Every week since January 1959, a trawler has left Wickford Harbor, Rhode Island, to make a 30-minute net tow in the Narragansett Bay estuary and in Rhode Island sound. The net collects animals three inches and larger living on and just above the bottom, explained Perry Jeffries, biological oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, in a session titled “Detecting Estuarine Change.” “Because we do the same thing week after week, we can observe gradual and long-term changes. No record comparable to this 43-year-old data set exists for any coastal area.”