Citizens for the Protection of Waquoit Bay has a new home online at waquoitbay.org! The site you’re reading has been rebuilt from the ground up with one goal: to make it easier for anyone who cares about Waquoit Bay to know what’s happening to it, understand why, and do something about it.
Since 1981, CPWB has worked to restore, preserve and protect the bay and its estuaries in Falmouth and Mashpee. Much of that work depends on people being well informed. Decisions about sewers, septic systems, culverts and river restoration are being made right now in town halls and state offices, and the science behind them is spread across dozens of agencies, universities and newsrooms. We want this site to be the place where it comes together.
What you’ll find
News. Stories that relate to the bay. Sourced from local papers, Cape and statewide newsrooms, and science institutions like WHOI and MBL, gathered in one place and summarized in a few paragraphs, with a link to the original.
Learn. Start with About Waquoit Bay, an overview of the bay, its rivers and its watershed: its history, why nitrogen is the core problem, how a warming climate adds to it, and why recovery is possible. From there:
- The Bay, Explained, our new series of plain-language explainers on topics important to the Bay. Part 1, Too much of a good thing, shows what extra nitrogen does under the surface — and includes a great video explainer too.
- The Research Library, with more than 100 summaries of studies and agency reports on the bay, written for easy understanding and consumption, and each linked to the full source.
- A glossary for the acronyms, technical terms and program names that fill every watershed meeting and news story. Terms are linked wherever they first appear in each post.
- The newsletter archive, the full collection of CPWB’s printed newsletters going back to 2005.
Our Work. The projects CPWB leads and supports, including:
- Storm Drain Adoption: pick a drain near you in Falmouth or Mashpee, check a few times a year and after heavy rain, and log what you see.
- Saving Washburn Island: the full history and timeline of how CPWB was founded during the fight to preserve Washburn Island from development.
Events. A calendar of CPWB events, plus relevant town meetings, hearings and partner events that matter for the Bay, so you’re always up to date on what’s happening.
Get Involved. Become a member, renew, donate, or sign up for email updates on news, events and new research. Members and donors can now join and give online in a couple of minutes.
How and why we use AI
We’ll be straightforward about this, because it matters to us and probably to you.
CPWB is a small, volunteer-driven organization. Keeping a site like this current by hand, reading every local paper, every new study and every town agenda, would take more volunteer hours than we have. So we use AI, specifically Anthropic’s Claude models, to help with the routine parts: scanning news sources and new research for stories about the bay, drafting short summaries in our style, adding relevant meetings to the calendar, and suggesting related reading at the end of articles.
What AI doesn’t do is decide what you read. A person reviews and approves every post before it appears on the site, and editors can rewrite or reject anything. Every post that AI helped draft says “Drafted with AI assistance” and links to our Our use of AI page, which explains exactly what the tools do. No member, donor, or subscriber information is ever shared with the AI.
We hold every summary to the same standard of accuracy we’d expect from a careful scientist. Each one is written from a primary source: the study, agency report, meeting record or news article itself, never a summary of a summary. Every name, date and number is checked against that source before it’s published, and the source is linked at the end of every post so you can read it for yourself. We keep claims at the strength the source gives them: if a study is preliminary or measured only part of the picture, we say so, and if we could read only an abstract rather than the full paper, the post says that too.
There’s a real tension in an environmental group using a technology with its own energy and water footprint, and we don’t want to pretend otherwise. We use it deliberately and sparingly, with a small monthly spending limit, and the Our use of AI page shows our estimated electricity, water and carbon footprint. The site works fine with the AI switched off; using it simply means more of our volunteers’ time goes to protecting the bay rather than to keeping a website up to date.
Tell us what you think
This is a work in progress, and we’d love to hear what’s useful, what’s missing and what you’d like to see next. Get in touch through our contact page, and if you haven’t already, sign up for email updates at the bottom of the home page or become a member.
Drafted with AI assistance from the linked source.
