Kevin Summers

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Gulf Ecology Division, Gulf Breeze, FL

John Carlton

Alabama Department of Environmental Management

Field Operations Division, Mobile, AL

Steve Heath

Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Mobile, AL

"How can you plan responsibly for your future if you do not know where you are in the present?"

With the ability of many federal agencies to maintain long-term coastal monitoring in jeopardy due to shrinking budgets, many states are beginning to re-examine their coastal and freshwater monitoring programs. This re-examination focuses primarily on the potential to design or re-design programs to attain multiple objectives through multi-agency interactions. This presentation documents the efforts of Alabama resource agencies to incorporate the monitoring activities of several freshwater and coastal state agencies and private industries into a coordinated, comprehensive water quality monitoring program. A key element of the comprehensive monitoring plan includes the use of biological indicators in addition to the tradition physical and chemical variables measured in the past. A key part of this effort involved the interactions between state and federal agencies, their interactions with academic researchers and the public to draw upon as large a knowledge base as possible. The process by which a multi-faceted, multi-objective comprehensive monitoring plan for Alabama waters was developed and implemented is described.

Whether you live or visit coastal Alabama, you are stuck by the high quality of life that exists here. White sand, clean water, a multitude of wildlife, and affordable and available land all combine to make this the fastest growing area in Alabama. With this growth comes increased pressures on local natural resources that have historically played an important role in the economic health of the area and of the State. Minerals, natural gas, timber, navigable waterways, and abundant viable habitats supporting the many commercial and recreational fisheries and shellfisheries all provide an important economic base for all of Alabama.

Accompanying this rapid increase in population is a growing public perception that the environment of coastal Alabama is threatened by the lack of a consistent, coordinated, management effort. Warning signs include: fish kills, shellfish closures, reduction in shrimp and fish harvests, continued losses of wetland acreage, large scale reductions in the biodiversity of the Mobile Bay watershed and the increased areal extent of summer hypoxia (i.e., low dissolved oxygen zones) where few if any organisms can survive. A comprehensive, scientific assessment of these problems is not possible as the state of Alabama does not utilize an ecosystem-based monitoring approach to detect changes in the natural environment. Ecosystem-based approaches to monitoring environmental "health" or condition are designed to assess not only site-specific threats to the environment but also more subtle environmental changes resulted in the cumulative effects of both man-made and natural processes through a watershed. This approach is being successfully utilized in other areas of the country and is currently being considered by many Gulf states (Grumbine 1994, McKenna 1994, Axelrad 1995, Cross 1996). While many characterization studies have been conducted in coastal Alabama waters, most have been compliance-driven and have been designed specifically to meet the requirement of regulatory agencies. These studies often have limited sampling periods, use different sampling protocols, and analyze and record data with different methods and formats. A more comprehensive and integrated approach to monitoring that focuses upon interagency cooperation is necessary before we can better understand how coastal Alabama water function under natural conditions or respond to man-made stressors.

Realizing the limitations of the current and historic monitoring efforts and the need for a comprehensive, integrated, ecosystem-based plan to serve as a foundation for more effective coastal management efforts, a group of scientists, planners, and engineers representing academia, government, and the private sector met to list criteria for the development of a cooperative regional plan. A representative "Strategy Subcommittee" of this group was formed to incorporate the results of the meeting into a final working strategy. This manuscript is a result of their efforts and attempts to address the pressures that an expanding population places on an ecosystem and to better utilize the diminishing flow of government funding allocated to manage our natural resources. This strategy incorporates both wide-scale baseline assessments of ecological condition, site-specific issues related to human activities and their influence on coastal waters, and enhanced cooperation and coordination of state agencies activities. The strategy is meant to be comprehensive in its approach to the issues, enable coastal managers to identify accurately long- and short-term environmental trends, and maintain the flexibility necessary to address future environmental issues.

The overall objective for the comprehensive monitoring plan is to: Assess the "health" or condition of the coastal waters of Alabama and track changes in that condition through time. As it is obvious that this statement has a different meaning for different individuals, most of the discussion can be reduced to: (1) A baseline of condition of all coastal waters, (2) A baseline of condition for selected coastal waters, and/or (3) paired sites of affected and unaffected locations within coastal waters.

It is clear that any monitoring strategy will have to address both wide-scale baseline assessment of condition and site-specific issues regarding anthropogenic influences on coastal waters. The Alabama Monitoring and Assessment program (ALAMAP) is designed to incorporate all of these issues through a multi-tiered design that addresses baseline ecosystem-level conditions, long-term trends, and hypothesized environmental problems; and yet, remains flexible enough to be useful in addressing future problems.

The selection of assessment questions is one of the most important activities in the design of a comprehensive monitoring plan. This list of questions becomes the roadmap for the design of the spatial and temporal attributes of the plan as well as the selection of appropriate indicators. Unlike objectives, which can include intangible concepts, assessment questions must be constructed to represent measurable quantities (e.g., concentrations) or, at least, represent second-order measurable quantities (e.g., diversity).

In August 1996, a workshop was held in Fairhope, Alabama to ascertain the assessment questions an Alabama Monitoring and Assessment Program would have to address. After several presentations regarding the development of these types of questions in other programs, workshop members split into two sub-groups—ecosystem and site-specific—to discuss the assessment question pertinent to ALAMAP. While many of the questions created by the two sub-groups were similar, three points became clear. (1) The site-specific group wanted the flexibility to address numerous problems as they arose; therefore, a fixed station design did not seem appropriate. (2) However, this group wanted a baseline of information regarding all Alabama coastal waters (and sub-systems) that could be used for comparison to the problematic sites. (3) Like the site-specific group’s second need, the ecosystem group desired a broad-scale monitoring program that would characterize the "coastal waters of Alabama" rather than just subregions or "hot spots" where problems occurred. While the final lists of questions from each group are important to ascertain the details of the design and the appropriate indicators, the primary finding of the workshop was that the ALAMAP design must be flexible and address overall condition of Alabama coastal waters as well as provide specific monitoring information for observed or hypothesized environmental problems.

Developing a conceptual model is an important step in constructing a monitoring plan in that it represents our present understanding of the manner in which Alabama coastal ecosystems function, the interaction of its components, and the potential effects of anthropogenic inputs to the system (e.g., effluents, atmospheric deposition) or outputs from the system (e.g., harvest, public recreation). To construct a conceptual model one says, "This is how I think my system operates." This process may be based on pure logic or based on experience and available data, but it represents our interpretation of the ecosystem to be monitored. Very often a conceptual model is depicted by a diagrammatic model such as those shown in Figure 1 and can vary greatly in the amount of detail depicted in their structures. All conceptual models are simplifications and idealizations; yet we accept these models as useful because they adequately express the most important aspects of the system with regard to the objectives of our monitoring plan and the assessment questions being asked.

Since ecological systems comprise many components that are highly interactive, the reduction of the number of components is necessary and by definition part of developing a conceptual model. The complexity of real world systems is usually simplified by the aggregation of processes and components that are similar into functional groups such as trophic levels, particle size, functional "guilds" and so forth. This consolidation is often a major factor involved in the construction of a conceptual model. The conceptual model constructed to represent Alabama coastal waters is shown in Figure 1.

This section provides an overview of a general strategy for indicator development and selection for a comprehensive monitoring program. The overall process of indicator development and selection consists of six phases:

The first two phases of indicator development and selection process are meant to generate ideas for endpoints and indicators. The processes used in these phases should therefore encourage broad-scale, lateral thinking with the focus on breadth rather than depth of coverage. Phase 1 (identifying environmental values, potential stressors and endpoints) requires a broad perspective on both desired ecosystem attributes (as expressed by resource managers, scientists, private industry, legislators, and the general public) and ecosystem stresses (which may occur on local to global spatial scales and over short- to long-term temporal scales). Proper identification of assessment endpoints and questions requires well-developed conceptual models of all important aspects of the ecosystem of concern (i.e., Alabama coastal waters), to ensure that identified endpoints are connected to the current and anticipated stresses of concern.

Phase 2 (identifying candidate indicators) similarly requires a broad sampling of scientific opinion, through both detailed literature reviews and interactions with scientists and resource managers conducting relevant research and monitoring. As this is a continuing process where scientific and technological advances occur, new candidate indicators can be generated or existing indicators can be improved.

The next three phases of indicator development and selection provide critical evaluation and iterative filtering of the set of candidate indicators to obtain a defensible, practical set of core monitoring indicators. Whereas Phases 1 and 2 are designed to include all possible relevant indicators, the next three phases are designed to systematically exclude indicators that fail to satisfy specific criteria for adoption, or are not amenable to complete evaluation.

The list of indicators should be as comprehensive as possible and a strawman list of candidate indicators for monitoring Alabama coastal Waters is presented in Table 1. The process of testing and prioritization of these candidate indicators is guided by a set of criteria for indicator selection coupled with peer reviews of these decisions. The use of clearly defined criteria increases the objectivity, consistency, and depth of indicator evaluations. Criteria for selection are shown in Table 2 and their application should not be too restrictive at this stage. A list of indicators to be measured at all baseline sites is shown in Table 1 as bolded entries. Indicators for the site-specific surveys will be specific to the site and question being assessed and examples of these types of indicators are denoted as SS in Table 1.

The assessment question workshop resulted in the development of two primary approaches: (1) Site-Specific and (2) Ecosystem. The site-specific approach requires a delineation of specific hypotheses to be tested by the monitoring activity (e.g., a comparison of selected areas receiving anthropogenic impacts to reference or unaffected sites). The ecosystem approach, if to be applicable to all coastal waters, requires the probabilistic approach. Both approaches require that the boundaries of the monitored population (i.e., Alabama coastal waters) be determined, acceptable uncertainty criteria be ascertained, and the appropriate design and reporting strata be determined.

The spatial and temporal aspects of a monitoring design are derived from the assessment questions and the variation associated with the selected indicators. The ecosystem-level assessment questions tended to call for monitoring results that apply to "all" Alabama coastal waters. A probabilistic design is required to meet this need although thousands of probabilistic options are available. The site-specific group’s questions called for results that would differentiate among selected sites or test working hypotheses. As a result, a set of judgmental sites would be required to address each hypothesis. Because both forms of questions were posed then a multi-tier design needs to be incorporated to include aspects of both approaches.

Uncertainty criteria must be defined and agreed upon to select a monitoring design that has the appropriate power to address the assessment questions. For example, one assessment criteria might be that all status or "health" assessments have 95% confidence intervals of ±10% such that an assessment of estuarine sediments with contaminant concentrations greater than criteria A would be X%±10% (e.g., 35±10% of all Alabama coastal sediments). This type of uncertainty pertains to probabilistic statements. Site-specific assessments also would require uncertainty criteria at primarily the level of discrimination often referred to as a p-level. For example, the uncertainty level for discrimination between affected and reference sites might be a 95% chance of discerning a difference if a difference exists between the sites (i.e., p<0.05).

Appropriate design strata can include many approaches. Basically, a rule of thumb is that if you wish to answer an assessment question with regard to a strata with the desired level of certainty then that strata should be designed into the overall monitoring plan. However, if the strata simply represents geographic units that you want information on (e.g., by habitat unit, use type, etc.) but do not care whether the design certainty level is met, then the strata should not be incorporated into the monitoring design.

In general, the use of strata within a sampling design enhances the power to detect differences because it optimizes the design based on the natural variability characteristics of what is being measured. However, in broad scale-monitoring designs where many indicators are being utilized, what is optimal for one indicator is often not optimal for another. In addition, to design a monitoring plan based on strata that represents the entire resource (i.e., "all" Alabama coastal waters) requires that the physical distribution of the selected strata be known and the variability of the indicators in question be known. Often this is not the case. While much information is known concerning potential strata in Alabama waters, rarely can a known distribution be determined for all strata variables without preliminary sampling.

Several options were discussed with regard to stratification for both site-specific and ecosystem-wide monitoring. Potential site-specific strata included:

Potential ecosystem-wide strata included:

All of these strata represent reasonable approaches to developing a spatial sampling design. The key to selecting the appropriate strata is a determination of the needs of the monitoring program, the availability of data on the distribution and boundaries of the strata, the availability of data on the spatial variability of indicators of interest within the strata, and the ramifications of multiple strata on sampling size (i.e., reduces sampling size for site-specific monitoring and increases sampling size for ecosystem-wide sampling).

The actual placement of sites and the total number of sites is also based on the assessment questions. Since many of these questions require assessments for "all" Alabama coastal waters then the sampling design must be extrapolable and thus probabilistic in nature. This does not necessarily mean that the sites are randomly placed, although that type of placement is one possibility. Probabilistic simply infers that the sites are representative and not biased. If the sites can be placed judgmentally (i.e., based on experience and knowledge) so that they are representative of selected strata (e.g., habitats, use zones), then the requirement for a probabilistic nature for the design will be met.

Designing temporal aspects of the sampling plan also relate directly to the initial set of assessment questions. If the monitoring program is to fully characterize short-term status and trends, then monthly sampling may be required. If the question lends itself to longer-term assessment of status and trends, then seasonal or annual samples may be more appropriate. The choice of a temporal framework should not be based on the fact that the values of the indicators change with time, but rather, what is the time scale of interest. If the purpose of the monitoring program is to "understand" coastal phenomena in relation to within-year changes associated with environmental forcing functions, then shorter-time scale sampling is appropriate that will include monthly and/or seasonal variation. However, if the desire of the planning group is to ascertain changes in overall status and trends over longer temporal scales (e.g., years), then annual or semi-annual time scales tend to be more useful.

Many of the proposed indicators exhibit large intra-annual variability (i.e., they are seasonal) (Oviatt and Nixon 1973, Jefferies and Terceiro 1985, Grassle et al. 1985, Holland et al. 1987). Generally, monitoring programs do not have the monetary resources to characterize this variability or to assess status in all seasons for "all" resources (i.e., all Alabama coastal waters). Therefore, sampling has often been limited to a confined portion of the year (i.e., an index period) when indicators are expected to show the greatest response to anthropogenic and climatic stress.

For most coastal ecosystems in the Northern hemisphere, mid-summer (July-August) is the period when ecological responses to pollution exposure are likely to be most severe. During this period, dissolved oxygen concentrations are most likely to approach stressful, low values (USEPA 1984, Officer et al. 1984, Oviatt 1981). Moreover, the cycling and adverse effects of sediment contaminant exposure are generally greatest at the low dilution flows and high temperatures that occur in mid-summer (Connell and Miller 1984, Sprague 1985, Mayer et al. 1989).

The assessment questions raised by the majority of the workshop participants require a base generalized, probabilistic design as one element of ALAMAP. The overall design needs to include both ecosystem-wide and site-specific elements collected during at least two index periods per year (spring and late summer). The ecosystem-level monitoring design tier stratifies based on water quality use categories with built-in design characteristics that would permit changing the strata to habitat-based after six years of data collection. In each case, site placement is probabilistically-based and includes 59 sites spread over nine water quality use areas sampled quarterly. Several of the water quality use areas that have the same use have been combined to ensure and efficient characterization of condition. The recommended approach for the annual baseline environmental characterization is shown in Figure 2.

The ecosystem-wide surveys are supplemented by two intensive surveys conducted biennially in two regions of Alabama’s coastal waters (Figures 3-8). The two regions include: (1) Mobile Bay proper (Regions 1, 2, 3 and 4) and (2) the coastal areas outside Mobile Bay including Perdido Bay, Mobile River, Tensaw River, Blakely River and Mississippi Sound (Regions 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9). The two-year period conforms to the 305(b) reporting schedule and would permit two full data collections per 305(b) cycle and will permit re-designs, if desired, on even numbered years from two-year to ten-year increments. The intensive surveys will be performed in a late summer index period only.

The ecosystem-wide sampling is supplemented by site-specific surveys used to examine specific environmental issues. This site-specific survey element is be based on impact and issue strata (i.e., what types of anthropogenic effects are of interest and what specific geographic areas are desired to examine whether management practices are successful). The design phase of this survey is dependent upon the identification of sites of interest and the questions posed. Their timing would be irregular based upon the timing of specific issues.

The proposed comprehensive coastal monitoring design combines the strengths of probabilistic sampling with hypothesis testing and permits:

The two-year rotational cycle is depicted in Table 3 and allows ADEM to meet the requirements of the 305(b) program for coastal waters. In addition, the first sampling cycle will permit the mapping of bottom habitats such that the sampling stratification could be altered to represent habitats in the future with the water quality use areas being determined by sub-population estimation. All ecosystem-wide estimates for collected indicators will be estimated in terms of areal distribution with an uncertainty of ±10%.

Monitoring programs that involve multiple organizations and laboratories, as well as multiple individuals in the field, frequently encounter problems in obtaining data that are comparable among the many individuals and laboratories involved (Taylor 1978, 1985; Martin Marietta Environmental Systems 1987; NRC 1990). Such problems usually result because, in the haste to initiate data collection programs, the participating organizations and their staffs are not adequately trained in applying standardized collection methods, and the comparability of the laboratory processing methods and capabilities are not evaluated (Taylor 1985).

The proposed comprehensive monitoring program for Alabama coastal waters should implement a quality assurance program to ensure that the data produced are comparable with known and acceptable quality. The program will consist of two distinct but related sets of activities: quality control and quality assurance.

Quality control includes design, planning, and management actions to ensure that the types and amounts of data are collected in a manner required to address the monitoring objectives. Examples of some quality control activities that could be employed are the use of standardized sample collection and processing protocols, and the requirement of specific levels of group training for field crews and technicians who will collect and process samples. The goals of quality control procedures are to ensure that:

Quality assurance activities should be implemented to quantify the effectiveness of the quality control procedures. These activities ensure that measurement error and bias are identified, quantified, and accounted for or eliminated (if practical). Quality assurance consists of both internal and external checks including: repetitive measurements, internal test samples, interchange of technicians and equipment, use of independent methods to verify findings, exchange of samples among laboratories, use of standard reference materials, and audits (Taylor 1985, USEPA 1984).

The proposed monitoring program will implement a quality assurance/quality control program based on measurement quality objectives based on estimates of achievable data quality associated with attributes of any data. These attributes are: representativeness, completeness, comparability, accuracy and precision.

Reporting of the results of any monitoring program should be timely and portrayed in a way that is useful to its audience (e.g., resource managers, decision makers, scientific community, the public). Every effort should be made to report on the findings in written form within 6-12 months of a survey’s completion. Unfortunately, this is often where reporting issues end.

The most important aspect of reporting is generally ignored by most programs—that is the development of an integrated information management system that makes the data readily available to most potential users and acts as an archive. One of the primary assessment requirements listed in an earlier section is the determination of trends. Trends determination requires consistent, long-term data collection. Invariably, over the course of a long-term study, participants come and go and key information concerning the available data (metadata); often even the data itself cannot be retrieved. Data collectors are no longer available or can not be found, database constructors have moved on, program planners are planning other programs. In short, no one remembers.

To avoid this all too common occurrence, the proposed monitoring program will develop a standardized, integrated information management system with the personnel responsible for that system involved in all early aspects of planning the program. A clear and concise set of responsibilities of this system (including metadata) should be determined early in planning. A good rule of thumb in developing such a system is called the twenty-year rule. In short, what information would you need in twenty years to reconstruct earlier activities if no one were available to ask. That’s the information that should be contained in your long-term information management system.

ALAMAP represents an early adaptation by a state of probabislistic approaches to collect the information necessary to meeting its 305(b) requirements. ALAMAP in 1997 expanded its probabilistic sampling to include all freshwater resources in Alabama, except lakes. In 1998, the Gulf of Mexico program initiated an effort to help the Gulf States adopt a core, comprehensive, integrated coastal monitoring approach that includes probabilistic sampling as one of its elements. Early discussions by this group have praised Alabama’s efforts and described their program as a framework upon which a Gulf-wide consistent monitoring program could be based. In 1998, the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program adopted ALAMAP as its programmatic monitoring approach.

In 1996, EPA’s 305(b) Working Group described probabilistic sampling approaches as an acceptable approach for collecting environmental condition data and reporting 305(b) results. At present, twelve of the 23 coastal states are adapting their coastal monitoring programs to utilize probabilistic surveys as an element of their overall programs.

Table 2. Indicator Selection Criteria