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INTEGRATED MONITORING OF MARINE DISEASE AND MORTALITY
Citation:
Fisher, W S. AND B. H. Sherman. INTEGRATED MONITORING OF MARINE DISEASE AND MORTALITY. Presented at 91st Annual Meeting of the National Shellfisheries Association, Halifax, Nova Scotia, April 18-22, 1999.
Description:
There have been apparent increases over the last several decades in disease and mortality of marine and estuarine organisms, including shellfish, presumably due to greater anthropogenic stress generated both in watersheds and coastal areas. These events are investigated from a local perspective even though they may have been equally driven, or at least influenced, by regional or global conditions. An ability to link the events with co-occurring physical and chemical disturbances, biophysical characteristics (water quality, harmful algal blooms), hydrographic characteristics, and marine-related human diseases can promote understanding of the effects of larger scale and interactive factors, and has potential value for indicating cause and/or environmental condition. Establishing these linkages will require a comprehensive program for collecting, documenting, compiling and integrating data collected from a variety of local sources over long periods of time. Two existing programs illustrate the potential to overcome challenges related to data collection, data quality, and database development, as well as establishing and maintaining continuity over time: (1) The Gulf of Mexico Aquatic Mortality Network, a program of state resource managers, demonstrates the ability to develop consistent investigative approaches, standard protocols, and standard data formats that are required to composite data, all the while maintaining state autonomy and ownership of the data. (2) The Health, Ecological and Economic Dimensions of Global Change Program is a retrospective compilation of disease and mortility events. This relational data framework offers the potential to link events with multiple environmental characteristics (water quality, temperature anomalies, etc.) within the same or external databases, and should serve as a template for future entries.