 B.C. Parks has established numerous long-term ecological monitoring sites across the province. Staff and volunteers collect data on plants, animals, and habitats from coastal shorelines to mountaintops on a regular basis in order to monitor the effects of things like climate change. This video is designed to help staff and volunteers establish transects and collect intertidal long-term ecological monitoring data. The intertidal zone is affected by both terrestrial and marine conditions. The organisms within the zone will be some of the first to respond to climate changes and sea level rise. Before heading into the field, make sure that you have everything on your equipment list. Check the tide chart and aim for field A that coincides with the lowest tides. At least two people are required for the field crew. If more volunteers are available, then more transects can be completed within a single tide. The ideal sites are those with a rocky intertidal area that contains few tide pools, boulders, cobble, gravel, sands, or mud and are accessible and safe. Also, the intertidal zone is between 10 and 40 meters wide, from the low tide line to the high tide line or vegetation edge. To establish a permanent sampling plot that will be resurveyed every four years, you will demarcate the survey plot by installing four pins into the rock with epoxy putty. Two of the pins mark out a 30 meter long baseline transect that runs parallel to the high water line or vegetation edge. Two more pins indicate the position of a secondary baseline, situated halfway from the primary baseline to the water line at low tide. For example, if the distance between the primary baseline and the low tide line is 40 meters, the secondary baseline and associated pins would be positioned 20 meters down from the primary baseline. The last step before starting together data is to set up your internal transect lines. These will run perpendicular to the shore, anchored every three meters along your primary baseline. The secondary baseline is used to ensure that your transect lines run parallel to each other. For a 30 meter baseline transect, you will have 11 transects in total. Be sure to take photos of your plot, pins, transects, and the site in general, as well as recording the coordinates of the pin locations. Enter this information into the site setup benchmark data form. You will collect data on three types of organism groups using three different methods, sessile organisms using point contact, non-sessile organisms using quadrats, and sea stars using swath transects. To allow for enough time, begin your data collection two to three hours before low tide. For the point contact method, select the appropriate data sheet and sampling interval based on the length of your transect. It's a 30 meter transect. We're going to use 30 centimeter intervals. So at zero, I'm looking down. I've got bedrock. But if I look in a 15 centimeter circle, there's a barnacle. And there's also some focus. Now, within a 15 centimeter radius, what's the next closest organism? Sea dolly. Sea dolly is a barnacle. Okay. And is there another species within that 15 centimeter radius? Looks like it's just more sea dolly. So this is an example of if your pin dropped here, you would record the first organism is a Pacific oyster. The second organism is our thatched barnacle. But it's growing on the oyster. So we would call this an epiphant. We would put a little E above the record in the box, indicating that it's an epiphant. We also have some blue muscle growing on this oyster as well. So if recording this on the sheet would be Pacific oyster first, then the barnacle with an E above it and then muscle with an E above it. Based on the zonation of the organisms, break the study site into three zones, the upper, middle, and lower. The upper zone is dominated by barnacles, the mid zone is dominated by muscles, and the lower zone is dominated by brown algae. Identify all of the non-cessile or mobile organisms within three random quadrat locations within each of the upper, middle, and lower zones of each transect. Place the quarter meter square quadrats on the right side of the transect when facing shoreward. Quadrats should not be placed over tide pools. Move to the next random number. Random numbers can be generated before going into the field or via a random number generator app. With the bottom corner at 14.9, right? So that means that this is going to sit kind of like that. So I'm looking for snails, kites, crabs. I'm kind of going in rows of 10 centimeters. So I'm going to go down this looking. There's another limpet there. Shell hash is hard to find stuff in, but I'm just going to move stuff. I'm not going to search for every little microorganism, so I've got little snails here. Yeah, so I got five limpets, 30 snails, one amphipod. Yeah. Yeah, it goes here. Transect T-12. Yeah. Station 14.9. Right, and the zone is mid. So there's two columns on the sheet. When you use, when you're doing those slash marks, one, two, three, four, five, that's what the first column is for, for those rough notes. So sometimes actually there was another snail, so I'm going to put comma one. So the total is 31, five, and one. So the second column is for your final answer. For the SWATH transect method, use the C-star data form. All C-stars that fall within one meter of each side of each transect line are recorded. We're going to count all the species of starfish we encounter, but we are not, we're only going to measure piaster, and we want to get the location of the starfish as well, so that's why we're going to do it along the transect. The data you will collect includes counting all of the C-stars, recording the health of each C-star, and recording the arm length of 30 disaster C-stars. So when we're doing the starfish, when we're measuring the legs, we only need about 30 measurements. So I've got one, two, three, four, five, six, six ochre stars, and that's a meter, so they're all in. And I'm at station 37.5, so we just, I'm actually, actually 37.5 is right here. So what I do, there's one that's in 37.5, and there's one, and then five in 38, because you go from, the 37.5 goes from here to 37. 38 goes from 38 to 37.5, one meter wide, right? One meter this way. So five are in this box, one's in that box. Okay, so now I'm going to look in the cracks. I got a, I got a leather star right here, and I'm in, I'm in box 36.5. So 36.5 is here, 37 is there, so I'm in 36.5. Count all C-stars in tide pools. Outside of tide pools only count those C-stars that are mostly above the water. You really have to look in the cracks, because the starfish can hide right down deep in the cracks, and there's one in there, and that's less than a meter from my tape. The only way to measure that properly would be to ram it out of there somehow, and you'd do way more damage than it's worth, so move on. There's other ones you can measure. We're going to measure the length of an arm. So we just need one arm, and basically you start at the center of the disc, and follow the arm out to the end. Sometimes it can be quite far back. So this is 11.6 centimeters. It often takes more than one day to complete all of the transects. Plan ahead to target the lowest tide and the largest field crew available, and start your survey two to three hours before low tide. If there are more than two people on the field crew, C-star transect surveys and non-SSL quadrat surveys can be done simultaneously, after the SSL point count method has been completed. With one team walking behind the other in order to beat the tide.