When the environmental organization Save the Sound released its biennial report card on the water quality in bays surrounding the Long Island Sound last week, it was thanks to the unified work of 31 environmental organizations. For the past 10 seasons, this consortium has worked to document the health of more than 50 bays and harbors surrounding Long Island Sound.
Pictured Above: (l-r) Dr. John Gross, Bob Mozer, Ethan Cuggino-Zensky and Aspen Lee after testing the waters at Mattituck Inlet Sept. 4.
The Unified Water Study, funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Long Island Sound Partnership, brings together scientists using the same sampling protocols from coastal Connecticut through Westchester and the boroughs of New York City and along Long Island’s North Shore.
“These groups come from all different backgrounds — community science groups, 100 percent volunteer groups or NGOs, municipalities and consulting groups,” Peter Lindroth, director of healthy waters and lands at Save the Sound, told us in an interview earlier this month. “We’ve developed a system where we make it as achievable as possible for all groups to attain high quality data, and all the groups have hands-on training with the instruments used to collect the data.”
Much of the work is done in bays that hug the western portion of the Long Island Sound, where water quality can vary dramatically due to differing land use issues in the areas surrounding the bays.
This year, Save the Sound has begun a new partnership with the Citizen Science Learning Center of Remsenburg to monitor the health of Mattituck and Goldsmith inlets on the North Fork. They are wrapping up their first full year of data, and their results will be a part of the 2028 Long Island Sound Report Card.
A group of four scientists from CSLC, led by the organization’s founder, Bob Mozer, alternate weeks visiting each inlet in the wee hours just after dawn from May through October — a crucial time of day to take measurements, especially of dissolved oxygen, which decreases at night when aquatic vegetation is not undergoing photosynthesis.
As they’re sampling, the other environmental groups are conducting their work at the same time throughout the system, ensuring the data is collected under the same conditions throughout the estuary.
At each embayment, the scientists take several readings of dissolved oxygen, turbidity, chlorophyl, salinity and temperature, and during the summer months they also survey the types and quantity of macroalgae (seaweeds) in the water.
We caught up with Mr. Mozer’s group as they brought in their boat at the DEC boat ramp on Mattituck Inlet after a morning of sampling on Sept. 4. They access Goldsmith Inlet in Peconic, which is more shallow, by kayak.
“The mission of Citizen Science Learning Center is to provide authentic, science-based projects that are really rigorous,” said Mr. Mozer as he prepared chlorophyl water samples to send to the lab to check against their field measurements on the tailgate of his pickup truck. “We have a Quality Assurance Project Plan, so the data we’re collecting is defensible. It’s not just bucket chemistry, using cheap equipment.”
Joining him were Dr. John Gross, a professor at Farmingdale State College, Stony Brook geology major Aspen Lee and Ethan Cuggino-Zensky, an environmental policy student looking to begin his graduate studies.
“This gives students the opportunity to experience this kind of work firsthand,” said Mr. Mozer.
As they collect their data, he said, passers-by sometimes ask “how’s the water quality?,” but that’s not a question they can answer on the sport.
“It just is what it is. By looking at the data over 10 years, you can see if one of the parameters is getting better or worse,” said Mr. Mozer. ”Over the 10 years that they’ve been doing this, there have been some some trends documented. For example, dissolved oxygen is an important parameter. If your dissolved oxygen levels are going down, that’s not good. If your dissolved oxygen levels are going up over this time frame, that’s a good thing. But you need more than one year’s data to develop trends.”
This is why Save the Sound is excited by this year’s tenth anniversary of collecting data — they now have a significant body of chronological evidence documenting changes in the bays.
The Report Card results, released on Sept. 22, brought “very welcome news,” according to Save the Sound. “Nearly every section of the open waters of Long Island Sound demonstrated higher scores compared with the previous Report Card, even along the most populated areas of New York City.”
But even with the improvement, only 56 percent of the bay segments graded in the 2026 Report Card earned an A or B for overall water quality. Half received a C, D, or F for dissolved oxygen, which Save the Sound calls “the leading challenge to water quality in bays and harbors. Low levels of dissolved oxygen impact marine life, reducing growth and reproduction and, when severely reduced, can lead to death.”
“The North Shore of Long Island has hundreds of thousands of cesspools, without on-site treatment systems, that are aging and in some places falling apart,” said Mr. Lindroth, Save the Sound’s director of healthy waters and lands. “Some areas with poor grades have clusters of cesspools, and reducing the count of those could go toward restoring water quality. Some also have high percentages of impervious ground coverage, where rainwater falls and rapidly rushes off, picking up pollutants. We take a deeper dive into what’s causing those grades, and build a solid road map to make decisions for the future.”
The North Fork Environmental Council had at one time sampled waters on the two Long Island Sound embayments on the North Fork, but had to give up the project, said Mr. Mozer.
“The program has had some groups come and go over time due to volunteer availability or staff turnover,” said Mr. Lindroth.
“I love working with like-minded groups and organizations,” he added. “It’s a lot of fun, but it’s also a very fine-tuned water quality monitoring machine. It requires a lot of trust.”
Details about the Long Island Sound Report Card, and Save The Sound’s Beach Report on more than 200 beaches around the Sound, which is issued in alternating years with the Report Card, can be found at soundhealthexplorer.org.
— Beth Young
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