31 January • Coming Together to Cast a Wide Net: Coastal Water Quality Following the Lahaina Wildfire by Sean Swift. Location: Zoom (register for Zoom here).
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Coming Together to Cast a Wide Net: Coastal Water Quality Following the Lahaina Wildfire
Speakers: Sean Swift
Date: January 31, 2024 (2:00 pm, HST)
In early August of 2023, a wildfire destroyed the town of Lahaina. In response to this disaster, a group of researchers at UH Mānoa from the departments of Oceanography, Marine Biology, and Sea Grant teamed up to characterize impacts of the fire on nearshore marine ecosystems. To accomplish this, our team worked in concert with a multi-agency consortium based on Maui, including non-profits, community members, the County of Maui, as well as state and federal agencies. The nearshore waters around Lahaina are dominated by coral reef ecosystems, which physically protect the coastline from waves, support local fisheries, and draw tourism to the region. Prior to this project, only a handful of studies had looked at the impacts of wildfires on coral reefs. None had examined the impact of an urban wildfire on coral reefs. Burned urban infrastructure can introduce chemically complex contaminants to the environment, and urban modifications to surface water and groundwater flow affect the transport of contaminants into the ocean. Our team measured a broad suite of water quality parameters including inorganic nutrients, trace metals, dissolved organic compounds, microbial community composition and abundance, and carbonate chemistry. We collected shoreline water samples across 9 sites within the Lahaina burn zone and at 2 distant control sites. In the year following the fire, we sampled across 7 time points including before, during, and after a major ‘first flush’ runoff event. In a complementary effort, we deployed 25 submerged sensors from November 2023 to February 2024. These sensors captured variation in salinity, temperature, current, and other parameters at 7 sites along the Lahaina coastline. The preliminary results of this study are informing our understanding of the impacts of urban wildfires on water quality and are contributing to our overall understanding of reef health in Lahaina.