Excerpt
Monitoring means “to watch or check on” (9). In resource management, monitoring is an essential step from both a resource and a legal perspective (5, G, 7, 10). In particular, monitoring is essential to evaluate management effects on a given resource; justify the expenditure of funds for pollution control, alternative resource management practices, and restoring degraded resources; optimize the allocation of funds among management alternatives; increase our understanding of the systems being monitored, particularly their temporal and spatial variability; and document compliance with regulatory requirements.
If our primary concern is water quality, for example, monitoring is used to evaluate compliance with water quality standards and the effects of management activities on water quality (3, 4, 5). If water quality is not satisfactory, a strategy must be developed to reduce incoming pollutants, and monitoring—often coupled with modeling-is essential to determine the most cost—effective approach. Thus, monitoring is essential to responsible, effective, and efficient resource management, and monitoring is increasingly a required component of water pollution control programs (e.g., 5, 6).
Nevertheless, remarkably little attention has …
Footnotes
Lee MacDonald is associate professor in the Watershed Science Program, Department of Earth Resources, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523. The author is most grateful to the many people who have shared their knowledge, experience, and questions about monitoring. Without their contributions, this synthesis would not have been possible. I also wish to thank Steve Bauer, Jim Loftis, and John Potyondy for reviewing a draft of this manuscript, and Marcus Duke for revising Figure 1.
- Copyright 1994 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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