Office of Research & Development | April 2022

United States
Environmental
Protection Agency

AEPA

Participatory Science

Data Management Case Studies

Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative

'Environmental Protection Agency [Contract No.
GS-35F-410DA] to Information International Associates, INC.


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Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative

Improving Data Management for Participatory Science

CMC successfully integrates data across government and non-government organizations, including
Participatory Science Groups, using a Tiered Quality Framework that allows participation by groups at
different levels and helps inform the data's use.

Project Overview & Goals

The Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative
(CMC), funded by a grant from the EPA
Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) in 2015,
participatory science initiatives across
groups and regions to amplify voices and
enhance understanding of the health of the
Chesapeake Bay and its watershed.
Monitoring groups collect chemical and
benthic macroinvertebrate data, all of which
are classified by the CMC Tiered Quality
Framework to ensure consistent data quality
across the region. CMC provides technical,
programmatic, and outreach support to
integrate participatory science monitoring
data into a centralized data hub, the
Chesapeake Data Explorer. Green Fin
Studios and the Chesapeake Bay National
Estuarine Research Reserve in Virginia at
the Virginia Institute of Marine Science
(CBNERR/VA-VIMS) developed the
infrastructure for the Data Explorer
continues to maintain and update the
platform. The data are publicly available via
the Data Explorer and are used by the
Chesapeake Bay Program, state
governments within the watershed
(Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland,
New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West
Virginia) and others to assess the health of
the Bay and to make decisions regarding
policy and remediation efforts.

Role of Project Participants

The CMC engages monitoring groups rather
than individual project participants and





Issue:

Water Quality

Location:

Chesapeake Bay
Watershed

Tools:

Varies

Contact:

Liz Chudoba

focuses on data
sources and data
aggregation. CMC's
core partners (the
Alliance for the
Chesapeake Bay, the
Izaak Walton League of
American, Dickinson
College's Alliance for
Aquatic Resource
Monitoring (ALLARM),
the University of

Maryland Center for Environmental Science,
and the Chesapeake Bay National
Estuarine Research Reserve in Virginia) act
as service providers, organizing the
monitoring groups in their areas, providing
technical support and training, and
performing QA. The monitoring groups
focus on data collection. The responsibilities
of the monitoring groups vary from group to
group and state to state within the
watershed depending on the group's needs.

Data Management

Central to CMC's data management is the
CMC Data Explorer, a portal for all the data
collected through the CMC and a suite of
tools to search and visualize the data.
Monitoring groups use the submission
component of the Data Explorer to upload,
manage, and share their water quality and
benthic data. The groups can also view their
data alongside data collected by other
groups. All data are identified by source,
collection method, and quality assurance
tier level using the CMC Tiered Framework.

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Data can be entered via group-specific
templates or by bulk upload, which uses an
Excel macro to create a vertical CSV
template. When the data have been entered
for the collection period, a coordinator
(either at the CMC or a service provider)
performs the final QA and publishes the
data, which releases it to the Data Explorer
for public and state use.

CMC does not provide or limit the
equipment to be used. However, the
equipment must meet the specifications for
each parameter the group monitors as
required by the group's QAPP and SOP.
CMC took this approach to encourage
participation by groups that had been
collecting relevant water quality data for
many years prior to the beginning of CMC.
However, CMC encourages the use of a
more limited list of equipment when new
groups come on board.

Data Use

Data are publicly available and used by the
CBP, state governments and other
organizations to assess the health of the
Chesapeake Bay and watershed and to
make decisions regarding policy and
remediation/restoration efforts. The data
providers (individual monitoring groups or
aggregators) own the data. Users agree to
acknowledge the data owner in any
downstream use or publication as part of
the terms and conditions of use.
Requirements for data citation and an
example citation are provided on the Data
Explorer.

Issues and Lessons Learned

In the beginning of the program, the biggest
non-technical issue was engaging the
existing monitoring groups and explaining

the goals of the CMC and the value that a
network like the CMC can bring to individual
monitoring programs. CMC was able to
mitigate this issue by using the Tiered
Framework which allowed groups to
participate from where they are without
making drastic changes that could affect
long-term datasets. A major technical issue
that has arisen during the on-boarding
phase is providing technical support for the
variety of equipment inherited from older
monitoring projects. CMC encourages the
use of standard equipment with new groups
or when equipment needs to be replaced,
but doesn't require standardized equipment
in order to meet the needs and resources
available to individual groups. The
development of the Data Explorer was
essential to building momentum among the
groups. The Data Explorer provides groups
with a pre-made data management system
that automatically connects their data to key
partners and allows groups to see their data
alongside data from other users opening the
door for broader connections.

Outcomes and Success Factors

A major success factor has been the
development of the CMC Tiered
Framework, which allows data from the
various groups to be integrated and users to
better understand data quality and
appropriate uses. The Data Explorer
provides an extensive toolkit for community
groups to collect, validate, store, share and
analyze data. A major CMC
accomplishment is the use of CMC data for
a CBP assessment in 2020. Since then,
other areas of the CBP are beginning to
show interest in using CMC data.

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Opportunities

•	Support and encourage standardization
and data use across jurisdictional
boundaries.

•	A tiered framework might be a way to

make a difference nationally but there
are challenges in creating such a
structure because the data needed for
reporting differs by state and the way
the data is used can vary widely
between jurisdictions.

•	Helping to create processes to help the
states better use the data.

•	Frameworks to help integrate the
participatory science-based data with
other datasets. Spaces for states to
learn from one another.

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