Like any annual checkup, the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary gets a wellness visit every year on the first Saturday in May.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is seeking volunteers for a one-day event they call “Snapshot Day” because it creates a picture of the health of the watershed.  

From Half Moon Bay to San Simeon, volunteers will fan out into the ten major watersheds that flow into the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary to collect water samples and conduct field experiments.  

The important water quality information collected by hundreds of citizen scientists is used to assess the health of over 100 bodies of water.  

The 24th annual “snapshot day” will happen May 4, from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., but a little training is required first.

People who want to participate must first attend a one-hour class to learn how to clinically collect water from streams and creeks within the watershed. Temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, and conductivity are measured in the field. Other samples are brought to the laboratory for analysis of nutrients and bacteria levels.

In-person training sessions are scheduled for early evenings starting in Santa Cruz on Tuesday, Half Moon Bay on Wednesday, San Simeon on Thursday and Marina on April 29. A virtual session is scheduled for April 30.  

For locations and times, visit the online registration site at tinyurl.com/snapshotday2024 or email lindsay.brown@noaa.gov.

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.