IMPLEMENTATION OF A NATIONAL MONITORING PROGRAM

Timely information on the condition of the environment is essential if complex environmental issues are to be resolved. Currently, much of the information we have on large-scale environmental conditions is from unrelated local monitoring efforts that must be synthesized to address large-scale issues. The Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) was initiated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to address the need for coherent ecological resource information on a regional and national scale. EMAP began with a design concept or framework that had the goal of providing an integrated family of monitoring designs that could be adapted to sampling any ecological resource. Since EMAP's inception, the design concept has been applied to pilot and demonstration monitoring programs for a variety of ecological resources. This paper discusses some of the rationale behind the conceptual design, describes some of the techniques for applying the general concept to a specific resource, and gives specific applications for several demonstration studies.