Seventeen projects involving 27 reserves across the nation and totaling more than $2 million have been recommended for support by NOAA’s National Estuarine Research Reserve System (NERRS) Science Collaborative.

The Habitat Heartbeats project is developing a monitoring system to integrate living organisms such as oysters and mussels ("biosentinels”) with existing monitoring efforts.

The Habitat Heartbeats project was featured during the 2023 virtual symposium showcasing recent scientific studies related to the restoration and health of San Diego estuaries including the Tijuana River Estuary, San Diego Bay, and Los Peñasquitos Lagoon.

A peer-reviewed article describing several of the biosensor tools and the design process used to build them, as part of the 2021 Collaborative Research project incorporating bivalve biosensors into estuary monitoring infrastructure. 

Poster: Drones can revolutionize research and monitoring…can’t they? (NERRS/NERRA Annual Meeting 2020)

Project Lead Brandon Puckett (North Carolina National Estuarine Research Reserve) gives an introduction to "Bridging the Gap between Quadrats and Satellites: Assessing Utility of Drone-based Imagery to Enhance Emergent Vegetation Biomonitoring," aka "Drone the SWMP," a catalyst project funded in

The 2020-2022 catalyst project  Bridging the gap between quadrats and satellites: assessing utility of drone-based imagery to enhance emergent vegetation biomonitoring conducted a regionally coordinated effort, working in salt marshes an

The 2020-2021 catalyst project Refining Techniques for High-Frequency Monitoring of Chlorophyll in the NERRS brought together twelve biogeochemically diverse reserves to compare results from new YSI in situ sensor technology with ex

Monitoring plays a central role in detecting climate and anthropogenic stressors and associated changes in wetlands. There is a need for wetland monitoring programs to bridge the gap between ground-based surveys, which can miss important spatial heterogeneity and cause wetland disturbance, a