It is a standardized monitoring exercise which employs a beach seine to capture, count and release fish and marco-invertebrates along various estuaries in the Southern Gulf of St.Lawrence during the summer months. In addition, the exercise includes monitoring the quality of water for temperature, turbidity, salinity, dissolved oxygen using a YSI 85 hand-held probe; and testing for nutrient analyses (nitrate, nitrite, phosphate, ammonia and silicate). CAMP succeeds in doing all this with the participation of community groups and their volunteers to safely monitor their local estuaries in a consistent format. These groups are situated along or near the 35 sample sites throughout the provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island along the Southern Gulf of St.Lawrence, with approximately 19 of these sites in the Northumberland Strait.
 
The project includes training the summer student coordinators and the community groups, and their volunteers, where they learn the methodology and protocols for sampling their estuaries. Recruited volunteers include students, seniors, community group board members, etc. By engaging these volunteers in the CAMP monitoring activities, citizens become educated about their local estuaries and are more apt to adopt sustainable practices in order to conserve them.
 
Counting the aquatic species collected through CAMP permits each group to quantify in their respective estuaries the diversity of aquatic and invasive species in each sampling site and to compare trends over time. Monitoring these indicators allows groups to document estuary changes and to react quickly to any problems. 

 

Typically, sampling stations are selected by considering the following criteria: convenient road access to the shore; presence or past occurence of some degree of eelgrass, comparable physical characteristics such as salinity, depth, bottom type and vegetation and selection of 6 stations to incorporate and characterize the entire estuary as much as possible. Finally, some stations within a site were chosen to capture a specific concern of point source pollution such as fish processing plant or sewage treatment plant for example.

 

CAMP Pamphlet

 

The link below brings you to a recent Department of Fisheries and Oceans technical report that was written by MArie-Hélène Thériault and Simon Courtenay on the results of the calibration exercise for the CAMP nutrient analyses. http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/Library/345195.pdf