Abstract
Water quality monitoring is a crucial component for any city or township as its results are used to pinpoint changes in local water bodies over time. In the historically poor quality waters of New York and Connecticut, monitoring has become essential for identifying point and non-point sources of pollution, as well as providing remediation strategies for these issues. With an extensive history of anthropogenic inputs—including industrial-, agricultural-, and community-based pollutants—the Long Island Sound (LIS) has gone from being a pristine tidal estuary to one that suffers from ongoing bouts of hypoxia and eutrophication. Therefore, this study involved the collection of water quality data from various Long Island Sound embayments to not only continue an ongoing (since 2017) water quality monitoring program, but also to gain insight on current trends and find possible connections to landuse practices. From June to October, weekly spot samplings were performed using a multiparameter sonde to collect dissolved oxygen (% & mg/L), turbidity (NTU), salinity (SAL), temperature (°C) and chlorophyll (RFU & µg/L) at 42 sites spread across the Connecticut and New York coasts, 33 of which were analyzed in this paper (Figure 4). Pearson correlations were used to assess relationships between the watershed’s landuses and their measured levels of dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll-a, and turbidity. Overall, the correlations were relatively weak (highest R2 = 0.42); however, each of the correlations were found to be statistically significant (p < 0.01). Not only were impervious surfaces found to contribute toward negative water quality indicators, but so too did greenspace correlate to increased chlorophyll-a levels. Therefore, increasing greenspace should not be considered as the only solution for offsetting the amount of impervious surfaces a watershed has. Instead, greenspaces need to be differentiated from natural spaces so that pollution absorbers like wetlands can be implemented over other seemingly beneficial greenspaces—such as parks, lawns and golf courses.