Topical Area: Data Management

George Henderson, Jill Trubey, and Mike Dick, Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Florida Marine Research Institute, St. Petersburg, FL; Tom Culliton and Dave Lott, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/SEA, Silver Springs, MD

The Everglades and its surrounding marine and estuarine environment is an area that has been altered by a myriad of human activities. These activities have led to a decline in the health and vitality of coral reefs, degraded water quality, contaminated sediments and biota, nutrient enrichment of marine water, mass mortality of plant life, changes in animal population abundance and harvests, and habitat loss and fragmentation.

Many environmental monitoring projects are currently active within the South Florida coastal ecosystem to support a variety of management and research purposes. However, it is not clear whether the results of these efforts are generating a "complete set" of information required to meet a common set of goals and objectives.

The purpose of this effort is to provide a forum in which decision-makers and scientists can develop an integrated monitoring and measurement program for the South Florida coastal ecosystem. The program will: 1) establish a coordinated monitoring framework to document change at the ecosystem level, 2) measure the effectiveness of ongoing and planned management actions, 3) reduce monitoring gaps and overlaps, and 4) improve existing monitoring capabilities.

The South Florida Ecosystem Monitoring Integration database effort is led by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection's Florida Marine Research Institute (FDEP/FMRI) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Strategic Environmental Assessments Division (NOAA/SEA). The database contains project level metadata (data about data) for over 240 federal, state, regional, local and private environmental monitoring projects operating in the South Florida marine ecosystem. The system does not contain actual data or document modeling or short-term research projects.

FDEP/FMRI and NOAA/SEA gathered these data through on-site interviews with principal investigators, throughout Florida, to ensure both adequate coverage of monitoring projects and consistent survey responses. Information on each project includes: spatial coverage and monitoring site locations, temporal characteristics, which include sampling dates and seasonal groupings, data parameters measured and collected, methodology, database characteristics, and data availability. Information on each project was recorded on a survey form and entered into an Oracle database via the Internet. The digital versions of the surveys can be viewed through the South Florida Ecosystem Monitoring Integration Project web site at

Once the metadata were collected, a series of workshops were held that utilized participants' knowledge and expertise to identify management concerns and associated information needs. The first workshop was held in January 1997 and provided the basis for the second workshop, in which the attendees worked to link critical concerns and monitoring activities. The goal of Workshop II, held in May 1997, was to develop a monitoring strategy for each critical concern. The strategies that were developed identified spatial, temporal, and thematic gaps in current monitoring efforts. The strategies developed at the workshop will be included in a monitoring plan to be developed by the Core Group planning team and reviewed and evaluated by the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force, the Governor's Commission for a Sustainable South Florida, and the Florida Bay Program Management Committee.

In addition to the metadata database, a geographic information system (GIS) was developed by FDEP/FMRI and NOAA/SEA to support the development of the South Florida Ecosystem Monitoring Integration Project. The site-specific portion of the survey, i.e. platforms, transects, and aerial units, was placed in a customized ArcView3 application, that listed the actual monitoring locations, and allowed access to sample dates and parameters measured at each site.