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DEMONSTRATION OF A MULTI-SCALE INTEGRATED MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT IN NY/NJ HARBOR
Citation:
Galloway, W B., J F. Paul, G Pesch, C J. Strobel, B S. Brown, D. Adams, D. Suszkowski, AND J. Lodge. DEMONSTRATION OF A MULTI-SCALE INTEGRATED MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT IN NY/NJ HARBOR. Presented at North Atlantic Chapter of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Portland, ME, April 24-26, 2002.
Description:
The Clean Water Act (CWA) requires states and tribes to assess the overall quality of their waters (Sec 305(b)), determine whether that quality is changing over time, identify problem areas and management actions necessary to resolve those problems, and evaluate the effectiveness of CWA programs. These programs include nonpoint source control (Sec 319), clean lakes (Sec 314), total maximum daily load allocation (Sec 303(d)), NPDES permitting (Sec 402), and dredging (Sec 404). Monitoring information is needed to effectively address these CWA goals. It is not economically feasible to census all waters in the United States in order to meet the CWA requirements. We propose a tiered approach which makes an overall assessment of the quality of all waters, then refines that assessment to target follow-up confirmatory monitoring to areas which have a high probability of impairment. We demonstrate this approach through the experience of NY/NJ Harbor over the period 1990-2000. The Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) 1990-1993 Virginian Province effort was a regional scale study. That study indicated widespread benthic impairments in the NY/NJ Harbor area which generated the 1993 Regional-EMAP (REMAP) effort which focused in at the sub-basin within the NY/NJ Harbor. The Contamination Assessment and Reduction Project (CARP) in New York Harbor, initiated in 1996, was intended to address the issue of sediment contamination relevant to dredging and the identification of sources of that contamination. This demonstrates how we can combine probability based survey information with other data, and analyses and models, to address specific environmental management needs at multiple scales.