Streamkeepers of Clallam County

Ambient Monitoring Strategy draft, 11/22/05

This draft statement was devised in consultation with our Technical Advisory meeting of 11/21/05.

Streamkeepers’ main ambient-monitoring strategy should be to look for emergent watershed degradation (i.e., “red flags”) in a geographically broad manner, because such sites call for a prompt management response. However, this primary strategy must be conditioned by the following factors:

• Sites where degradation has been documented need to be revisited periodically.
• It may take many years to document degradation at a particular site, particularly if trend analysis is to be performed.
• Certain Streamkeeper partners or volunteers may desire to establish a long-term data set at particular sites for particular purposes.
• Other project partners may request Streamkeepers to perform special monitoring for a particular purpose, such as restoration project effectiveness monitoring, watershed or endangered species recovery planning, or TMDL implementation. Such projects need to be tailor-made for the end-user.
• The achievement of the above objectives is limited by the resources available from Streamkeepers’ staff, technical advisors, and volunteers.