Buzzards Bay National Estuary Program

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Draft Action Plan 22:
Monitoring Management Action, Status and Trends

About the new Buzzards Bay CCMP Action Plans
The Buzzards Bay NEP is now updating our 1992 landmark Buzzards Bay Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP) to reflect the great progress achieved since that plan was finalized. It will include new goals, objectives, and recommendations to meet the environmental needs for Buzzards Bay and its surrounding watershed throughout the next decade. This new document will also meet the requirements for a Massachusetts Watershed Action Plan, which will enable new funding opportunities through the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

On this page is a draft action plan from the updated Buzzards Bay Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan. The text on this page is a public draft provided to invite comment and discussion of the subject by residents and stakeholders. It may contain goals and recommendations that have not yet been endorsed or approved by the Buzzards Bay Steering Committee. The views or information contained here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or the US Environmental Protection Agency.

We want your feedback on this action plan. First, please read the action plan Monitoring Management Action, Status and Trends [this is an incomplete draft without recommendations added]. In many respects, the perspectives and priorities in the original 1991 monitoring plan remain relevant. Then at the bottom of this page click the "rate this action plan" button to provide comments on each goal, objective and recommendation contained in this Action Plan. Based on your feedback, we will update and revise all the action plans in the new CCMP.

Monitoring Management Action, Status and Trends

April 21, 2009 draft

Background and Issues

[this is an excerpt]

Monitoring is a necessary requirement for any program to track the effectiveness of management action as well as management inaction. For Clean Water Act initiatives like the National Estuary Program, a key question has always been, are we making waters more fishable and swimmable? While this question is based principally on human health, and whether or not fish and other natural resources are present, the question is also understood as whether government is preserving and protecting ecosystem health and the integrity of the natural environment.

Increasingly, state and federal funding agencies want to know not only whether the grant recipient completed a project successfully, but also whether the effort was truly making a difference in protecting or restoring the environment. In fact, the 1987 amendments to the Clean Water Act section 320(b)(6) specified that each NEP Management Conference shall "...monitor the effectiveness of actions taken pursuant to the plan," and to meet these two goals: "measure the effectiveness of the management actions and programs implemented under the [CCMP]; and provide essential information that can be used to redirect and refocus the CCMP during implementation." Implicit in these requirements are programmatic monitoring, environmental monitoring, and some level of research to ensure that selected environmental monitoring is adequately characterizing environmental conditions and risks.

In 1993, Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) "to provide for the establishment of strategic planning and performance measurement in the Federal Government." Fifteen years later, the implementation of this law is still evolving and changing how federal agencies, and federally funded state agencies, gather information to evaluate the performance of programs and how they monitor the environment. The Act required federal programs to identify measurable goals for tracking progress toward the agency's mission. To answer such a fundamental question, each program needed to adopt performance indicators that were objective and valid.

To meet elements of the U.S. EPA's compliance with the GPRA, all the NEP's now track CCMP actions completed, and acres of wetland and habitat protected and restored. Beyond these minimum requirements, each NEP is responsible for developing and implementing a monitoring program to track both programmatic actions recommended within a CCMP, and measures to document water quality, habitat, populations, and measures of ecosystem health and integrity.

....

Another difficulty in communicating results occurs when entities collect data on numerous parameters, making it difficult to communicate a clear message about multiple trends with a simple "story." This problem led the Buzzards Bay NEP to create the Eutrophication Index for the Coalition for Buzzards Bay citizen monitoring program in 1992, combining five different parameters (chlorophyll, secchi depth, inorganic nitrogen, organic nitrogen, and oxygen concentrations) into a single water quality index. The Coalition for Buzzards Bay adopted a similar approach by creating scores for a series of other numeric indicators for its State of the Bay reports beginning in 2001. This technique allowed the establishment of a single Bay Health Index cutting across numerous water quality and living resource issues. Environmental programs have increasingly adopted these approaches across the U.S. and elsewhere.

A nontrivial subset of problems with communicating environmental trends is the fact that there has been a dramatic increase in population and development and a dramatic loss of natural habit in the coastal zone in the last 20 years. If certain water quality indicators remain steady in the face of these trends, this is in fact a management success. However, getting funding agencies and the public to appreciate such realities has been difficult at best.

A more disturbing impediment to the development and funding of new monitoring programs is that government often does not want to document the extent of existing or new problems. In this context, monitoring the environment is seen neither as an investment, nor as a mechanism to build a healthy economy. More rigorous monitoring can close swimming beaches, discourage tourism and recreation, and cost government and industry money by exposing problems that cost money to solve. An extension of this logic is that it is more appropriate to use limited government funds and budgets to solve problems already documented by earlier monitoring efforts than to implement new monitoring programs.

Goals

Goal 1. To document environmental trends of water quality and living resources in order to assess the effectiveness of management actions taken, or the need for new actions.

Goal 2. Identify research and monitoring needs to better understand the causes of impairments and to resolve uncertainties about the health and condition of Buzzards Bay..

Objectives

Objective 1. Collect and monitor programmatic actions to document implementation of CCMP recommended actions.

Objective 2. Ensure regulatory agencies define essential monitoring requirements and collect data necessary to evaluate program and project success.

Objective 3. Ensure that funding is available to implement essential monitoring programs.

Objective 4. Revise and adapt the monitoring program to meet changing needs and information gaps.

Objective 5. Disseminate data and syntheses of information to scientists, managers, and the public.

Objective 6. Encourage scientists and agencies to evaluate emerging contaminants and other stressors to the environment.

Recommendations

[under development]

Create your own Recommendations

Help us develop recommendations for this action plan. Please go to our wiki page http://buzzardsbayresearch.wikispaces.com and write your own ideas for research and monitoring programs for Buzzards Bay. The Buzzards Bay National Estuary Program set up this wiki page to enable scientists, agency personel, and the public to make suggestions relating to monitoring and research needs in Buzzards Bay. Recommendations included here will be considered for inclusion in this and other action plans in the new Buzzards Bay Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan.


To fully understand the basis of these goals and recommendations, please read the complete Monitoring Management Action, Status and Trends Action Plan (1/5/10 draft, pdf file).

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