For 22 years, MLML has led a team of volunteers and scientists that monitors the health of coastal California by surveying beaches from Santa Cruz County to Los Angeles County. The Beach Coastal Ocean Mammal and Bird Education and Research Surveys (BeachCOMBERS) began in 1997 with the objective to train citizen scientists to collect standardized scientific data within the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
Since then, the program has expanded to Southern California and 150 volunteers who document the deposition of marine birds, mammals and turtles. During the first week of each month, survey teams record the number of deaths, species, cause of death (if known) and effects of oil on beachcast specimens. Cases of oil spills, fishery interactions (entanglements), harmful algal blooms (HABs) and plastic ingestion have been documented.
Resource managers have used the data to change the policies on fishing practices to reduce fishery interactions. This long-term dataset was used to recognize that oil was seeping from the USS Jacob Luckenbach, a vessel shipwrecked off San Francisco in 1953. Winter storms often caused the ship to shift and some oil to escape, leading to the deaths of thousands of seabirds. The source of the oil was identified when the oil on the birds was “fingerprinted,” which identified the source of the oil It generated the will and resources to remove the oil from the sunken vessel. Several large die-offs of seabirds occurred throughout the west coast of North America and were attributed to starvation. The migrating birds were mostly juvenile birds that were not finding enough fish. The long-term monitoring also determined that an increase in HABs have affected seabirds and the fish they ate. HABs have been responsible for shutting down the California Dungeness crab fishery, and can have ecosystem impacts from benthic invertebrates to pelagic fishes to higher level predators that are monitored.
BeachCOMBERS is an excellent example of citizen scientists conducting a rigorous science project for years. This project is a collaboration with the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Service.