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OKATIE — Viewed from above, the 1,600-square-mile Port Royal Sound watershed appears as the literal and figurative heart of the Beaufort County and, more broadly, the southern Lowcountry.
Twice a day, the sound takes an hourslong breath in, drawing enormous quantities of ocean water in and distributing it through miles and miles of arteries and veins that are the watershed’s rivers and creeks.
Unlike most river systems, the Port Royal Sound watershed is not fed by freshwater sources draining upland hills. Instead, the entire system rises and falls with the tides, carrying water from the Atlantic Ocean far inland.
A man fishing on the Knowles Island fishing pier said he regularly catches sharks from the pier. The pier from which he was fishing is 22 miles from the ocean.
“Anybody who swims in this water is crazy,” he said.
Twice a day, the sound exhales, sending the nutrient-enriched water back to the sea.
“It’s a weird system,” said Tye Pettay, associate professor at the University of South Carolina Beaufort and director of the school’s Water Quality Laboratory. “There’s not a lot of freshwater flow.”
Hang around in Beaufort County long enough and you’ll be sure to hear an oft-quoted truism. Half the salt marsh on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States is in South Carolina, and half of that figure is in Beaufort County. Most of it is in the Port Royal Sound, some 100,000 acres worth, according to the Okatie-based Port Royal Sound Foundation.
“I would argue that it’s an important system just from the fact that you have all these salt marshes, which are nursery grounds for marine organisms,” Pettay said.
For all that is understood about the sound, much about its day-to-day functioning remains unknown. More important, there’s little understanding about how it’s changing. Researchers aren’t completely in the dark. For 30 years, the state’s environmental agency, now called the S.C. Department of Environmental Services, has monitored 14 sites around the watershed, collecting from those sites on a monthly basis.
Chris Kehrer, science program manager at the Port Royal Sound Foundation, described the state’s effort as transactional. The data was only measured against state standards at the time it was collected in an attempt to identify any potential problem. It’s important work, but the data was never viewed with an eye toward identifying trends or changes in the sound’s ecological health over the long run. Nor was it used to predict the changes that could be expected in future years.
Since 2020, Kehrer, the foundation and other partners like USCB have driven an effort to collect more data with the intent of better understanding the sound in a more holistic way. A year ago, the foundation’s program expanded dramatically, becoming the only state-approved monitoring program of its kind in South Carolina.
“Our goal is to monitor change in the system, good or bad, and figure out ways we can influence change in a positive manner,” Kehrer said.
Citizen scientists
Every two weeks, foundation staff and a team of about 70 volunteers including USCB students make their way to 35 different sites around the watershed to conduct field tests and collect water samples. They drop a probe into the water at their selected site and record measuring data on water temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen and pH. The process takes about five minutes, and the water samples will get delivered to Pettay’s lab for further testing.
The monitoring program got its start in 2020. Kehrer had been given direction to get a monitoring program for the Port Royal Sound watershed off the ground, and he signed on with the state’s adopt-a-stream program. At the time, it had just expanded to include tidal saltwater monitoring along the coast.
“Before, it was all fresh water, small creeks and river systems in the Upstate,” Kehrer said.
Kehrer was one of the first to be trained by the state’s saltwater monitoring program, and his program in the Port Royal Sound took off quickly. At one point, he had trained more volunteers than any other trainer in the coastal area.
George Bolger lives on the Okatie River and was one of the first volunteers to be trained when the adopt-a-stream monitoring got underway. He continued volunteering when the program transitioned to the more stringent testing standards last April. Retired from a career in the oil and gas industry, he relishes the opportunity to stay involved in a scientific endeavor.
“It’s something that needs to be done. Everything’s moving, so to speak. You need to find out what’s here now and when it starts to change, then you want to know why,” Bolger said of his experience as a volunteer.
Courtney Kimmel, the foundation’s director of conservation, is quick to acknowledge the significant role that volunteers play in the success of the watershed monitoring program.
“It only works at scale because we have people like George, who are incredibly intelligent and trained and here and have time and are committed and passionate about the outcomes and what it is we’re trying to do,” said Kimmel.
Stepping it up
It became clear to the foundation that the adopt-a-stream program had some shortcomings. Primarily, it was designed to flag trouble spots based on a relatively short list of factors, like dissolved oxygen or pH. If a sample detected a reading outside of the state standard, the Department of Environmental Services was notified, and that agency began monitoring the troubled location.
While the program performs an important function, the data collection ultimately fell short of the foundation’s goal of developing a database that can be used to inform regulatory decision-making. It became evident that the foundation needed to take its program to the next level.
Moving toward that objective, the foundation purchased monitoring equipment that met state standards and developed a program plan that did the same. Kehrer and the foundation took to the mission enthusiastically. The state, however, had a bit of a different perspective.
“We presented (the program) to DES, and they told us to pump the brakes,” Kehrer said.
DES was also enthused about the proposed plan, but the state required an approved quality assurance plan before it could certify the data collected by the foundation. Kimmel took lead on the new task, and 18 months later a 70-page quality assurance plan detailing every step in the process, from training to lab certification, was delivered to the state. DES approved the program, making the Port Royal Sound Foundation the first organization in the state to have a level 2 monitoring program approved.
Adopt-a-stream programs qualify as level 1 monitoring, while level 3 monitoring collects data used to make decisions like closing shellfish beds or beaches. Data collected in level 2 monitoring programs is intended to inform policy decisions.
“Level 2 is strictly for decision-making. We can’t shut down any river systems from the data that we create, but the data that we create can be presented to council members and municipalities, and they can use it on their own,” Kehrer explained.
The science and the data
The collected water samples are delivered to USCB’s state-certified Water Quality Laboratory, where total chlorophyll, a photosynthetic pigment that captures light that all plants and algae have, and total suspended solids are measured.
“If you monitor them over time, you get baseline data. Then changes in algae or suspended solids suggest that something’s going on on land that’s affecting them,” Pettay said. “They’re quick and easy measurements that give you an idea of water quality and particularly any change in water quality.”
Additional measures for fecal bacteria are also being worked into the testing regime, as is nutrient analysis measuring nitrogen and phosphorus.
Pettay, using a grant from Port Royal Sound Foundation, started an ancillary monitoring program nearly six years ago that collects weekly data at three sites. He hopes to publish analysis based on this work sometime this summer that begin to tell the tale of how the sound functions.
“Strangely enough, there are no real papers out there on this system,” he said. “It’s relatively unknown.”
Looking forward, Pettay expects that the improved quality of the collected data will facilitate an improved understanding of the sound.
The process of creating baseline data against which future samples can be compared is a long one. Five to 10 years of data is required before meaningful comparisons can begin to be drawn, but fortunately the state has a database with 30 years of collected data.
The state’s monitoring has been singularly focused on identifying risks or potential risks to human health. Additionally, data was only connected once a month, and there are gaps, reflecting years where funding wasn’t available to support the program. Nonetheless, it provided Kehrer and the rest of the team a starting point that otherwise would have taken decades to achieve.
Through an agreement with DES, the foundation pulled all that data into its fledgling database and continues to pull new data from the state as it becomes available.
“We have the engine running essentially continuing this baseline, and it allows us to keep sort of eyes on the sound and identify when things are acting weird,” Kimmel said.
While the state’s focus has been on human health concerns, the foundation is examining the data from an ecological perspective.
“That is something that (the state has) never done,” Kehrer added.
Looking ahead
Mining the database, the foundation has observed changes in the sound, Kehrer said. Salinity levels have diminished, while temperatures are increasing. Those changes have been observed across all 14 sites that the state has monitored for three decades. But with a watershed as large and complex as the the Port Royal Sound, the degree of change can vary among the sound’s 37 sub-watersheds.
The foundation’s team is also using the database to identify gaps in the monitoring, locations that have been understudied. That is also yielding early results.
“We’ve found there are major gaps in systems that need monitoring,” Kehrer said, indicating that the program is likely to continue to expand.
Kehrer plans that new monitoring sites will be established in the upper reaches of the watershed in Jasper and Allendale counties. Increased distances and smaller populations present some logistical challenges. Some of those challenge may be mitigated by limiting the data collection to a monthly exercise.
The foundation’s program has already had some impact. In 2025, a developer sought to annex about 1,400 acres in rural Jasper County along the Euhaw Creek into the town of Ridgeland. The plan included commercial and residential development in the middle of a rural landscape. The plan was contested by residents and conservation groups, and when the town council finally voted on the matter, the request was denied.
“When the town of Ridgeland denied that annexation, they quoted our paper that we gave them, which was land use data as well as water quality data that we created in a one-pager,” Kehrer said. “So you know that the program is working in that sense.”
Kimmel said that when the foundation was contemplating the creation of the monitoring program, members of the conservation community urged the foundation to move forward with the plan. The fate of the sound, she was told, would likely be decided within the coming decade.
“Compared to other systems like the Chesapeake Bay or the Long Island Sound, the Port Royal Sound is still a pretty healthy system. We still have a chance to keep the system functioning in a good way,” Pettay said.