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Finding the Maine Story in Hugh Cumbersome National Monitoring Datasets
Citation:
KIDDON, J. A. AND H. A. WALKER. Finding the Maine Story in Hugh Cumbersome National Monitoring Datasets. Presented at Maine Water Conference, Augusta, ME, March 17, 2010.
Impact/Purpose:
This talk is an invited presentation at the 2010 Maine Water Conference, an annual meeting that aims to promote interaction regarding water quality among state and city managers/regulators and environmental scientists. The talk will be presented in a session entitled "Maine Water Quality Data: Overview, Availability and Challenges". Its goal is to provide an overview of three federal monitoring programs conducted in Maine (and elsewhere): the National Coastal Assessment (2000-2006), the National Lakes Survey (2007), and the ongoing National Aquatic Resource Surveys. We emphasize the utility of such federal data by presenting examples of how Maine conditions compare with other Northeastern States, and by demonstrating a "data viewer" under development at the Atlantic Ecology Division that aims to ease the process of accessing, viewing, and interpreting data from the national programs.
Description:
What’s a manager, analyst, or concerned citizen to do with the complex datasets generated by State and Federal monitoring efforts? Is it possible to use such information to address Maine’s environmental issues without having a degree in informatics and statistics? This presentation will briefly review several large national USEPA monitoring programs that have evaluated water quality in Maine and elsewhere over the past decade, including the National Coastal Assessment (NCA), the National Lakes Assessment (NLA), and ongoing National Aquatic Resource Surveys (NARS). We’ll highlight the benefits and weaknesses of these large-scale programs that feature random site selection, consistent evaluation metrics, and limited sampling activity. In particular, we’ll appraise how well such programs address state-scale issues, and present examples of how NCA and NLA data have been used by Northeastern states. Additionally, we’ll review an approach under development that uses the familiar Excel spreadsheet to deliver, view, and interpret NLA water chemistry data. This easy-to-use tool generates maps reflecting user-designated condition categories, weighted statistics, weighted cumulative distribution function (CDF) plots, and other graphics. Ideally, the tool will promote exploration and interpretation of the NLA data, and place the condition of Maine’s lakes in regional context. As we are in the early stages of developing this and similar tools, we solicit feedback and suggestions regarding this approach.