Deciphering the water quality impacts of COVID-19 human mobility shifts in estuaries surrounding New York City

The COVID-19 pandemic altered human mobility, particularly in large metropolitan areas. In New York City (NYC), stay-at-home orders and social distancing led to significant decreases in commuting, tourism, and a surge of outward migration. Such changes could result in decreased anthropogenic pressure on local environments. Several studies have linked COVID-19 shutdowns with improvements in water quality. However, the bulk of these studies primarily focused on short-term impacts during shutdown periods, without assessing longer-term impacts as restrictions eased. Here, we examine both concurrent lockdown and societal reopening impacts on water quality, using pre-pandemic baseline conditions, in two highly urbanized estuaries surrounding NYC, the New-York Harbor estuary and Long Island Sound (LIS). We compiled datasets from 2017 to 2021 of mass-transit ridership, work-from-home trends, and municipal wastewater effluent to assess changes in human mobility and anthropogenic pressure during multiple waves of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. These were linked to changes in water quality assessed using high spatiotemporal ocean color remote sensing, which provides near-daily observations across the estuary study regions. To distinguish anthropogenic impacts from natural environmental variability, we examined meteorological/hydrological conditions, primarily precipitation and wind. Our results show that nitrogen loading into the New York Harbor declined significantly in the spring of 2020 and remained below pre-pandemic values through 2021. In contrast, nitrogen loading into LIS remained closer to the pre-pandemic average. In response, water clarity in New-York Harbor significantly improved, with less of a change in LIS. We further show that changes in nitrogen loading had higher impact on water quality than meteorological conditions. Our study demonstrates the value of remote sensing observations in assessing water quality changes when field-based monitoring is hindered and highlights the complex nature of urban estuaries and their heterogeneous response to changes in extreme events and human behavior.