Community Aquatic Monitoring
Program (CAMP)
What is
CAMP?
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 occurrence 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.
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
