Fulfilling our mission to protect and restore the Morro Bay estuary for people and animals requires a lot of hard work in the field. Read on to see what our staff and volunteers are doing on the ground.
National Aquatic Monitoring Conference
Karissa, Estuary Program Monitoring Coordinator, attended the National Aquatic Monitoring Conference in Tampa, Florida. A highlight of this conference was seeing a freshwater spring bubbling into an estuary while on a kayak tour to look at seagrasses in the Gulf of Mexico.
![A mangrove forest, seen from the water.](https://www.mbnep.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/May-field-1.png)
![seagrasses](https://www.mbnep.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/May-Blog-2-e1465437533363.png)
Final bioassessment surveys completed
We completed four more bioassessment surveys to finish off the 2016 bioassessment survey season. We would like to give a huge thanks to the 27 volunteers who came out and attended the bioassessment training and field surveys. In total, we completed 8 surveys this season, which took 325 hours to complete. (If you divide that into 24-hour days, that’s almost two full weeks of around-the-clock surveying!)
![Our volunteers were all great! This volunteer crawled under a tree to measure water depth on lower Chorro Creek.](https://www.mbnep.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/May-Blog-3.png)
![Another volunteer helped us measure slope on Pennington Creek](https://www.mbnep.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/May-Blog-4-576x1024.png)
![Thank you to all of our volunteers that braved one of California's great native plants- Poison oak.](https://www.mbnep.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/May-Blog-5.png)
![This is just one of the beautiful sections of creek we got to survey.](https://www.mbnep.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/May-Blog-6.png)
Photo monitoring
We conducted photo monitoring on a privately owned property on which the Estuary Program was instrumental in establishing a conservation easement to limit development.
![It's hazy, but you can see the ocean in the distance.](https://www.mbnep.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/May-Blog-7.png)