aquaculture industries. Centrally located in the Salish Sea, the Padilla Bay Reserve has spent decades monitoring waters in Padilla Bay and collaborates with partners to monitor water in the watersheds flowing into Padilla, Samish, and Skagit Bays. 

One example of these collaborations is the long-running Stream Team and Storm Team volunteer monitoring program led by the Skagit Conservation District. Since the 1990s, volunteers have monitored water quality across watersheds feeding Padilla Bay, Samish Bay, and Skagit Bay, collecting data on dissolved oxygen, temperature, and fecal coliform bacteria at nearly 100 sites. 

“Our greatest resource isn’t the streams we monitor, it’s the incredible people who give their time to protect them,” says Cindy Pierce, outreach and education lead at Skagit Conservation District and Stream Team program leader. “Our volunteers’ dedication to citizen science helps us better understand our watersheds while fostering a lasting connection between people and the places we call home.”

The Stream and Storm Team program is a partnership amongst the Skagit Conservation District, Padilla Bay Reserve, Skagit County, shellfish growers, and three cities.

Padilla Bay Reserve staff work closely with the Conservation District, County water quality experts, and partners in developing standardized sampling protocols, quality assurance plans, volunteer training, and data management systems to support data that would be robust, reliable, and useful for management decisions. 

“With experience from implementing the NERRS’ System-wide Monitoring Program, the Padilla Bay Reserve is able to contribute to the Stream Team program with technical aspects of collecting water quality data, managing data, making the data available, and continuously engaging users of the data to ensure data are informative and relevant,” says Sylvia Yang, the Reserve’s research coordinator. 

The monitoring effort has helped local governments identify pollution sources and respond to emerging issues within watersheds. 

“Skagit County is a large county with many freshwater streams and sloughs that feed into our marine waters,” says Emma Santana, Water Quality Analyst with Skagit County Public Works. “Stream Team helps with additional monitoring on waterways that we just don’t have the capacity to do in our own program. The more eyes on our waters, the better!”

Shellfish growers, like Taylor Shellfish Farms, depend on clean water for their livelihoods. Shellfish live at the interface between land and sea, meaning everything that happens upstream, from stormwater runoff to failing infrastructure, can affect the health of the system and the viability of shellfish harvests. The stakes are high: Washington is the leading U.S. producer of farmed bivalves, with recent annual sales of nearly $150 million.

The data also inform shellfish bed management decisions following major rain events, when elevated river flows can increase the risk of fecal contamination entering coastal waters. In some cases, volunteers collected and reported water quality information during weekends and holidays, times when agency staff were unavailable but when shellfish growers urgently needed current information to determine whether harvesting could safely resume. 

“Shellfish growers in Samish Bay rely on clean water to grow and market our shellfish,” says Bill Dewey, Taylor Shellfish Farms’ Director of Public Affairs. “Stream Team’s work provides data that is helpful in identifying pollution sources that need to be corrected. Their water quality sampling significantly reduces the number of days the bay is closed to harvest.”

This collaborative model reflects the broader value of the National Estuarine Research Reserve System. Rather than working in isolation, the Reserve and partners are working together to help connect people, organizations, and information across the landscape.