Abstract
Since the turn of the century, Connecticut and New York have worked together to improve water quality within the Long Island Sound by reducing nutrient loads and contaminants. Along the Sound’s coasts, there remain wide disparities in both environmental and socioeconomic quality of life. This project focused on the Connecticut coast of the Long Island Sound and attempted to assess the relationship between these variables. Specifically, it aimed to explain variation in enterococcus on Connecticut’s beaches, and observe what socioeconomic and geographic parameters had potentially influenced water quality in the area, as well as what impacts this had on beach management practices. This project involved secondary data analysis in which a total of 75 beaches across 24 towns along Connecticut’s coast were studied over a four-year period to analyze presence and persistence of enterococcus and attempt to relate these occurrences to socioeconomic and geographic predictors within the area. Explanatory variables included precipitation, median household income, impervious cover, town area, population, water quality standard failures, beach closures and advisories as well as drainage along the coastline. Data was analyzed using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), frequency and regression analyses. The results of both simple linear and multivariate regression analyses indicated few significant results within these models. Analysis showed that the best predictors for enterococcus were land area and population. However, the only statistically significant relationships were between single-sample enterococcus standard failures and impervious cover, with a p-value of 0.006086, as well as beach actions and impervious cover, with a p-value of 0.046. Additionally, there were 466 single-sample failures, 56.01 percent occurred in dry weather conditions while 43.78 percent followed wet weather events. These results suggested that 1) precipitation may not be an effective indicator for enterococcus contamination in the area, 2) effects of land use and cover should be examined more thoroughly to better understand implications of their association with beach management strategies and 3) there are likely more variables yet to be examined that play a role in explaining this phenomenon. Based on these results, it is suggested that additional work be conducted to determine causes for enterococcus occurrence and variation across beaches on the Connecticut coast.