Solutions-Centered Data to Address Water Quality Threats: The SaltWatch Dashboard

By Peggy Chen, Duke + NCSSM Summer Internship

Explore the dashboard yourself here, and if you would like to, we welcome anonymous feedback through this form. 

Sea level rise and saltwater intrusion (SWISLR) act together to collectively alter socio-ecological systems on coastlines. There’s a lot of work required of scientists and coastal residents to make solutions work – and even then, it’s an uphill battle to combat an issue with such an extensive scope of effects. This summer I worked in the Bernhardt Lab with Kiera O’Donnell and Heili Lowman helping with a SWISLR RCN project that addressed SWISLR solutions holistically. 

​The overarching goal that guides this project is to quantify perceived and actual water quality risks due to SWISLR for rural coastal communities in North Carolina. This is invaluable to understanding and sharing the future actions residents in these vulnerable areas can take to safeguard themselves and their families from the threats of SWISLR. 

But before we can get started on testing water quality and guiding community discussions, we wondered: what has already been done to address coastal water quality threats? We were especially interested in how human infrastrucutre like septic and well water systems were at risk. These systems are hypothesised to be compromized with the rising saltwater but there is not a clear answer to how much water is too much water for these coastal systems. Scientists may be able to estimate an answer based on the literature they read or produce, but for informing on the ground solutions and actions this isn’t such an easy question to answer. 

1. The SaltWatch Dashboard

Our first goal was to create an interactive dashboard using R. The focus of this project was science communication – ultimately, we want to empower coastal communities with a solution-centered tool. 

We started by compiling databases of literature, with an emphasis on stories and solutions that highlighted the amazing resilience of communities in the midst of extensive threats to their water quality and health. Just as we wanted the dashboard to be for anyone, regardless of their background in current environmental research, we decided to expand our scope beyond research articles. Our belief was that in searching beyond academic literature, we could find unexpected and undiscovered solutions that communities in need of solutions can find inspiring and useful. 

We filled two databases, one for solutions and one for stories, with news coverage, virtual webinars, policy proposals, podcast episodes, and other forms of media. Although neither was a comprehensive review of the material out there, it did represent many of the stories of communities on the coast. 

The stories and solutions were then added to an interactive map that allowed users to sort the stories by date, location, or even the type of source it came from. Even though the emphasis of our dashboard is on North Carolina, we found that work done in other states – and countries, too! We had an article from Bangladesh – could be helpful to communities navigating SWISLR-related changes. For example, the University of Arizona discussed a constructed wetland initiative to absorb wastewater from a nearby dairy farm. We weren’t able to find a similar project in North Carolina, so we decided to add this article to our database. 

​The solutions we took from our literature search was synthesized into categories that allowed users to sort by criteria like the duration, location, and type. We found a similar resource on the American Flood Coalition’s Flood Funding Finder which categorized flood relief programs by metrics similar to the way that we did.
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Just as SWISLR impacts social-ecological systems, the solutions we chose also approached the problem in ways that reflect the intersectional nature of the problems caused by this issue. In particular, solutions like implementing living shorelines we found to be compelling because it not only improves water quality, but also contributes to a plethora of benefits to fisheries, biodiversity, and recreation for residents. In this way, the solutions database encompasses the various facets through which communities can combat SWISLR. ​

2. Water Quality Analysis

After exploring and reviewing many of the actions taken by communities in the coastal plain, I found myself wanting to look into the more technical side of the research. I knew how people are responding to this threat, but what are the numbers that can quantify the extent of this issue? While I didn’t have enough time to sample coastal water, I had a useful resource introduced to me by Heili Lowman: the United States Geological Survey (USGS) vast and extensive repository of nationwide water quality data.
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I focused on the National Water Information System (NWIS) specific conductance data, and conducted some exploratory data analysis on the numbers. I generated a few plots and graphs to give me an overview of what the data looks like. But, whether this data is complete and representative of North Carolina’s water quality will require further investigation.  For instance, in generating scatterplots for several of the sites, some came back with only several data points – not enough to tell the full story. 

If we could find whether testing locations that have more measurements tend to cluster in certain areas, that could lead us to determine whether certain waterways were being tested more frequently or not frequent enough. The following map drove much displays all the USGS locations in North Carolina that measured specific conductance after 2000. However, the color scale on the right also told us how many measurements each site took. As you can see many sites are a light blue, meaning that very few measurments were taken there. If we focus on the sites that have a high amount of measurments, we will have a much more accurate characterization of the salinity in that area.

​These are just preliminary findings, but we hope that other researchers have or will soon pick up on investigations that probe deeper not at the stories that data tells, but the stories of data itself. To anyone interested in exploring this further, we included links to datasets from the USGS, EPA, and the North Carolina Department of Water Resources on SaltWatch.

3. Takeaways

​In the coming months, this project will shift to sharing our dashboard with the coastal communities themselves! We received fruitful feedback from an array of stakeholders in the SWISLR field, and are excited to see this model of research communication delivered to a larger audience. By informing residents in North Carolina on what other people have done to fight SWISLR, we’re hoping for some engaging discussions about how we can collectively move forward to combat water quality threats in a way that suits the resources, goals, and values of each individual community.
 
We hope our work this summer also demonstrates the fascinating and imperative intersection of the social and environmental sciences. By both asking about people’s stories and resilience in the face of SWISLR and by quantifying coastal water quality, forming solutions will take more than just a single field of science to accomplish.
 
Explore the dashboard yourself here, and if you would like to, we welcome anonymous feedback through this form.