Resources and Publications

When it comes to tackling marine pollution, one of the most common questions we get asked is what should I monitor?

This can then lead to a whole array of different questions about where I should monitor? What happens with my data? How do I know when I have collected enough?

In reality, we ask ourselves these questions every day in our national monitoring programmes, and we have put together some answers are built on years of data, lots of experience in using different types of monitoring approaches, and also having some very clear questions, either set as a regulatory framework or to track and assess change in response to human intervention.

This can be a much harder question to answer when countries are just starting out, or beginning to think about what marine pollution means to them and their coastal and marine systems, and how to collect data that allows them to make decisions on how to reduce or mitigate the problem.

Under our new and recently endorsed Ocean Decade Programme – Nutrient Pollution – Global Action Network (NP-GAN), one of our key activities was to develop easy, accessible toolboxes with consistent and transferrable methodology.

Led by the Wildlife Conservation Society and born from many discussions over the years on how to assess pollution in your area or through different projects. These toolkits provides easy to follow advice on what methods should be used, what parameters should be monitored, and how to monitor to inform management and decision-making. These reports standardise this advice, and present easy to read, accessible online documents that takes you through the many steps of setting up and developing a marine pollution monitoring programme.

The toolkit consists of three parts:

• In Part 1, we go over how to develop a pollution assessment and monitoring strategy that can be used to inform decision-making and initiate change.
• In Part 2, we go into details of different approaches that can be used (i.e., water samples vs. ecological monitoring vs. remote sensing).
• In Part 3, we go into details on the pros and cons of different in-situ methods of assessment such as water quality samples vs. testing kits vs. data loggers.

This work was funded by Science for Nature and People Partnership (SNAPP).