Coastal Services Center

More and more national attention is being put on managing entire coastal ecosystems instead of individual environmental components. For the past 15 years, a volunteer program in the State of Washington has successfully taken this kind of holistic approach to understanding and preserving the fragile environment along Island County 's 212 miles of shoreline on Puget Sound.

Beach Watchers began in 1989 with 10 volunteers. Today, the Washington State University Extension Program trains and leads more than 250 volunteers, who do everything from monitoring beaches and water quality to leading educational tours and removing invasive weeds.

"It covers the entire watershed, from the top of the freshwater systems to the depths of the saltwater systems," says Don Meehan, director of the university's extension program and the creator of Beach Watchers.

In addition to educating the public and helping to protect the area's resources, the group provides important data to area coastal resource managers, assists researchers, and has "changed" how local shoreline planners do their jobs.

Take and Give Back

Volunteers who participate in the program are heavily screened, notes Beach Watchers' coordinator, Dot Irvin. They undergo 100 hours of

intensive training and are expected to give back 100 volunteer hours.

In reality, Irvin says, they typically give even more, annually donating over 17,000 hours of in-kind service. The retention rate of the volunteers also is very high.

About 35 instructors who are coastal resource managers, researchers, and other experts provide the rigorous eight-week classroom and field training that the volunteers undergo. The training covers such topics as beaches, environmental processes, forests, septic systems, geology, and marine life.

One of the trainers is Glen Alexander, education coordinator at Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in Mount Vernon, Washington. He notes that the program produces a "really fantastic group of citizen volunteers."

"I don't know what makes them so special, but these citizens do an incredible job," says Alexander. "The amount of work they accomplish each year is unbelievable. Their newsletter is the best one I receive, and their annual festival is the best one I attend."

They Probably Do That, Too

As extensive as the training is, the number and types of activities Beach Watchers is involved in is sweeping. A list of 30 activities listed on the program's Web site–itself maintained by the volunteers–demonstrates the group's diversity.

The list includes monitoring 37 beaches and two watershed streams, collecting shoreline and coastal data, evaluating water quality, and performing geospatial mapping to determine the extent of artificial shoreline hardening, such as bulkheads.

The volunteers develop community education programs, publicize environmental information, speak to community and school groups, and organize events, such as a one-day "community university" on the environment. They conduct public tours of the resources, promote beach etiquette and stewardship, and publish everything from teacher handbooks to marine environmental guides.

As if that weren't enough, they work with researchers to reintroduce salmon, investigate stranded marine mammals, and help prepare deceased marine specimens for study and display.

Masters of Their Domain

The format of Beach Watchers is "identical" to Washington State University's pioneering Master Gardener Program, which originated in 1973 with the concept of providing university training to volunteers, who in exchange serve their communities through horticulture. The Master Gardener Program has now been implemented nationwide.

"We started Beach Watchers because there was an awful lot of interest in Puget Sound," Meehan says. "We needed to try to begin to get a handle on what the impacts of growth were in the area."

Up until that point, Meehan had been conducting "fairly traditional" extension programming, primarily dealing with agriculture. But with the extensive shoreline in the county, the interconnectivity of the ecosystems–and the impact of development–could not be ignored.

"This program was designed to get the community to respond to the natural systems, understand them, and help to protect them," Meehan says.

It's All in a Name

To create the program, Meehan established an advisory group, made up of experts from the university, relevant state and local agencies, and community leaders. One of the first things they wanted to do, he says, was come up with a catchy name. Watershed Masters just didn't fit the bill.

While many were concerned that Beach Watchers might be perceived as "police on the beach," the name stuck. "Everybody loves beaches," Meehan says. "People get interested in the program just from the title."

The advisory committee also helped put together the curriculum and established who the instructors were going to be. The equivalent of one-and-a-half full-time employees are paid to administer the program.

Beach Watchers is primarily grant funded and for 10 years received grants from the Washington Department of Ecology's Coastal Zone Management Program. Grant funding is currently being received from Washington Sea Grant.

Quality and Quantity

The intensity of training that volunteers undergo is necessary because "we accept responsibility for the scientific rigor of our data collection," Meehan says. "This is no casual little monitoring thing we have going on here. We have a very sophisticated monitoring protocol" that is critical to make the data useful for local, county, and state coastal managers.

Meehan admits that some agencies were reluctant to accept data from a volunteer organization at first but have since come around. Part of the reason for the turnabout is Beach Watchers' demonstrated commitment to collecting high-quality data, and the rest boils down to cost.

"State agencies could not afford to do" the monitoring and data collection that Beach Watchers undertakes, Meehan says. "It would cost millions of dollars to pay for what our volunteers are doing."

Not only are the group's efforts cost-effective, they also are making a difference.

Meehan notes that one local shoreline planner told him that Beach Watchers had "changed his job completely" from one of a hand-slapping regulator to more of an educator.

"Before, the planner was regularly slapping people's hands for messing things up," Meehan says. Now, property owners are calling regulators before they start a project to ask questions about what is allowable.

The Long Haul

Ultimately, it is the quality of work that Beach Watchers is able to achieve that inspires volunteers to give so much of themselves, Irvin says. "When volunteers feel that they are doing important work, it makes a big difference. They want to keep giving."

Meehan believes that, like the Master Gardener program, the Beach Watchers formula could be used in all the nation's marine areas.

He adds, "If you bring in quality people, expect quality output, and give quality support, you can make a difference in any community."

For more information on Beach Watchers, point your browser to www.beachwatchers.wsu.edu. You may contact Dot Irvin at (360) 679-7391, or doti@wsu.edu. Contact Don Meehan at (360) 679-7327, or meehan@wsu.edu.