It felt great to be back at the Wells NERR after being away for four months, especially since I had spent much of that time wading through reams of data on dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll-a, and dissolved organic nitrogen from our four System Wide Monitoring Program (SWMP) sites in the Webhannet and Little River estuaries.

Dr. Suzanne Bricker from NOAA NCCOS came from her Silver Spring, Maryland, office to meet for two days with Dr. Michele Dionne of Wells NERR, Fred Dillon of FB Environmental, and me on our project called ASSETS. Our goal is to use a model of eutrophication (nutrient pollution) to evaluate the degree of the nutrient pollution problem at five northeast NERRs.

Besides reviewing pages and pages of numerical data, we also value the personal knowledge that researchers have accumulated over their careers. We are visiting Narragansett Bay, Waquoit Bay on Cape Cod, and Great Bay in New Hampshire to collect data the old-fashioned way, by directly talking to many scientists who have dedicated their working lives to understanding these estuaries. Look for more information on this project in spring 2006.