A program of the Cape Cod Technology Council.
Lewis Bay
Newsletter Article - April 2007
As recently as 35 years ago, Lewis Bay was a sleepy coastal area with a small year-round population. Over the years, all of Cape Cod has seen a dramatic increase in the number of year-round and seasonal residents and a dangerous decline in the viability of native marine life. For example, nearby Hyannis is now a major industrial port with millions of recreational and commercial vehicles and individuals in the water each year impacting the surrounding areas.
The impact of millions of users of the ocean waters of Cape Cod is undeniable. Public fisheries have been mismanaged and over-fished, and many historical shellfish beds have closed because of pollution that includes numerous non-point sources that are difficult to identify and more difficult to control. Many areas have been affected by changed ecosystems due to human encroachment and pollution, such as changes in algal species, reduced oxygen in the summer, more algal growth and higher bacterial levels. While these changes and levels may not be harmful to humans, they can be detrimental or deadly to marine life.
Lewis Bay has not been spared from the negative impacts of increased pollution on Cape Cod. An informal coalition of government, university and community officials began monitoring Lewis Bay’s water quality nearly a decade ago and have shown that increased development and use of Lewis Bay has increased pollution and negatively impacted its indigenous marine life.
More recently, the Lewis Bay Research Center, Inc. (LBRC) was formed as a formal entity by Rulon Wilcox, President, and Brian Braginton-Smith, with the primary goal of preserving and protecting the marine ecosystems in Lewis Bay and to develop strategies to stop these negative impacts and to begin to reverse them in order to improve the environment and ecosystems of Lewis Bay, the Ocean Interface Zone and thereby all of Cape Cod.
As a means of communicating the status of the ocean environment, LBRC has teamed with leading experts in marine technology to provide a real-time web based display of current information on the marine environment. Our website, at www.lewisbay.org, provides details about our monitoring efforts and offers a unique opportunity for you to view and interact with the environmental data. On this site you can view charts and data reports of real-time, recent and historical data collected in Lewis Bay. The state-of-the-art ecosystems monitoring program provides public access to information that will help people better understand the state of the ecosystems in our marine environment. Additionally, the LBRC is presently working with Barnstable County and town officials to expand the program to monitor other embayments and offshore water across the Cape and Islands.
