Life on the Beach
Beach Watchers Survey Intertidal Zone
As published in the Volunteer Monitor Newsletter, Volume 14, Number 1, Winter 2002
by Eleanor Ely

Across the continent from the Maine and Massachusetts beach profilers described in [a] preceding article [of Volume 14 No. 1, Winter 2002], volunteers in Washington State are using yet another version of the Emery rod method-but the beaches they are profiling look very different. While the New England volunteers move their profiling rods across broad expanses of sand, the Island County/Washington State University (WSU) Beach Watchers clamber over rocky terrain covered with slippery seaweeds. Most of the beaches they monitor are on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, near Seattle.

"Our beaches are teeming with life," says Beach Watcher Jan Holmes, who's been involved with the program for 11years. Nonhuman life, that is. No throngs of tourists crowd these beaches, which are notably short on surf, sun, and (in most cases) sand. But those attributes so prized by humans are just about the opposite of what most intertidal life forms consider desirable. What small worm or snail wants to be pounded by waves and washed every which way on moving sand, only to be left high and dry when the tide goes out? Give them a nice pebbly beach lapped by low-energy waves. Such a place offers lots of amenities: attachment spots for seaweeds, barnacles, and anemones; hiding places for crabs and amphipods; sheltered patches of sand for clams and burrowing worms. Throw in some fog to keep everything moist between tides, and you've got-from the invertebrate perspective-prime shorefront real estate.

Different environments lead to different priorities for volunteer monitors. On Whidbey Island, beach profiling is not an end in itself, as it is for New England groups tracking erosion, but just the first (and easiest) step in an ambitious program to inventory and monitor intertidal life. Within a 10-foot swath along the profile line, Beach Watchers note the presence and location of several substrate types; some two dozen categories of invertebrates (snails, mussels, sea stars, limpets, worms, and many others); and red, green, and brown seaweeds. Surveys are done at low tide when the maximum area is exposed. The results are summarized in a graph on which the basic profile line is festooned with multicolored lines and shapes showing the tidal elevation range at which each substrate or organism type was observed (see illustration on page 8;unfortunately, the colors can't be reproduced here).

Actually this graph, dense with information as it is, displays only part of the Beach Watchers' work. After the profile line and presence/absence survey are completed, volunteers turn to the quantitative portion of their monitoring. They lay out transects to determine nine locations for detailed data collection-three each at the plus-1-foot, zero-foot, andminus-1-foot tide levels. At each site, volunteers place a quarter-meter quadrat frame within which they identify and quantify (by count or percent cover) every plant and animal. Currently Beach Watchers conduct surveys on 28 beaches.

"Every time I go through the field sheets and enter the data I'm just flabbergasted that we talked 85 or 90 people into doing all this," says Holmes. "And for the most part it's the same people who have kept it up year after year."

Honing the methods
Beach Watchers started in 1990, the same year Holmes joined, but it took five years to arrive at the final beach monitoring methods. Don Meehan, chair of Island County/WSU Cooperative Extension and founder of Beach Watchers, says, "I knew I wanted Beach Watchers to do a biological assessment, but I had a hard time finding a model." Meehan was interested in the biology because, he explains, "I think of the intertidal area as an indicator zone for the health of both the upland area and the marine waters."

Meehan assigned a student assistant to look for other monitoring programs doing similar work, but she could find none anywhere in the United States. Finally the search led to Jack Serwold, a marine biology professor at a local community college, who had developed protocols for beach profiling and biological assessment and was willing to train Beach Watcher volunteers. Serwold set the program moving in the right direction, but some of the methods he was using, such as scraping organisms off rocks and weighing them to calculate biomass, proved to be too involved for the volunteers.

Volunteers take the lead
At this juncture, the volunteers themselves took on the responsibility for revising the methods. Fortunately the program had several very knowledgeable volunteers-including Holmes, who had been inspired by her involvement with Beach Watchers to pursue a master's degree in marine biology. "Beach Watchers attracts people who like science and want to learn," says Meehan.

The volunteers formed a committee and proceeded, as Holmes describes it, to spend "hundreds of hours grinding away at a workable solution." At one point they considered offering participants a whole range of options. "Some people are intimidated by the word 'data,' " says Holmes, "so we thought, let's have a continuum-some people can just take pictures or keep a journal." But ultimately the group decided they needed consistent methods that everyone would follow. In1995, following a great deal of research and trial-and error, they settled on the current protocols.

Most people would probably say that the Beach Watchers' methods are still quite demanding. Volunteer monitors go through two full days of initial training plus additional workshops and are called upon to identify dozens of organisms. Yet, Holmes points out, the compromises that were made to accommodate volunteer monitors do impose certain limitations compared to a research-level study. Most beaches are monitored just once a year, making seasonal comparisons impossible, and the relatively small number of quadrats used means that only the more prevalent organisms will be observed. "But you can't do it all," says Holmes. "I think we are at just about the right level."

By now all the volunteers are very adept at profiling their beaches and collecting the presence/absence data, but the quadrat study, with its requirement for genus-level identification, still poses a challenge for some. Here again, the program's "expert" volunteers come to the rescue, accompanying less experienced teams on their surveys. "You can't imagine all the time they're investing," Meehan says of this core group of volunteers. "Their dedication and time and knowledge are really what makes this program successful."

Beach Watchers also has a strong outreach component that includes public workshops, visits to school classrooms, and an annual water festival. Meehan says, "Our volunteers have to learn all these organisms; they have to understand what goes on in the intertidal zone. That gives them the ability to communicate to the public that this is a very special and very sensitive place, full of special organisms."

Beach Watchers' procedures are described in detail in the program's training manual, Beach Monitoring Procedures; available from Island County/WSU Beach Watchers, P.O. Box5000, Coupeville, WA; 360-679-7391(PDF format free via email; hard copy $20). For additional information, contact Don Meehan at meehan@wsu.edu or BeachWatchers Program Coordinator Sarah Schmidt at sarahs@wsu.edu.