Monitoring for Non-Point Source Pollution --Perspectives From the Field--

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Monitoring for Non-Point Source
Pollution--Perspectives From the Field--

• Kate SullivanSustainable Ecosystems Institute

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Why are we talking about monitoring?

• Government Perspective
• Fundamental element of TMDLs and HCPs
• High expectations for data and design
• Sounds like its easy to do
• Landowner Perspective
• State responsibility
• Two-edged sword
• Extremely expensive

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My Perspective on Monitoring

• Far too little knowledge about system performance
  has been generated for the money and time spent
  on monitoring in the past 30 years
• It is very hard to develop and manage
  coordinated, informative monitoring programs
• Approach driven by TMDLs and HCPs will
  potentially make the problem worse, not better
• National scale programs will not help develop the
  kind of knowledge we need to guide State-based
  BMP systems

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What a monitoring program must consider

• Performing the job
• Managing design and data
• Managing organization(s)
• Long-term commitment of financial resources
• Reporting
• Who cares?
• Learning
• Putting together information in a way that leads
  to conclusions about performance
• Using information in decision-making

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Challenges to Monitoring Programs

• Linking responsibility to landowners
• Linking information to management practices
• Accounting for watershed variability
• Learning from monitoring
• Linking information to decision-making

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What we would like to establish

• Compliance
• Did we do what we said we would do?
• Effectiveness of practices
• Did it solve or prevent the problems it was
  designed to address?
• Resource status and trends
• Did preventing or solving these problems
  translate to protection or improvement in
  resources of concern?

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Accounting for watershed variability

• Watershed complexity has been well established by
  Watershed Analysis
• Multiple watershed processes
• Scale
• Spatial variability in sensitivity
• Temporal variability in driving processes
• This makes comprehensive monitoring of system
  very difficult
• replication
• detection
• cause and effect linkages

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Comparison of Point and Non-Point Sources
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What does NMFS ManTech Report suggest?

• 20-50 sample sites within each stream type (6) in
  your watershed 120-300 sampling locations
• Random sample design
• for 3 years, select 200 stream sites each year
• after 5 years, start re-sampling
• Reference sites to compare to
• Participation in multi-State regional sampling
  program
• Standard protocols
• Training, QA/QC
• Measure many things

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Scientific Standards May Be Excessive
95 Confidence

• Scientists make the methodology hurtles very high
• Replication
• Randomness, etc.
• Traditional statistical approach
• Agencies are extremely risk averse

How about80-90?
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Linking responsibility to landowners

• Potential problems
• Mixed ownership
• Legacies from past practices conducted over the
  past 100 years
• Commitment of resources and keeping momentum
• Getting going is difficult!
• Setting up plans
• Coordinating among various stakeholders
• Designing credible, durable program

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Learning from Monitoring

• Like other scientific endeavors, monitoring
  should be based on HYPOTHESES
• of cause and effect linkages

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Cause and Effect Linkages

• Standard forest practice rules . . . . . .
  guide riparian area silvicultural
  practices.. that
  influence recruitment of ..
  functional large
  woody debris...
  that controls
  channel conditions . . .
  
  that provide habitat .
  
  that supports harvestable levels
  
  of fish.

Management System
ManagementPractices
Watershed Processes
Input Factor
Channel Conditions
Habitat / Water Qual
Beneficial Uses
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Learning from Monitoring--Scientific Problems

• Poorly articulated relationships between
  disturbing agents and channel response
• failure to measure crucial variables while
  measuring many non-essential variables
• Lack of understanding leading to inappropriate
  methods and blindness to linkages
• Measuring at wrong scales
• boundaries too small, boundaries too large
• unrecognized process or event intervenes between
  the measured independent variable (e.g.. logging)
  and the system response (e.g. fine sediment
  loading in the channel)
• If causal pathways arent fully delineated
  monitoring will often not detect or understand
  why the system changed as it did

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Learning from Monitoring

• Measurements not taken at appropriate time scales
• Most processes do not proceed at a steady rate
  through time
• More common for long periods of boredom
  interspersed with short bursts of terror
• like war or evolution
• Measurements should be tailored to seasonal or
  hydrologically-mediated rhythms of processes
• more frequent when variables change fast or
  non-linearly
• less frequent when variables change slow,
  linearly, or in a predictable fashion

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Learning from Monitoring

• Practical problems
• Timeframes are generally slow and data is
  generally ambiguous
• Data piles up without analysis
• When do we act?
• When can we turn this thing off?

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Elements of Smart Monitoring

• Monitoring designed to test hypotheses about the
  key linkages of causes to effects in watersheds
• all crucial steps in chains of cause and effects
  examined
• periodic re-working of hypotheses in light of new
  information
• test with new data
• Spatial mapping of key elements and processes in
  specific watersheds with an eye to developing the
  necessary hypotheses that predict relationships
  of variables that can be monitored more quickly
  over broader spatial scales

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Elements of Smart Monitoring

• Interpretation of cause and effect linkages must
  be made locally and recognize situations
• What is achieved depends on where on your are
  today
• Example
• Prescription is to leave 100 ft no-touch buffer
  along streams to achieve large conifer

Riparian Stand Type
Outcome Hypothesis
Mature Conifer Success
should achieve Mixed
Conifer/Hardwood Mixed results
would achieve

in some locations Hardwood
Failure should not
achieve
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General Conclusions on TMDL Monitoring

• Many Pitfalls
• Complexities in application of management
  system/practices
• Complex interactions among practices and
  watershed processes
• Land ownership patterns
• Legacies from past (legal) activities
• Scale
• Learning vs. measuring
• Linkage to decision-system
• Where is realistic guidance coming from?

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Watershed Analysis as a basis for monitoring

• Watershed Analysis encourages information
  generation
• Information is part of decision-making
• Where watershed analysis has been done we know
  something about
• Status of public resources
• Cause and effect linkages between management
  practices, watershed processes and habitat
  conditions
• Appropriate prescriptions tailored to landscape
  sensitivities

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Washington TFW Statewide Monitoring Program
Monitoring is not Monitoring is
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Monitoring Program Approach

• An example situation that is monitoredCoarse
  sediment from past mass wasting in mapped unit 3
  associated with roads on unstable slopes is
  reducing pools in stream segments 1 and 2 and
  degrading summer rearing habitat.
• Could monitor Landslide rate Pools
  Amount of rearing habitat

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Goals for Monitoring Program

• Utilizes all information efficiently
• Learns quickly
• Encourages volunteer information as well as core
  program funded by TFW
• Reasonably reliable
• Tracks trends in resource status
• State of the state report
• Establishes effectiveness of prescriptions