A group of Preserve Calavera volunteers have been working for a number of years collecting data evaluating the “health” of Buena Vista Creek. We sample the creek near the Oceanside DMV, near the Buena Vista Creek Ecological Reserve and near the driving range on Haymar in Carlsbad. Nutrients (ammonia, nitrates, total phosphorus, reactive phosphorus), turbidity, dissolved oxygen, pH, conductivity along with bacteria (total coliform and E. coli) help us assess the state of this watershed. Collected data can be viewed at the San Diego Coastkeeper website.
In late 2017, a team for Agua Hedionda Creek was created and trained by our umbrella group, San Diego Coastkeeper.
Since December 2018, San Diego Coastkeeper funding has been exhausted so Preserve Calavera has taken over the lead to continue testing of the three Carlsbad Watersheds: Buena Vista Lagoon, Agua Hedionda Lagoon and Batiquitos Lagoon. Our new name is North San Diego County Watershed Monitoring Program.
True to our nature, this is an entirely volunteer-run program. The set up costs for the program is about $10K mostly for the initial set up of our lab, with recurring costs running about $3000 annually. If you’d like to support us, please check the right side bar for donation information. We’d like to thank IDEX Foundation for an initial grant of $5000.
Click here to view our data.
Annual reports for each of the 3 subwatersheds can be found here.
Here are the locations of our testing sites along with our 2022 scorecards for each subwatershed:
Batiquitos Lagoon watershed:
Agua Hedionda watershed:
Buena Vista Creek watershed:
