Why Conduct Regional Monitoring?
In 1989, the National Research Council (NRC) conducted a review of marine environmental monitoring programs in the Southern California Bight and found that $17 million is spent annually on marine monitoring, but that it was not possible to provide an integrated assessment of the status of the Southern California coastal marine environment. Most monitoring was associated with NPDES permit requirements and directed towards addressing questions about site-specific discharge sources. As a result, most monitoring in the Bight was restricted to an area covering less than 5% of the Bight, making it difficult to draw conclusions about the Bight as a whole. The limited spatial extent of monitoring was also found to limit the quality of local-scale assessments, since the boundaries of most monitoring programs did not match the spatial and temporal boundaries of the important physical and biological processes in the Bight.
NRC further found that there was a lack of coordination among existing programs, with substantial differences in the parameters measured among programs preventing integration of data. Even when the same parameters were examined, they were often measured with different methodologies or with different (or unknown) levels of quality assurance. Moreover, NRC found that even when the same parameters were measured in the same way, substantial differences in data storage systems among monitoring programs limited access to the data for more comprehensive assessment.
Read the NRC Executive Summary
Read Southern California's Marine Monitoring System Ten Years After the National Research Council Evaluation