Island Lab · brief

What condition is this coast in?

And what did we do to put it there.

Measuring and monitoring the health of coastal ecosystems.

Nothing here is deployed. Every value is modelled.

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See it whole firstNine surfaces, arranged by the question each one answers/coastal-health →
01 Healthy

Light reaches the bed, and something holds

A working coast has structure: kelp and seagrass, a food web at its full length, water clear enough for light to get down.

Lose the light and you lose the meadow, whatever else you fix.

The light argument, as a toolThree ways to draw a water column, because a flat map shows one number per place/biofouling/depth →
02 The baseline

Healthy is a comparison, not a threshold

Coastal systems differ too much between places for an absolute number to mean much. Health is measured against a nearby site nobody built on.

That reference is the yardstick. Everything else is read as a departure.

Read one against anotherFive coasts on six measures, each against the reference embayment/coastal-health/compare →
03 What we do to it

Five signatures, not one pollution

  • Port · metals, and habitat removed outright.
  • Salmon · nitrogen, organics and copper at once.
  • River mouth · the sediment does the damage.
  • Shellfish · net extractive. It takes more than it gives.

Comparably impacted, different mechanisms.

The five signatures, liveSwitch the measure and watch which sites move/coastal-health/compare →
04 The comparison

What healthy looks like, and what we do to it

One generalized coast. Five sites, six measures, each read against the reference.

Generalized archetypes, not a real place. Or open it full screen.

05 The response

Where it goes once it is in

  • Mercury and zinc climb the web.
  • Arsenic thins out with each step.
  • Copper has no settled direction across 9,929 samples. meta-analysis
  • A crab holds copper near a setpoint, so it reports its own biology.

Which contaminant you chase decides what you sample.

06 The column

Does the crop carry it?

Levels placed by isotope, transfer measured on every edge.

Every value modelled. Or open it full screen.

07 What you can do

Two appetites, one pair

Shellfish take the particles. Macroalgae take the dissolved fraction, metals included.

Complementary rather than additive, which is what integrated multi-trophic aquaculture is.

On the generalized coast, both together take the salmon farm from 0.77 to 0.43.

Put the pair somewhereThe band where the nitrogen still pays and the tissue copper still clears spec/imta →
08 The catch

It moves, it does not vanish

An intervention improves the water by putting contaminants into tissue.

So where that tissue goes, and whether it is clean enough to sell, is part of the plan.

An intervention layer without a tissue layer is half a plan.

Does the crop carry itProducer to predator, and which protocol reaches which answer/biofouling/trophic →
09 Siting

Where extractive biomass pays

A farm, a current, and the band where the crop is worth taking.

Modelled, no site data. Or open it full screen.

10 How you would know

What it takes to actually know

  • Panels, and trophic levels collected together.
  • Passive samplers as the abiotic anchor.
  • Temperature, salinity, oxygen, turbidity, light.
  • Open feeds for what a sensor cannot reach.

The sampler is calculable from physics. The organism is not.

Turn surfaces into choicesSuppress, groom or release, surface by surface across a harbour/biofouling/tool →
11 The twin

A field, and how much to trust it

The model fuses samples, sensors and feeds into a value per cell, each carrying its own uncertainty.

Uncertainty is the output that decides where the next sample goes.

The field, per cellModelled pressure and tidal flow over an eight-day window/biofouling/map →
12 Worked example

One coast, instrumented

Bellingham Bay is the worked example: eight stations, measured depth, a panel protocol, and a regulator with a deadline.

Washington legislated a copper phase-out three times and postponed it three times. It reports again by 30 June 2029. WA Ecology

The apparatus, on one coast.

13 The map

Modelled pressure, and where to trust it

Drag the chart to move time. Click a hex to read it.

Every value synthetic. Or open it full screen.

14 What scales

The mechanism ports. The numbers do not.

A plume dilutes the same way everywhere. What it dilutes into is local.

Every new coast needs its own reference site and its own calibration, and gets the method for free.

That is what predictable means here.

The portable kitEvery surface the method has produced, with its coefficients/coastal-health/all →
15 How this rolls out

Four phases, each with a stated exit

Each phase is priced, and each ends on a criterion written so the answer can be no.

PhaseWhat happensSuccess criterion
0 · desk
no field cost
Literature check, confirm whether the port asset registry exists in usable form, run a context scan against the bounding box, write the evidence ledger. The registry, context and evidence files exist, and evidence decides whether phase 1 starts.
1 · one station
one season
A single vertical panel array with all four coating treatments, staggered retrievals, imagery, and co-deployed passive samplers with both accumulator classes. Every panel set carries an uncoated control and the incumbent copper coating, so the result is a trade statement. A calibrated two-group growth curve for one station, and a first answer on hard versus soft accumulators.
2 · four stations
the gradient
The full gradient design, metabarcoding, and the chitosan sampler arm. Transfer functions with stated uncertainty, and a pressure field that verifies against held-out panels.
3 · product
operator trial
Asset attribution, the decision layer, and an operator trial on the cleaning deferral decision. One real cleaning decision changed by the map, with the counterfactual documented.
Kill criteria for phase 1

Two tests, and the first validates the instrument rather than the product.

  • The accumulator array detects a copper difference between the copper-coated panels and the others. If it cannot see copper next to a copper coating, it will see nothing subtler anywhere, and the monitoring claim goes with it.
  • The coated panels differ from the uncoated control in total cover by a margin larger than the between-replicate spread, in the direction predicted. If they do not, the coating hypothesis fails at the cheapest possible point.

Declared interest: chitosan is the anchor intervention of this design, and Island Lab's principal led product strategy at Tidal Vision from 2023 to 2026. Reference treatments, blind scoring and symmetric publication are the structural answer. Source: DESIGN.md sections 5.4, 5.5 and 13.

Nothing here is deployed and no client is committed.

Sources and surfaces
The generalized comparison /coastal-health
The trophic column /biofouling/trophic
The siting tool /imta
The worked coast, mapped /biofouling/map
Surfaces to suppress or recruit /biofouling/tool
Reading depth three ways /biofouling/depth
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