Marine Monitoring In Heterogeneous Environments

Marine monitoring programs around the city of Los Angeles' Hyperion municipal wastewater outfall provide insight into important issues in monitoring design. Historical monitoring programs have produced information that was instrumental in making major management decisions about waste treatment policies. In addition, consistent data collection over time has helped document trends in environmental conditions around the outfall. Monitoring requirements recently have expanded, however, and scientific and public concerns about environmental quality have become more complex. Time-series collections of data on a relatively limited suite of parameters is no longer suitable. Designing monitoring programs to meet present needs requires careful attention to the twin, but competing, demands for consistency and adaptive flexibility. Consistency is necessary to track trends over time and to compare data from several studies. However, natural heterogeneity and changing management concerns require adaptation and flexibility. Examples from the City of Los Angeles' ocean monitoring program for the Hyperion Treatment Plant exhibit this adaptive flexibility. Such adaptation is neither easy nor straightforward, and depends on thorough knowledge of the management context and the natural environment.