From the Falmouth Enterprise · April 1, 2022 · By Calli Remillard
At a March 28, 2022, meeting devoted to Waquoit Bay, members of Citizens for the Protection of Waquoit Bay urged Falmouth’s Water Quality Management Committee to give the bay more attention, noting it is the Cape Cod Commission’s top-priority watershed in the regional 208 plan. Noah Clemens said CPWB’s subcommittee on alternative technologies was studying floating wetlands and a possible pilot on the Moonakis River, which he said supplies about a quarter of the bay’s freshwater; he added that the Childs and Moonakis/Quashnet rivers together deliver more than 51 kilograms of nitrogen a day, above the TMDL for the whole bay. Chairman Eric T. Turkington explained that Waquoit ranks behind Little Pond and Great Pond because it is far from existing sewer lines and shared with Mashpee, which member Thomas Duncan said accounts for around 40 percent of the bay’s load. Turkington said Falmouth had sent Mashpee a draft agreement and had not heard back.
Jordan Mora, formerly of the Waquoit Bay Reserve and now with the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, then presented research done with Matthew Long of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, drawing on about 20 years of reserve monitoring and Waquoit Baywatchers data. It showed rising nitrogen, a shift from eelgrass and seaweeds on the bottom to phytoplankton in the water, warming water, declining dissolved oxygen (steepest in Sage Lot Pond), increasing acidity, and longer heat waves and low-oxygen events. Mora concluded that the nitrogen limits set from Massachusetts Estuaries Project studies are now outdated and that new models are needed.
This is CPWB’s summary of a news article. The full article and its photos are published by the Falmouth Enterprise.
Drafted with AI assistance from the linked source.
