Assessing program goals and effectiveness

measuring a fish

Taking notes

Monitoring can be used to assess many different program goals. For example, compliance monitoring is required for wastewater treatment plants and industrial dischargers as part of performance evaluations. Water released from these facilities may be sampled for solids, oxygen-demanding wastes, fecal coliform bacteria, metals, nutrients, or other pollutants in order to determine if levels exceed a permit limitation and pose a threat to public or ecological health. As another example, a watershed association might have a monitoring program to evaluate implementation of its watershed plan and the associated ecological effectiveness. Such a validation monitoring or implementation monitoring program might be set up to answer the question, "Were restoration and/or management measures implemented correctly and achieve desired results?"


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Common Monitoring Objectives

Water Quality Monitoring Objectives

To properly manage a water resource, you need to know all about the water body and the watershed it drains. Watershed monitoring is a major part of the process for collecting this information and is therefore an essential component to water quality assessment and to watershed management. The information collected can support sound decision-making by identifying high quality waters and tracking their condition over time, by providing clues to the sources and levels of pollution for waters that are impaired or threatened, by helping managers understand the impacts of human activities within the watershed, and by providing input data used in water quality models. So without crucial monitoring data, we might not know exactly where a pollution problem exists, where we need to focus our watershed management energies, or where we may have made progress. Water quality monitoring programs are designed to serve many purposes.

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Section 4 of 19