New partnership to standardize indicators and methods in Chesapeake Bay

Members at meetingEcoCheck initiated a new effort to develop standards for data collection and analysis by watershed organizations and tidal volunteer monitoring networks. Participants include representatives from the Nanticoke, Choptank, Chester, Sassafras, Magothy, Severn, South, West/Rhode, and St. Mary's Rivers, with additional members expected to join. Currently, each organization collects and reports data for different indicators and in different ways, making comparison between datasets difficult. This new effort tasks the group with identifying a core set of indicators that should be collected, developing standard sampling and analysis methods for those indicators, and establishing common considerations for designing sampling schemes. Guidelines will be produced for other non-profit or volunteer-based groups assessing ecosystem health, and will hopefully lead to a rich and robust data set that can help fill a critical data gap in Bay tributaries.