Some areas have active water quality monitoring groups, others have built alliances with other towns sharing the estuary watershed, but quite a few are at the beginning stages of thinking about the concept of how land use within the watershed affects coastal water quality. Several monitoring projects, such as the Citizen Stewards program of the Friends of Casco Bay and the Water Evaluation Team at the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve, have paid coordinators. The majority of these monitoring programs now have five years or more of baseline data on water quality conditions in local coastal waters, including temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen and fecal coliform bacteria, and in some locations pH and transparency. The data is used locally to screen for potential pollution sources, to help municipalities and landowners to correct pollution problems and for community education. The Department of Marine Resources uses volunteers to help sample waters for the shellfish classification program, and the Maine DEP looks at volunteer-generated data to help them report about the status of our coastal waters in a report to Congress.
Volunteers also carry out watershed surveys, mapping land use and prioritizing problem sites.
Coastal volunteers are now helping to create a more comprehensive picture of environmental health by monitoring for toxic phytoplankton, conducting intertidal habitat investigations, performing resource surveys of clam populations, conducting assessments of tidal marshes, and by monitoring for certain species of green algae that are thought to be compromising the quality of shellfish beds.