“Source to Sea” Data Gap
What We are Doing: Open-Science for a Resilient Seacoast
Traditional monitoring is too slow and too expensive. HMS Stewards fills the data gap with high-resolution, real-time sensing.
We combine accessible, open-source “Lean Science” with community-led monitoring to generate high-resolution, lab-grade data. Our core activity is not just observing environmental change but actively building the scientifically defensible baseline data needed to map, understand, and mitigate issues affecting our local waters.
This is not closed-door research. Our goal is transparency. We are actively building an open-data platform—a public dashboard where the whole Seacoast can see the real-time health of the local waters we all work, live, and play in.
Where We’re Mapping: The Cross-Border Primary Arteries of the Great Bay
We envision a future where the journey of water—from its mountain source to the open sea—is understood, cherished, and protected by every community it touches, ensuring thriving ecosystems and resilient economies for generations to come.
The HMS Core Values
Foundation
The map on this page visualizes the foundation of our entire operation. HMS Stewards bridges a specific data gap. For decades, the Great Bay itself has been well-studied, but the specific dynamics of the non-tidal headwaters and the critical arteries feeding the system are vastly underestimated.
The map illustrates how the entire Great Bay ecosystem is shaped by its primary tributaries.
Mapping the Arteries
We are focusing our Sentinel Surveys on the 10 major tributaries that feed into the Piscataqua River, ensuring we gather precise data from the Squamscott River, Lamprey River, Oyster River, Bellamy River, Cocheco River, Salmon Falls River, Bunker Creek, Winnicut River, Spinney Creek, and Spruce Creek.
Source-to-Sea Connectivity
This map visualizes a connected system, not separate parts. Environmental events entering the upper Cocheco in Dover eventually affect the eelgrass beds in Great Bay and flow directly past Portsmouth. We map this system in its entirety, linking communities with their upstream realities.
Our 2026–2027 Strategic Monitoring Grid: Covering the New Hampshire/Maine cross-border watershed where state agencies lack high-resolution sensors.
Why We’re Doing It: Community-Led Stewardship
We believe the solution is community-led. But to lead, the community needs actionable insight, not abstract data.
The defining characteristic of our work is turning a “literacy gap” into powerful action. HMS Stewards provides the specialized knowledge, specialized hardware (like the R/V HMS Buttercup and the MSU), and professional governance needed to map our waters with precision.
By generating this “ground truth” data and translating raw sensor readings into intuitive, community-accessible stories, we empower local citizens, landowners, and municipal leaders to act as the informed first line of defense for New Hampshire’s marine ecosystems.
Our 2026 Pilot Season is underway, focusing on calibrating our technology and building the baseline map visualized above.
From the Lab to the Landscape
We are actively recruiting passionate “Source-to-Sea” Stewards to join our full-scale launch in 2027. We’re building a wait list for volunteers who want to learn how to monitor the health of their local rivers and translate open science into tangible protection for the Seacoast.