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Research Moguls Reorient

Two programs charged with checking the Estuary's vital signs and reporting back to regulators on the status of its health are now updating their original goals and being pressed by policymakers and water users to expand their research and make more connections between the millions of bytes of data they collect.

The purview of one program is pollutants in the Bay - the Regional Monitoring Program (RMP) run by the S.F. Estuary Institute samples the levels of over a hundred different contaminants in sediments, water and transplanted bivalves at 22 stations around the Bay. The purview of the other is fishery and hydrologic conditions in the upper Estuary - the Interagency Ecological Program (IEP) has long monitored water salinity, temperature and flows in the Delta's major rivers and channels, as well as the impacts of freshwater flows, export pumping and other factors on fish.

But regulators, dischargers and water users are now asking these two programs to do much more, to not just sample conditions but also to draw conclusions that will inform short- and long-term environmental management decisions and to start making links between data collected upstream and downstream, and between fish, flows, contaminants, marshes, human disturbances and other areas of study.

"For every dollar we spend on dredging, we must spend another dollar on sediment testing," says Ellen Johnck, director of the business-oriented Bay Planning Coalition and a member of the RMP steering committee. "We want to make sure that money is well-spent, that we're doing the right tests, asking the right scientific questions and getting useful answers."

According to the Estuary Institute's Bruce Thompson, the two-year-old RMP has now collected enough baseline data to begin more integrative analyses. But that will take more staff and money, he says, and it's not within the original scope of the program. So this summer the Institute and RMP steering committee - which includes the dischargers who foot the $2 million annual monitoring bill - are debating questions such as what the trade off is between routine monitoring and special studies, how big the RMP should get (should the program also sample in watersheds and wetlands or just stick to the Bay?) and how the program could better coordinate with other monitoring efforts. While the answers to these questions are still up in the air, Institute staff have recommended sticking to the original program goals of routine contaminant monitoring until 1997, when more thought, time and money can be given to program improvement.

The Estuary's other environmental monitoring mogul, IEP, has already asked itself enough similar questions to have a draft programwide review on paper (due for release September 15). According to the program's Pat Coulston, IEP managers and stakeholders launched the review when the recent Bay-Delta Accord and the new State Water Quality Plan placed new demands on the research program. The program is now not only being asked to measure flows and locate fish schools so that daily decisions can made about export pump operations, but also to assess water project impacts in the context of the whole Estuary and other human activities that affect it, he says. Coulston has already met with Thompson to discuss potential joint studies in the areas of fish contamination and marsh ecology.

Clearly the two monitoring moguls hope to provide more useful information on an ecosystemwide level. A step toward this synthesis may be the "contamination index" the Estuary Institute hopes to develop over the next year with the help of ecological risk assessment experts. The index would synthesize data on whether a wide array of pollutants are exceeding water quality objectives. This new pollution index could, if combined with striped bass and smelt indexes used by IEP upstream, fold into what everyone seems to be clamoring for - a single, overall index of the Estuary's health.

Contact: Bruce Thompson (510)231-9539 or Pat Coulston (209)948-7800

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