It’s more of a red teardrop, actually, plotted almost exactly on a dot-and-dashed line that splits Cold Spring Harbor in half, the Town of Huntington in Suffolk County, NY on one side, the Town of Oyster Bay in Nassau County on the other.
The story this spot tells is the water quality history of monitoring station FB-1, location at 40.87277778 degrees latitude, -73.47361111 longitude. In a few clicks, you can find the results of a few hundred dissolved oxygen readings collected between 8:55 a.m. on April 3, 2006 and 8:49 a.m. on October 17, 2023. Or you could look at the results of the samples tested for Enterococcus, the fecal indicator bacteria that is used by the states of New York and Connecticut to determine safe-swimming criteria in saltwater.
Not long ago, if you were interested in the story of this single monitoring station, you would have had to find which of the five drawers in which of the six file cabinets inside an office in Oyster Bay housed the exact field datasheet you were looking for.
Not anymore. In February, Save the Sound rolled out QuickDrops, the first database of its kind designed to collect, manage, and widely share water quality data specific to the Long Island Sound watershed. Funded and supported by the Long Island Sound Funders Collaborative, New York Community Trust, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Long Island Regional Planning Council, and the Jeniam Foundation, QuickDrops was built to serve the full community of stakeholders: community science groups, researchers and educators, health departments and water resource managers, municipal leaders, and even members of the media. It provides a free user-friendly platform for data collectors to upload their data (so they’re not entombed in someone’s filing cabinet or hovering in some organization’s Cloud account), as well as a clearinghouse for water quality data of all sorts for data users.
“When we have more data, we can make better decisions in managing our water resources,” said Peter Linderoth, director of healthy waters and lands for Save the Sound.
Access to data is one thing. But if data can be displayed in a way that helps people who aren’t fluent in the language of water quality parameters understand the story the data is telling, a platform can be more effective for more people.
“One of my teachers in grad school always said, ‘What’s the point of collecting data if you’re not communicating it?’” said Caroline Fabian, program coordinator for Friends of the Bay, who uploaded decades of her organization’s data as one of the platform’s early users before its launch.
A lot of organizations produce reports on data they collect annually, but not many have the resources to analyze years of data to look for the kind of trends that could be instructive.
“QuickDrops has been great for that,” said Fabian (pictured at left with Amanda and Christine to the right). “Being able to make a graph in under a minute that shows me ten years of data on a given parameter can help us put all the work we’ve done over time to better use.”
There are so many possible applications for sharing all the water quality data that will now live under the same Sound-centered roof. Teachers can use QuickDrops to create tables that help their students understand, say, dissolved oxygen levels in their local waterbody. Reporters can customize line graphs to illustrate a story about Enterococci levels at a given beach during a given swimming season.
“It’s so easy to make charts and graphs,” said Rick Landau of the Ash Creek Conservation Association, and another early adopter of QuickDrops. “It makes the data make sense.”
Better informed students. Better informed residents. Better informed elected officials. It all leads to the same place. “More data leads to a better understanding of the water quality challenges facing a waterbody, which in turn drives smarter solutions,” said Linderoth ■.
Save the Sound works across the Long Island Sound region to protect the Sound and its rivers, fight climate change, save endangered lands, and work with nature to restore ecosystems. More info at savethesound.org.
