“Coming Together to Cast a Wide Net: Coastal Water Quality Following the Lahaina Wildfire”
January 23, 2025
Join the Water Resource Research Center (WRRC) at UH Mānoa for the presentation, “Coming Together to Cast a Wide Net: Coastal Water Quality Following the Lahaina Wildfire,” by Sean Swift on January 31, 2025 at 2 p.m. via Zoom.
Description:
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.
Sean Swift was born on Maui and spent most of his childhood in upcountry Kula and Makawao. He received a B.A. in Environmental Studies and Political Studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and an M.S. in Biology at California State University, East Bay, where he worked in the lab of Dr. Brian Perry characterizing symbiotic fungi of native Hawaiian plants. This work led to a lab management position in the labs of Dr. Nicole Hynson and Dr. Anthony Amend at UH Manoa, where he was involved in the creation of the Center for Microbiome Analysis through Island Knowledge & Investigation (C-MAIKI). After four years of working as a technician, he decided to pursue a PhD in Marine Biology in the lab of Dr. Craig Nelson. He is currently a Sea Grant Graduate Fellow investigating how microbes interact with dissolved organic compounds through projects based in West Maui, Mo’orea, and O’ahu.