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STEPS FORWARD IN WETLAND MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT
Citation:
Kentula, M E. STEPS FORWARD IN WETLAND MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT. Presented at Association of State Wetland Managers Symposium, Nashua, NH, October 20-23, 2003.
Description:
The recent report of the National Research Council on wetland mitigation again highlighted the need for regional watershed evaluation as a context from which to determine the efficacy of past regulatory decisions and to improve the effectiveness of future actions. Collaborative studies are bringing together scientists from the USEPA's Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP), EPA's Regional Offices, state agencies and academia to develop and eventually implement regional monitoring and assessment strategies and tools to report on wetland condition. The overall strategy involves three levels of assessment (landscape, rapid and intensive) which are chosen for use depending on the objective of the assessment, availability of resources, and the degree of confidence needed in the results. Tools needed to implement the strategy are being developed and evaluated. In particular, methods for obtaining a representative sample of the resource and samples at multiple scales are now available. Sample design provided by EMAP results in a spatially well-dispersed sample, with each site sampled having a known probability of being selected. This ensures the sample drawn is representative of the wetland resource. The design also provides for adjustments in the results to account for biases in the data that could occur as a consequence of denial of access to private property. Development of guidance on rapid assessment methods is underway involving review and field testing of existing methods. This will result in approaches that use intensive methods to regionalize and validate rapid methods and that customize rapid methods for special uses such as evaluation of mitigation projects. Results from monitoring at the three levels can be used to report on the ecological condition of the wetland resource, to improve the design and targeting of restoration, to provide data for developing scenarios for future actions, and to evaluate the effectiveness of mitigation, and evaluate effectiveness of management actions.