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1. Environmental Monitoring: Function and Purpose
The OSPAR Convention 5 Annex IV (On the Assessment of the Quality of the Marine Environment) defines monitoring as the repeated measurement of

  1. the quality of the marine environment and each of its compartments, that is, water, sediments, biota;
  2. activities or natural and anthropogenic inputs which may affect the quality of the marine environment
  3. the effects of such activities and inputs
Monitoring may be undertaken with the purpose of identifying patterns and trends for research or other purposes. (OSPAR, 1998). Here the term "monitoring" refers to a baseline position, which establishes normative values. Such monitoring may utilise "exploratory sampling" (JAMP, 1997) to estimate the level of a particular measurement at a particular time or place, to describe the normal range of values of the measurement and its spatial variability, i.e., to estimate the level of a particular effect at all points in an area, with a specified precision, or to estimate a parameter or parameters (e.g. mean, median, 95 percentile) with specified precision.
To design a monitoring programme some a priori knowledge of the system to be monitored is required. If this is not available, one main objective of the monitoring activity can be to obtain such information so that more focused monitoring can be done subsequently and the results can then be interpreted against a background of spatial and temporal natural variability Programmes aiming to assess the quality of the marine environment may have several purposes (since such monitoring can demonstrate links between contaminants and ecological responses)
  1. to ascertain general quality status
  2. to assess areas with known or suspected environmental impact
  3. to provide a tool to detect problems.
In areas where particular pollutant impacts are not suspected, it is nevertheless appropriate to deploy techniques which aim to monitor the general "health" of the marine ecosystem. Detecting significant effects in the sediments or the water column would trigger detailed biological and chemical investigations whose purpose would be to establish the severity of any impacts and possible causes. Two major functions fulfilled by such a general quality status programme are:
  1. an "early warning" component which focuses on the identification of areas of concern at an early stage, based on information from biomarkers indicative of both exposure to contaminants as well as any deleterious effects;
  2. a programme to detect long term changes in the marine environment which could help to identify more subtle changes which may or may not be impact-related.(JAMP, 1999)

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