Long-Term Monitoring Study Design and Impleme

The design of field biological data collections is directly tied to the goal of the study. For ongoing activities, such as a national pollutant discharge elimination system (NPDES) permitted discharge, an appropriate goal is to measure long-term trends in biological communities. Long-term monitoring programs can provide important data to measure responses to such constant inflows and often become a valuable resource to answer questions from regulatory agencies following an upset or event that may have harmed the ecosystem.