Monitoring Southern California's Coastal Waters (1990) / Chapter Skim
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6 Analysis of Monitoring Efforts
6 Analysis of Monitoring Efforts
Pages 116-141
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From page 116... ...
This review therefore identifies important conceptual issues, and illustrates them using examples from existing monitoring programs. Many of these issues and examples identity shortcomings of the monitoring system and existing programs, and others stress positive developments.
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From page 117... ...
This consensus is presented here as a series of statements and is amplified in the following sections. The strengths of the monitoring system include: · an established legal requirement for addressing environmental issues and problems; · important contributions to environmental decision making; · active links to ongoing research programs; · innovative monitoring program designs and techniques; data; high-quality methods for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting · raw monitoring data of high quality and integrity; · large data sets that have greatly increased understanding of localized impacts, particularly of municipal wastewater discharges; and · a few long-term data sets that are valuable for examining large-scale and long-term effects of human activities on the bight.
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From page 118... ...
This begins with broad public concerns about public health and the status of marine resources; extends through laws, regulations, and permits; and ends with the specifications of individual monitoring programs. In Chapter 3 the public's concerns were reviewed in the section "Public Concerns for the Bight," while the laws that furnish the regulatory context for monitoring were reviewed in `'The Regulatory Sector." Finally, the structure of effluent limitations and water quality criteria was described in Chapter 4 in "The Monitoring Sector." These objectives influence the design of monitoring programs.
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From page 119... ...
1b design a monitoring program with the objective of ascertaining "degradation," the term must be defined in a meaningful way. Thus, monitoring program objectives should be stated as clear, preferably quantitative, questions or null hypotheses: for example, a program could be designed to determine if the three most abundant fish species within 3 mi of the Orange County outfall had decreased in abundance by more than 50 percent from one year to the next.
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From page 120... ...
These decisions can be made with the support of the technical design tools outlined in Figures 5-1 to 5-4. In contrast to most objectives used as the basis of receiving-water monitoring, the three examples above provide the foundation for focused, efficient monitoring programs.
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From page 121... ...
In areas of wastewater impacts (particularly White Point on the Palos Verdes Shelf) these activities reduced apparent impacts from me Los Angeles County outfall.
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From page 122... ...
Inflexibility Because monitoring programs are typically defined in regulatory permits, it is difficult to alter them as knowledge accumulates. The lengthy public hearing process required for updating permits has occasionally deterred permittees from attempting to modify their monitoring programs.
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From page 123... ...
As a condition of their 301(h) permit, the County Sanitation Districts of Orange County are required to routinely measure a wide range of chemical contaminants, even though many of them are never found in effluent or sediments.
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From page 124... ...
Implementing this change in the sampling design required several years and a public hearing, at a cost of wasted sampling effort at B-2 and reduced ability to monitor impacts at 150 ft. As part of its NPDES permit to discharge cooling water from coastal power plants, the Southern California Edison Company is required to monitor for thermal effects on marine resources despite the fact that nearly 20 years of studies have documented the limited nature of these effects.
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From page 125... ...
They produced information that was important in understanding and reducing impacts without becoming a part of routine monitoring activities. On the other hand, Edison personnel pointed out to the case study panel that they found the data from mandated monitoring programs based on conventional measurements to be of relatively little value in managing marine resources.
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From page 126... ...
The permit-by-permit approach makes it more likely that these potentially confounding influences will be disregarded when designing a monitoring program for the Orange County outfall. The city of Los Angeles and the County Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles and Orange counties all carry out fish trawling programs around the Hyperion, White Point, and Orange County wastewater outfalls, respectively.
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From page 127... ...
Specific examples of inconsistencies among monitoring programs include the following: · The city of Los Angeles has a flexible approach to measuring priority pollutants in sediments and organisms, whereas the County Sanitation Districts of Orange County measure priority pollutants regularly. Bawl sampling around wastewater outfalls is usually conducted quarterly or semiannually, but trawl sampling around coastal power plants is conducted every two months.
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From page 128... ...
New monitoring tools can be properly applied only in the context of clear statements of management needs and the questions and/or hypotheses that resect them. The following examples illustrate this point: · Power tests can estimate the likelihood that a sampling plan will detect a change, such as an increase in the diversity of the benthic infaunal community of 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, etc.
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From page 129... ...
The California ocean plan (State Water Resources Control Board, 1987) defines a "significant" difference as '`a statistically significant difference in the means of two distributions of sampling results at the 95 percent confidence level." The problem with this definition is that it provides no guidance in determining how large a change is of importance and should therefore be detected by a monitoring program.
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From page 130... ...
In addition, an emphasis on improving monitoring methods has resulted in standardization of invertebrate taxonomy, benthic grab sampling techniques, and chemical analysis procedures. Monitoring programs at the municipal wastewater discharges benefit directly from research carried out at SCCWRP.
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From page 131... ...
For example, the Los Angeles County sanitation districts have computerized past monitoring data from the White Point outfall, whereas such data from the County Sanitation Districts of Orange County are available only in written reports. Data from the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigation (CalCOFI)
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From page 132... ...
and the ODES data base represent important steps in setting consistent standards for standardization, quality control procedures, error checking, and digital formats for monitoring data. However, there is currently no easily accessible, user-oriented data base system to provide access to analysts interested in integrating data from several different kinds of studies.
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From page 133... ...
198-ft (60-m) survey; · Scripps' shoreline temperature data for the west coast of the United States, and wave energy and wave direction database; · California Department of Fish and Game sportfish catch; National Marine Fisheries Service commercial fish catch data; benthic infaunal and sediment data from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)
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From page 134... ...
In this section, the technical interpretation of data obtained in monitoring programs and its use in decision making are addressed. Some examples show that monitoring data have been adequately interpreted and used in decision making.
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From page 135... ...
monitoring program performed by the County Sanitation Districts of Orange County resulted in adjustments to the districts' permit. In addition, the data in the report suggested that no changes were needed in the waste discharge or treatment processes.
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From page 136... ...
It has also yielded useful resource information on a sedentary reef fish community. This latter example demonstrates that if data were made available scientists would find monitoring programs useful for filling in information gaps about marine resources.
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From page 137... ...
The state board establishes overall policy and the regional water quality control boards determine individual permit requirements. Both the EPA and the regional boards believe that most monitoring programs are well planned, well executed, and yield data that are useful in demonstrating compliance and in documenting regulatory changes.
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From page 138... ...
It has tracked the improvement of gross contamination in areas such as Los Angeles Harbor and the beaches of Santa Monica Bay. Longer-term studies, such as those carried out at the White Point outfall by the County Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles, have provided valuable insights into how human impacts interact with natural disturbances.
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From page 139... ...
Spatial and Temporal Scales As a general rule of thumb, the spatial and temporal boundaries of a monitoring program should match those of the phenomena it is attempting to monitor. As Figure 5-6 shows, the spatial and temporal boundaries of existing monitoring programs match those of some but by no means all of
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From page 140... ...
monitoring data have contributed to many important decisions related to pollution abatement and the management of natural resources. In general, monitoring has been successful in identifying and quantifying the impacts of such point-source activities as wastewater outfalls and coastal power plants.
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From page 141... ...
storing efforts; poorly stated objectives that provided insufficient guidance for mon · inability to monitor the effects of activities falling outside the existing permit structure; · inflexibility that inhibits needed adaptability; · overemphasis on a permit-by-permit approach to monitoring and environmental decision making, thus limiting the ability to monitor cumulative and large-scale impacts; · insufficient use of statistical design tools in the development of sampling and measurement plans; and · lack of a bightwide data management system to support integration and synthesis of data from different studies. The panel performed a preliminary synoptic assessment of environmental problems in the bight.
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