Gulf of Maine Projects

Final Report: Evaluation of the Gulfwatch Monitoring Program

As part of the mission of Gulf of Maine Council, the GOM Monitoring Committee was charged the development of the Gulf of Maine Environmental Monitoring Plan. The intent of the Monitoring Plan is to provide environmental resource managers with information to support sustainable use of the Gulf and allow assessment and management of risk to public and environmental health from current and potential threats.

To carry out the Monitoring Plan, a project named Gulfwatch was established, to measure chemical contamination Gulfwide.

Gulfwatch is presently a program in which the blue mussel, Mytilus edulis, is used as an indicator for habitat exposure to organic and inorganic contaminants. Bivalves, such as M. edulis, have been successfully used as indicator organisms in environmental monitoring programs throughout the world to identify variation in chemical contaminants between sites, and contribute to the understanding of trends in coastal contamination.

The reports and data of the Gulfwatch program are available below:

The recent evaluation of the Gulfwatch program, Final Report: Evaluation of the Gulfwatch Monitoring Program, provides a review and recommendations for improvement.

The Evaluation of Gulfwatch reports, from 1994 and 1995 , are currently available in an Adobe Acrobat 3.0 version. (If you need to download this software, it is very easy, and free.)

Since these documents are somewhat bulky, here is the Table of Contents and Introduction. The Gulf of Maine watershed map accompanies these reports in two image sizes, for each year:

The Gulfwatch data, which details contaminant concentrations in the blue mussel, is available in three formats: HTML, a tab-delimited text file, and Microsoft Excel Version 8.0 for PCs.. A table detailing site information accompanies the contaminant data, and can be accessed in an HTML file (43K), text file (5K), or Excel file (28K).

KEY: Links in the table indicate data size. ND indicates No Data.
NOTE: Excel 8.0 files are binary and will have to be viewed with Microsoft Excel. Download the Excel files to your local disk by holding the shift button while clicking on the filename. After you have retrieved the files this way you may load them into Excel.
NOTE:Tab delimited text files may be downloaded the same way as the Excel files and then imported into your favorite database/spreadsheet program.

This program is supported by the Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment and the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Questions/Comments about data to Steve Jones, shj@christa.unh.edu