Is the water getting cloudier? If so, why? Is Great Bay still healthy? What can our community do to protect local rivers, estuaries, and streams? These are just a few of the questions PREP has heard while visiting communities across the Piscataqua Region Watershed over the past year.
Every community brings valuable knowledge about its local waterways. They're often the first to notice when something has changed. Through our Water Quality Talks, we've met with residents, municipal leaders, and local organizations to connect those lived experiences with regional science, monitoring data, and practical resources. Together, we explore what's happening, why it's happening, and what communities can do to protect the waterways they care about.
Along the way, we also share communication tools, funding opportunities—including PREPA and Climate Impact Grants—and other resources that can help turn understanding into action.
Over the past year, we’ve had the pleasure meeting with seven cities and towns: in Maine, Eliot; in New Hampshire, Epping, Dover, Greenland, Newfields, Newington, and Newmarket. Thank you to these communities for having us and for your investment in clean water!
Now, we’re looking to keep the momentum going. We are continuing to schedule talks with any municipal community in our watershed.
Want us to bring the tour to your local board or community? Email PREP Director Kalle Matso to start the conversation: Kalle.Matso@unh.edu
Back to Basics: What We Talk About When We Talk About Monitoring Water Quality
Water quality is a way to describe how healthy our rivers, lakes, ponds, and estuaries are. While our waterways may look beautiful, there are a number of factors that help us see how clean it is under the surface. A sampling of these factors include analyzing
- How much nitrogen and phosphorus pollution is in the water? How much oxygen?
- How clear is the water? How deep can sunlight reach?
- What is the temperature of the water?
- How much sediment is in the water, what is in that sediment, and how does that sediment move once it’s in the water?
- What sources do water pollutants come from?
- What about the plants and animals that live in the water? Are they healthy and abundant?
PREP and partners have a robust monitoring protocol that helps us understand the health of our estuaries. Even if you live further from Great Bay or Hampton-Seabrook Estuary, the water in your part of the Piscataqua watershed will eventually lead here. By tracking changes and trends in water quality, PREP and partners provide publicly available data that help everyone in our region make smart, scientifically informed decisions to protect our shared waterways.
Questions People ask at PREP’s Water Quality Talks
We cover a range of topics in our talks. Communities are concerned about contaminants they’ve read about in the news, like PFAS. Most communities in the region face ongoing challenges related to old, failing septic systems. They want to know how big an impact septic systems have on their local waters, or ideas on how to address the significant cost to upgrade multiple failed systems. In Newmarket, NH residents wanted to know if their upgraded Wastewater Treatment Facility was worth their investment and whether it has made a difference (the answer: YES! a big, positive difference!). In Eliot, Maine community members asked about the relationship between increased development, impervious cover (e.g., parking lots, rooftops, roads), protected lands, and water quality. How does it all fit together?
However, the most popular topic was cloudy water. Has the water become cloudier?
As it turns out, cloudy water is a great introduction to explore many of the other questions people had. Our region’s biggest water quality challenge is nonpoint source pollution (or NPS), and it has an important relationship with cloudy water.
Kalle Matso and Michelle Shattuck speak with the Eliot, ME Conservation Commission.
Nonpoint source is water pollution that does not originate from a single location (so sources other than pipes, wastewater treatment facilities, or factories). Rather, nonpoint source pollution comes from diffuse, widespread sources.
A sampling list of sources include:
- Stormwater runoff, which includes runoff from yards, streets, roads, and other land areas after rainfall. As stormwater flows over grounds, buildings and roads, it picks up pet waste, lawn care chemicals (pesticides or herbicides), road salt, trash, sediment. Then it flows directly into our waters.
- Runoff from failing or faulty septic systems, that can leak sewage, nitrogen, and bacteria in the groundwater.
- Runoff from agricultural fields, which may contain animal manure, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.
- Runoff from air pollution deposited onto land and water (or, atmospheric deposition)
Generally speaking, nonpoint source pollution challenges become more intense in places with more hard surfaces and development (sometimes called, impervious cover), aging or failing infrastructure, fewer conserved lands, and fewer vegetative buffers along waterways.
The water turns cloudier.
As it turns out, protecting water quality also means protecting our quality of life. Clean, clear water has many benefits because they support our drinking water sources, support our swimming, fishing, paddle boarding recreation, and they also support the homes for the fish, crabs, oysters, and eelgrass that depend on it.
Runoff pollution is challenging to tackle, but we heard from passionate community members who want to do exactly that.
Video: Learn more about the impacts of stormwater runoff on our watershed and what you can do about it. Download this free resource from PREP's Stormwater Toolkit as a complete 5-minute video or as short, shareable chapter clips.
Making the Data Work for You: Understanding Water Quality Data in an Accessible Way
While the term nonpoint source pollution might be a newer concept to community members, their observations are more familiar: cloudy water, algal blooms, beach and lake closures after a large storm, infrastructure headaches, and ecological disturbances like eelgrass decline.
In our Water Quality Talks, we connect what people are seeing to the science behind it. We clarify how nonpoint source pollution (like excess nutrients, suspended solids, and dissolved organic matter) is contributing to declining water quality. There is so much information to consider, and the data can be difficult to interpret. PREP’s goal is to translate our region’s water quality data into information they can be used to inform local decisions.
To do this, we use a range of methods to help people understand water quality challenges. We show underwater footage of our region’s habitats. We’ve walked residents through graphs and plots, providing explanations for otherwise confusing trends.
Importantly, we’ve linked these water quality trends with practical next steps. Our talks explore how management actions can positively impact water quality—from where and how we develop land to managing stormwater and conserving our forests, wetlands, and other natural areas. We’ve shared communications tools, technical assistance, and funding opportunities, to help communities make these actions possible. We also highlight recommendations from our Piscataqua Region Environmental Planning Assessment (PREPA), that provides planning and regulation recommendations for each municipality in the watershed.
Water Quality is a complex topic and can carry a lot of nuanced conversation! If we know a community is interested in a topic beyond our expertise, we can bring in a trusted partner to share in the discussion. For example, in Newington, NH specialists from the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services (NH DES) presented on PFAS after our introductory water quality talk. For communities interested in their connection between fresh water and saltier estuarine water, we invited our close collaborator and researcher Michelle Shattuck of the NH Water Resources Research Center at the University of New Hampshire to present her data on fresh water flows and tributaries.
Each time we give a presentation, we tailor that presentation for the community we met with, providing them with both a local perspective on the bay, river, or creek they care about most.
Keep the Conversation Going
Residents and community members care deeply about our watershed. By continuing to pursue and prioritize clean water efforts regionally, we have a greater opportunity to tackle the challenges we face.
Ready to learn more?
We'd be happy to tailor a presentation to your community's interests and connect residents, local leaders, and organizations with the science, tools, and resources they need to better understand and protect their waterways.
Contact PREP Director Kalle Matso to start the conversation! Kalle.Matso@unh.edu
