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THE WHAT, WHY, AND HOW OF REGIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCE MONITORING
Citation:
Peterson, S A. AND S G. Paulsen. THE WHAT, WHY, AND HOW OF REGIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCE MONITORING. Presented at Amer. Soc. of Limnology & Oceanography (ASLO) 2000 Conf, Copenhagen, Denmark, 6/5-9/2000.
Description:
Many monitoring sites in the United States are at point source discharges for compliance with chemical water quality standards. Monitoring at site specific restoration projects is increasing. However, it has long been recognized that more emphasis should be directed toward regional and biological assessments relative to the effects of multiple stressors on varied geographic regions. Extrapolation from site specific monitoring data to regional assessments has encountered considerable difficulty. Aggregating data from individual sites not originally intended for extrapolation has contributed to the difficulty. While suitable for their original purposes, these data, when extrapolated regionally, produce biased environmental resource estimates with unknown accuracy. Side-by-side comparison of existing data aggregations with survey data designed for regional assessments from the same region indicate that aggregation estimates are unreliable and misleading. Errors can approach 100 percent. Thus, when regional estimates are the goal, aggregation of existing data should be avoided. New remote monitoring tools, statistically based monitoring designs, emerging biological assessment techniques, and advanced geographic information systems now provide the basis for developing much improved, large scale environmental resource estimates with known accuracy.