Regional Monitoring

One of the Project's most significant achievements has been the development and implementation of a comprehensive regional monitoring program for Santa Monica Bay. The focus of the program is to coordinate and integrate regional monitoring activities. The ultimate goal is to provide meaningful information on the issues that concern the public the most: the health risks associated with swimming in the Bay and eating Bay seafood, and the health of the Bay's marine resources and habitats.

Although the Bay is probably the most intensely monitored coastal area in the country, with at least 15 agencies collecting data for a variety of purposes, prior to the efforts of the SMBRP there was no overall coordination or integration of these activities between agencies. This lack of coordination resulted in numerous problems including:

Overlaps and duplication of effort among separate programs
Information gaps
Lack of focus on information management needs
Insufficient standardization across separate programs
Lack of flexibility and adaptability
Overemphasis on large point sources
Inability to combine data from separate programs

Progress Update
A Comprehensive Monitoring Framework was first developed in 1993 to redefine the purposes of monitoring away from individual agency mandates towards a more holistic approach to data collection, emphasizing the Bay's four priority issues (safe swimming, safe seafood, marine resource health, and ecosystem health). Under the new framework, these information needs were transformed into 16 key monitoring components and 54 data elements, including natural and human stressors as well as biotic response indicators.

With guidance provided by the Framework, working groups of representative agencies and citizens developed specific designs for each monitoring component. Efforts were made to accommodate the capabilities (existing or potential) of the designated monitoring agencies so that the completed design could be readily implemented. To date, designs are completed for six key monitoring components, including bacteriology, seafood tissues, wetlands, pelagic ecosystem, kelp beds, and pollution sources/loading. The new designs call for many fundamental changes to existing program objectives, design principles, endpoints, methodologies, and data management.

Other Regional Monitoring Efforts in Southern California
First initiated by the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project (SCCWRP) and the SMBRP in the early 1990s, regional surveys of the Southern California Bight were conducted in 1994 and again in 1998. The surveys included sampling from randomly selected stations throughout the bight on key parameters of water and sediment chemistry, benthic infauna, fish assemblage, and fish tissue. The results of the surveys provided a valuable assessment of the conditions of Santa Monica Bay in comparison to the rest of the Southern California Bight.

In 1996, the U.S. Mineral Management Service initiated a Multi-Agency Rocky Intertidal Monitoring Network (MARINE). This network is designed to regularly monitor 27 sites throughout the central and southern California coast in conjunction with on-going monitoring efforts on the Channel Islands. Two rocky intertidal locations in Santa Monica Bay (Paradise Cove and White's Point) are included in the network. Rocky intertidal monitoring conducted under MARINE uses consistent protocols and methodology with the goals of tracking temporary trends and making spatial comparisons of the habitat conditions in the region.

Challenges
Although there have been great successes, challenges remain to full implementation of these new approaches to day-to-day monitoring. Although most scientists and managers agree that the changes proposed under the new monitoring designs are necessary and reasonable, it remains a difficult task to break institutional barriers. In many cases, implementation of the new program will require revision of existing NPDES permits, changes to laboratory procedures and equipment, as well as data management systems.

To help facilitate the implementation of the new monitoring framework, the SMBRP conducted an assessment of the compliance monitoring system in Santa Monica Bay. The assessment dealt with two primary questions:

Are monitoring resources being appropriately allocated to address current problems?
If not, what adjustments might be called for?

The first question was addressed by evaluating data produced by existing monitoring programs over the last 20-30 years. The results confirmed a growing recognition that while several existing programs have already answered the management questions they were designed to address, many other issues of increasing public and scientific concern are not being systematically studied.

Based on these findings, the SMBRP recommended a series of changes to the existing monitoring programs in Santa Monica Bay:

Discontinue monitoring of water quality, sediment, infauna, rocky subtidal, and trawl sampling around the large wastewater treatment plant outfalls, coastal power plants, and oil refineries where steady monitoring has demonstrated that impacts are minor or have never been observed;
Reduce monitoring where impacts have been well documented and are trending downward or where discharge quality has been greatly improved;
Restructure or increase monitoring of seafood tissue, the open ocean ecosystem, kelp beds, rocky intertidal communities, resident fish populations, wetlands, and storm water (inland and coastal plumes);
Use the savings from scaled-back monitoring efforts to create a regional funding pool to pay for increased monitoring.

The report that summarizes the assessment and recommendations can be downloaded from our Library. To oversee implementation of the report's recommendations, the SMBRC plans to convene a Monitoring Policy Committee to be composed of top decision-makers from key regulatory and monitoring agencies, dischargers, and representatives of environmental organizations. The Committee will develop the implementation mechanisms, including financing and organizational structures, for the comprehensive Bay Monitoring Program.