Parker Gassett is a graduate student of ecology and marine policy at the University of Maine in Orono. His research and practice focus on partnership development for coastal environmental governance. With this interdisciplinary lens, he combines a foundation of ecological sciences with principles of community leadership and societal decision-making processes in his work. In the Northeast, demographic transitions and climate changes are leading to emergent challenges and opportunities for coastal sustainability. By contextualizing adaptation within social and economic transitions, Parker’s work uses cross-disciplinary and team science pedagogies to improve environmental management at a municipal and state scale. Currently, Parker co-leads efforts supported by NOAA and EPA to link citizen science water-monitoring organizations with ocean and coastal acidification research and management.

About Parker‘s ee360 Community Action Project

Nearshore environments and the communities that rely on them are uniquely vulnerable to ocean and coastal acidification, yet we lack comprehensive monitoring at spatial and temporal scales in order to provide actionable information. While there are a small number of existing long-term, decadal and climate-scale coastal acidification monitoring sites, including National Estuarine Research Reserves, crowdsourced monitoring in collaboration with water quality stakeholders offers an opportunity to vastly expand monitoring of nearshore acidification. Many existing citizen science water-quality monitors in the Northeast United States already measure carbonate chemistry and are well positioned to investigate coastal acidification processes alongside traditional priorities for marine habitat protection, nutrient pollution, and watershed management. Based on a recent EPA publication (“Guidelines for Measuring Changes in Seawater pH and Associated Carbonate Chemistry in Coastal Environments of the Eastern United States”), Parker helped conduct a series of online and hands-on stakeholder training workshops in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine, with more than 40 community water-monitoring programs. The workshops focused on approaches for calibrating pH measurements and expanding the sampling of total alkalinity and dissolved inorganic carbon.

Parker’s ee360 Community Action Project will develop a method for acidification “blitz sampling events”. This novel approach would provide a big-picture view of vulnerability to acidification across the Northeast and could offer coastal decision makers with actionable information to implement tailored adaptation and mitigation strategies at a local scale.