Swim, Drink, Fish

As water temperatures rise and masses of algae bloom each summer in the two Great Lakes that cradle Niagara, a $20,000 grant from the Niagara Community Foundation’s Environmental Fund is encouraging community members to become scientists and waterkeepers — and to go to the beach!

Swim, Drink, Fish — a national organization that strives to create swimmable, drinkable, fishable water — regularly collected and tested samples from five Niagara beaches, helping to create an invaluable record that can be used by policy makers to protect shorelines and water.

But in addition to shaping decision-making to protect water and shoreline health, the project had a more immediate goal: to encourage people to visit, walk, play and swim at Niagara beaches.

“We have a motto, ‘connection is protection’,” said Megan Coad, manager of technology and innovation. “Our goal is to get the community to care about their water and to foster a love and relationship with it, so they’re invested in restoring it.”

Beach visitors are also being encouraged to join Swim, Drink, Fish and its partnership with Niagara Coastal Community Collective to document what they observe through the VAST initiative. Changes in algae levels are an important tool in evaluating water quality and in restoring our relationship with the water.

Swim, Drink, Fish is asking “at what point does algae start to inhibit people from enjoying the shoreline and from recreating in the water?” Coad said. “Eliminating algae entirely is not an option, because it’s supposed to be there. But when does it become a problem? That’s what we’re trying to identify.”

Niagara Region deems some beaches unsafe for swimming because of the presence of algae, but algae on its own does not necessarily make water unsafe, Coad said. So, volunteer beach visitors are being trained to spend 15 minutes weekly, taking pictures at predetermined locations and recording coastal conditions, including whether there is enough algae in the water or on shore to fill a backpack, a wheelbarrow, a pickup truck or a dumpster, and whether they would still swim or play there. Is it rotting? Does it smell? Is the beach being cleaned and raked?

“It’s a low-barrier way for anyone to contribute to coastline observations,” said Kyle Chuckry, an environmental technician with Swim, Drink Fish, who did the testing. It gives people a way to care about ecosystem health.

Swim, Drink, Fish is sharing the data with other researchers and hopes to combine community-based research with scientific drone footage that can measure the volume and type of algae in the water and on land.

And they hope to do it for as long as possible and in as many places as possible, Coad said. “The power in environmental data comes with long-term monitoring.

“Our big goal is to get more people out,” she said. “We care deeply about community science. And anybody can do this. Everyone has a part to play, in caring about the water and changing our ecosystem for the better.”