Monmouth University Gets $150K Grant To Study Coastal Lakes

WEST LONG BRANCH, NJ – The Monmouth University Urban Coast Institute (UCI) recently received a $150,000 grant from the Jules L. Plangere, Jr. Family Foundations to help monitor the health of coastal lakes.

The grant will allow the Coastal Lakes Observing Network (CLONet) project to continue through the summer of 2023 and purchase handheld probes that measure harmful algal bloom (HAB) levels in their community lakes. The grant will also make it possible for the UCI to establish a citizen science coordinator position to oversee the day-to-day management of CLONet, including the analysis and monitoring of sampling data, organizing coastal lake summits on campus, and guiding multiple CLONet lake groups and individual samplers.

Through the CLONet, university scientists and students have trained and equipped the community to test Monmouth County’s beach-adjacent lakes for temperature, salinity, clarity, and dissolved oxygen levels, then file their readings into an online database.

Since summer 2019, citizen scientists have been testing Deal Lake, Fletcher Lake, Lake Como, Lake Takanassee, Sunset Lake, Sylvan Lake, and Wesley Lake. Monmouth students and scientists have supplemented the data by regularly sampling the same bodies, along with Silver Lake, Spring Lake, Sylvan Lake, and Wreck Pond.

The new probes will enable them for the first time to collect data on HAB biomass that can be contributed to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s (NJDEP) online HAB Interactive Map Reporting and Communication System. Prior, only Monmouth’s scientists and students had access to the equipment, limiting information collection.

“The HABs issue has received increasing attention in New Jersey in the last several years, particularly following the closures of Lake Hopatcong and Greenwood Lake in 2019 that caused major losses in tourism revenue,” said Jason Adolf, who co-leads a HAB Expert Team formed by Gov. Phil Murphy to provide input to the NJDEP and is an endowed Associate Professor of Marine Science and CLONet coordinator for Monmouth.

“Unfortunately, we expect climate change will make HABS all the more common in urbanized areas like the Jersey Shore by overheating our lakes and allowing more intense coastal storms that overload the waters with nutrients. The data collected by CLONet’s citizen scientists can help us get ahead of HAB events by spotting the warning signs instead of repeatedly reacting to them after they occur."