Apalachicola Bay Water Quality Station Cleaning and Maintenance

This week, ANERR research staff were able to complete routine cleaning and maintenance of their 5 water quality monitoring stations. Over time, the PVC tubes that house our water quality monitoring equipment become biofouled from barnacles, oysters, algae, mud, and more. This can alter the conditions within the tube, creating a microcosm that is not representative of the water surrounding it. To prevent this, as well as to ensure quality data collection, staff dive the stations quarterly to clean, inspect, and perform maintenance on the tubes. Data will now be checked to see if any measurements were altered after being cleaned to see if the tube was impacting the data.

Additionally, staff installed another piece of water quality monitoring equipment outside the tube of one station to evaluate any differences in the conditions inside the tube versus outside of it.