Summary

Description

Documenting the range of tides within a wetland provides critical information to assess the effects of restoration as well as changes from sealevel rise and frequency of extreme storm events. In FY12, the USGS Western Ecological Research Center initiated a project with the R1 IM program at Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge to develop a remote water level logger system that could monitor tidal level data at coastal refuges. This development project required identifying and acquiring a sensor that could provide regular updates of water level within a tidal marsh, adding a radio broadcasting link to send the data from the sensor to a station, and creating a process to record the data where it could be downloaded or served to a website.