Minutes Monitoring and Analysis Subcommittee Meeting Joe Macknis Memorial Conference Room (Fish Shack) April 18, 2007 11:00am - 3:00 pm Carlton Haywood, ICPRB Nita Sylvester, EPA/CBPO Scott Phillips, USGS Peter Tango, USGS/CBPO Jackie Johnson, ICPRB/CBPO Dave Jasinski, UMCES Bruce Michael, MDNR Peter Bergstrom, NOAA/CBPO Bill Dennison, UMCES Mary Ellen Ley, USGS/CBPO Claire Buchannan, ICPRB Kathy Ellet Jamie Bosiljcvac. CRC/CBPO Workgroup Updates TMAW-Bill Dennison This year marks the first time the entire communications schedule has been completed. TMAW now continues to work on next years communications products. A few of the projects that TMAW will be working on in the next few months include: 1. How to better use all of the water quality data the agencies are collecting. And also incorporate the existing data that we are not using. 2. Explore biotic indictors in human health. TMAW would like to follow up on the meeting that was held jointly with LivRAW concerning bacterial health indicators. 3. Have more peer review papers for the forecast and BHHI. 4. Continue to improve the forecast by adding new indicators and more peer review processes. 5. TMAW is developing a role in the Maryland Bay Stat initiative, such as providing data since the needs for data are more immediate. 6. The forecast will be out at the end of May, right before the Memorial Day weekend. Non-Tidal Workgroup-Scott Phillips The workgroup will be focused on two major topics: (I) coordination of monitoring and data management and (II) data analysis and information delivery. Part one will consist of coordinating monitoring for the non-tidal network. This is a static program unless more funds become available. The database manager, Tami Huber, is continuing to improve the non-tidal database. Part two includes refinement and development of the watershed health indicators. The majority of the workgroups time this year will be spent developing these water-quality related indicators. Another component of part two includes assessing water-quality changes over time. AMQAW- Bruce Michael The workgroup meets on a quarterly basis to coordinate the review of Bay Program participating lab, ensuring methodologies are consistent. Mary Ellen is leading the labs ------- in updating the Recommended Methods and Guidelines document. The labs are also being assessed for a gap analysis, which is comparing them to NELAC standards. Labs will be compared across states, not just within. The NELAC comments will also help us organize the methods manual. The workgroup also continues to coordinate shallow water and phytoplankton monitoring efforts. Before switching out old Clark cell DO probes with new optical probes, a study is being conducted to compare the two. CBOS and NOAA buoys are also being compared to ensure methods are similar. Indicator Workgroup-Nita Sylvester The 2006 Bay Health and Restoration Assessments are complete, but still need to fill gaps and improve timeliness of data. This is also the first year you can drill down to details on the website. Nita provided an indicator summary comparing last years numbers to this years numbers. The Reducing Pollution section of the report still needs work because it is not clear how it is weighted and rolled up into the summary. The workgroups 2007 workplan includes developing watershed health indicators with the non-tidal workgroup, providing links to the geographic cuts of information on the CBP website and providing trends where available. BHHI Discussion-Carlton Haywood The Bay Program did not publish the Bay Habitat Health Index as scheduled due to an unresolved conflict concerning how to show the dissolved oxygen conditions of the Bay. Instead UMCES has agreed to publish it acknowledging the Bay Programs contributions and plans to publish it together next year. The differences will be resolved over the next 9 months through TMAW. MASC Budget-Carlton Haywood The 08 base budget will remain the same as last year with all of the ongoing projects that have already been approved continuing. There is no money for extra activities. The BSC is keeping the same list of requested activities as last year, and any extra money from ending activities will be appropriated by the BSC. Scott Phillips asked if the BSC is pursuing alternative sources of funding for these activities. Carlton suggested that MASC can list this as an activity for a future meeting. Non-tidal STAC Workshop results-Scott Phillips The STAC watershed health workshop results are still being drafted. As soon as the authors submit their sections to Scott, the recommendations will be finalized and submitted to STAC. Scott provided a handout with the draft executive summary which included recommendations for the watershed health indicators. This handout can be found on the 4/18 MASC website calendar entry. Some of the recommendations include using the State's 303d reports. It may have to be just a summary of the reports. In order to keep the report manageable, we will just start with reporting data that we already have instead of creating new indictors. The non-tidal workgroup has asked that ------- each State informally present what streams are impaired and how they report this in the 303d. Ultimately it would be nice to stratify the watersheds into like groups. The STAC indicator workgroup may be helpful with this task. Michael Williams has the lead on preparing the indicators and he will invite Peter Claggett to show the land use indicators at the May 9th meeting. Nita relayed the Indicator Workgroup comments on the STAC recommendations to MASC. - Why are we doing a separate Watershed Health report? This is something that the IC wanted, not the GAO. We don't have to follow the same format as the other reports. There is more flexibility with it. Conduct smaller spatial scale assessments Compare similar watersheds using similar reference criteria, (ex: The goals in urban areas are different than agricultural areas.) This report doesn't seem feasible to do on an annual cycle. Maybe every 2 or 5 years. - Does this have to be a separate report? Can this information be included into our current assessments? - Look at the State of the Forests document as a model. This is done 3-5 years because of the availability of the data. - Watershed Health seems to be a mix of health and stressors, (ex: Impervious surface is a stressor to the Bay, but not a stressor in the watershed). - Work closely with the NEMO (used to stand for Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officials) people. They have a better understanding of who the target audience would be. ------- |