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


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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


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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.


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