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PILOT STUDY FOR ESTABLISHMENT OF A NETWORK OF COASTAL REFERENCE SITES
Citation:
Robertson, A. AND J K. Summers. PILOT STUDY FOR ESTABLISHMENT OF A NETWORK OF COASTAL REFERENCE SITES. Presented at Coastal Zone 99, San Diego, CA, July 24-30, 1999.
Description:
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have joined in partnership for a pilot study for the establishment of a network of reference sites, the Coastal Intensive Site Network (CISNet). CISNet is composed of intensive, long-term monitoring and research sites around the U.S. marine and Great Lakes coasts. In this partnership, EPA and NOAA are funding research and monitoring programs at pilot sites that utilize ecological indicators and investigate the ecological effects of environmental stressors. NASA is funding research aimed at developing a remote sensing capability that will augment the in situ research and monitoring programs selected by EPA and NOAA for this program. CISNet has three objectives: (1) to develop a sound scientific basis for understanding ecological responses to anthropogenic stresses in coastal environments, including the interaction of exposure, environment/climate, and biological/ecological factors in the response, (2) to demonstrate the usefulness of a set of intensively monitored sites for examining short-term variability in environmental stressors, including anthropogenic and natural stressors, and ecological response; and (3) to provide intensively monitored sites for development and evaluation of indicators of change in coastal systems. To select sites for inclusion in CISNet, objective criteria were developed by a working group of NOAA and EPA scientists. These criteria were arrayed under three main areas: (1) boundary conditions (those conditions any selected sites must meet before consideration), (2) site-specific criteria to be used to rank the candidate sites meeting the boundary conditions, and (3) factors to be used to ensure that the completed set of sites selected on the basis of the boundary and site-specific criteria are representative of the range of coastal and estuarine habitat types and their anthropoge