Stony Brook Herring Monitors Receive Award

On June 17, the Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment presented its annual awards during a ceremony in Hampton, New Hampshire, including awards to four environmental leaders from Massachusetts: The Stony Brook Herring Monitors received the prestigious Longard Volunteer Award, which is presented to an outstanding individual volunteer or volunteer group within the Gulf watershed. Formed in 2007, this group of 15 volunteers has been monitoring the Stony Brook herring run in Brewster. Each spring, they painstakingly track the return of herring to five upstream ponds, noting the decrease in population and raising awareness of the declines. Their efforts paid off when a three-year project on the herring run restored nearly 400 acres of spawning, nursery, and feeding habitat for river herring, increasing herring numbers by a factor of 10 since the project’s completion in 2013. Documentation of this success was made possible by the monitoring work of the Stony Brook Herring Monitors.