From community to science to community, enhancing remote sensing of water quality in Chesapeake Bay tributaries through participatory science

Citizen, or participatory, science provides a powerful tool to both enrich environmental datasets as well as increase public awareness of pressing environmental issues - especially in coastal regions. Here, we used rich bio-optical datasets collected by trained volunteers to develop, optimize, and validate new satellite retrievals of key water quality indicators in the economically and ecologically valuable tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay Estuary. The optimized algorithms were applied to imagery from Landsat/OLI, Sentinel-2/MSI, and Sentinel-3/OLCI, and effectively captured the temporal and spatial distribution of turbidity, chlorophyll-a concentration, and dissolved organic matter dynamics in both optically complex tributaries and the main stem of the Bay. Our results highlight the significant benefits of engaging volunteers in estuarine water quality monitoring activities, particularly for participatory data collection, standardized data collection across coastal systems, and improvement of satellite biogeochemical retrievals in complex nearshore waters that directly impact coastal communities and economies.