Harmful Algal Bloom Monitoring to Protect Mid-Atlantic Waters and Communities

Partners/CoPIs: St Mary’s College of MD (Emily Brownlee) and UMCES (Greg Silsbe)

Partners at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and UMCES are developing a unified, community-driven phytoplankton image library within the MARACOOS database to support regional HAB monitoring. The project brings image collections from IFCB, PlanktoScope, and FlowCam instruments together into a standardized library for the Mid-Atlantic region. Images will be organized by instrument type and species with relevant metadata for easy access and use. Through a regional user workshop and input from existing projects, the team will establish shared data management practices and create clear guidance for contributing, uploading, and downloading image sets. They will also maintain a GitHub repository featuring Python-based image classification tools trained on the new MARACOOS libraries, expanding the resource’s value and encouraging collaborative data sharing across the Mid-Atlantic.

North-East Shelf LTER research cruises, spanning from Cape Hatteras to the Gulf of Maine, collect long-term phytoplankton and water column data to track HAB species and year-to-year variability. Dr. Mulholland’s lab will use EcoTaxa to analyze IFCB imaging data, focusing on current and emerging HABs in under-monitored areas of the Mid-Atlantic. Data from the Pioneer Array near Cape Hatteras and semi-annual servicing cruises d will be included, with the annotated IFCB database hosted on MARACOOS OceansMap as the regional hub for phytoplankton imagery. This work will improve the understanding of HAB presence in unmonitored waters and identify species potentially emerging due to a changing climate.

The Harmful Algal Bloom and Hypoxia Research and Control Amendments Act (HABHRCA) established an interagency working group of 13 federal agencies to improve detection, monitoring, assessment, and forecasting of HABs. NOAA leads for marine and Great Lakes waters, while EPA co-chairs and focuses on freshwater, with both agencies using satellites and monitoring programs to produce HAB forecasts and respond to HAB events. Currently, their data systems are separate, making it challenging to create a unified national view of HABs. Integrating these datasets could improve understanding of factors driving blooms—such as wind, currents, temperature, nutrients, and salinity—and support research on HABs as a climate change co-stressor affecting aquatic ecosystems. MARACOOS aims to advance interoperability by engaging NOAA and EPA stakeholders, reviewing their HABs data holdings, and developing a prototype framework to connect key datasets for more comprehensive analysis and forecasting.

Assets & Technologies:

• Predictive Models
• Water Quality

Partners

• Virginia Institute of Marine Science
• Old Dominion University
• NOAA NCCOS