Cape Cod and South-Eastern Massachusetts is home to a thriving shellfish aquaculture industry. These aquaculture farmers, as well as regulators and wild harvesters, rely on water quality conditions to operate, and accurate data can help to properly operate their business. Changes in water temperature, chlorophyll concentration or dissolved oxygen are important as farmers make decisions to manage their farms and harvest the product. Having access to real time information specific to the growing area, as well as long term data is valuable for both farmers and regulators to track seasonal trends as well as changes over time. Cape Cod Cooperative Extension has been maintaining long term monitoring at sites across the region for over 20 years at some locations, but has lacked an ability to provide data in real time at most of these sites.
To make the data available in near real-time, water quality instruments need to be connected to telemetry devices. This equipment can often be cost prohibitive and technically challenging at sites that are intertidal in nature. Working with some lower cost telemetry equipment (In-Situ Inc.) and a software engineer (Interactive Oceanographics) for web hosting, Cape Cod Cooperative Extension has been able to provide a more cost-effective option to bringing telemetry to all six locations. These devices work in conjunction with water quality sondes and currently upload to a custom public website designed. The website updates every few hours and allows any interested party to view real time data, graph recent data or download raw data. Archived and quality-controlled data is always freely available upon request.