Gulf of Maine Projects

Final Report: Evaluation of the Gulfwatch Monitoring Program

Gulfwatch Review

General

In general the review panel was impressed with the effort Program staff have made to date, especially given the logistical problems of running an international program with very limited funding. Gulfwatch reports have honestly detailed problems encountered and they have largely done a good job with corrective actions to address these problems. This review details a number of comments and concems both about the underlining assumptions made and about the program implementation but these critical comments are intended to guide constructive program modifications and should not be interpreted as a negative opinion of the entire program.

An underlying "flaw" in the Gulfwatch Monitoring Program is that it has been seriously underfunded from the beginning. Some of the criticisms contained in this review relate directly to that reality. The Initial Plan developed in 1991 contains many of the appropriate program elements and recommends a realistically expected level of effort for a regional monitoring program. However, only a small portion of that Plan was funded. In addition, the original Plan was overly dependent on splicing together existing local programs into a regional entity without a critical review of those programs. While this may have been a logical reaction in the face of known fiscal constraints, a collection of local programs that meet local needs cannot automatically be knitted into a regional program. Also, the myriad of differing objectives and variable data quality found in a collection of local programs make the integration effort extremely difficult. Objectives of the 1991 Plan are overstated and create a level of expectation that cannot be fulfilled. The 1991 Plan ignores the essential integration step which would continually review data produced in the context of questions asked and modify the program in the light of this review. The publication of data files is but one part of a monitoring program and this missing integration step has cascaded from the Plan to program implementation.

The formal review represented by this report needs to be incorporated as an integral element of Gulfwatch. In the initial five years of operation, a reasonable data baseline has been produced and this serves as a foundation on which to build a stronger program. The Review Panel hopes that this review will catalyze efforts to reestablish the underlying purpose for monitoring in the Gulf, and to restate the management questions which supposedly drive the monitoring. Implicit in all of this is the continued support of a Gulf-wide regional monitoring program, including necessary resources.

Back to Table of Contents | On to Future Design Modifications

To obtain a printed version of this report, please download this document. You will need Adobe Acrobat 3.0. It's easy to use and available free.