Friends of the Bay’s Water Quality Monitoring Program is an important component of our efforts to protect the Oyster Bay/Cold Spring Harbor estuary and surrounding watershed.  It serves to increase public awareness of local threats to water quality. This program was developed in cooperation with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, United States Environmental Protection Agency, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, local governments and other citizen monitoring groups around Long Island Sound.

Friends of the Bay monitors 19 locations within Cold Spring Harbor, Oyster Bay Harbor and Mill Neck Creek. Each site is monitored once per week April through October, weather and tide permitting, for dissolved oxygen, bacteria, salinity, temperature, pH and clarity. Nitrogen samples are collected once per month for analysis.

This program initiated in the late 1990s to continue data collection efforts that were canceled due to county funding cuts. Friends of the Bay considers this program a necessary component of the effort to preserve, protect and restore the Oyster Bay/Cold Spring Harbor complex. In 2006 and recently in 2020, Friends of the Bay received a Quality Assurance Project Plan from the Environmental Protection Agency. This program enables trained citizen scientists working alongside Friends of the Bay staff to monitor the marine ecosystem. In 2009, the program was given a Region 2 Environmental Quality Award by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Water quality reports are prepared by Fuss & O’Neill using the data collected by Friends of the Bay. Raw data is posted in the water quality data section under the monitoring tab on this site.

Water Quality Report Archive: