Community-Based Monitoring in the Saint John Harbour

The goal of this project was to create a field program in the Saint John Harbour to collect

aquatic environmental data on water quality, fish communities, and sediment PAHs in line

with Fisheries and Oceans’ Coastal Environmental Baseline Monitoring Program. The

2018 sampling season served as a pilot year for building the Harbour Baseline Monitoring

Program, and there have been four full sampling seasons since. Water quality was

analyzed at 22 sites, and of these sites, 13 were also sampled for sediment contaminants

and eight sites were surveyed for nekton communities via beach seine and fyke net. There

was generally good water quality at most Harbour sites, except for certain sites, especially

those in Marsh Creek and Little River. Marsh Creek and Little River are two streams

known to have historic contamination from industrial and municipal effluents. We collected

a total of 41,715 fish and invertebrates, representing 38 species, in beach seines and

fyke nets across the eight fishing sites