Regional Monitoring for Sediment and Water Quality in the Urban Ocean of the Southern California Bight

The Southern California Bight (SCB) is host to one of some of the most productive ecosystems in the world, providing economic, cultural and recreational services to large populations living along the coast. However, it is also subject to significant pollutant inputs due to a highly urbanized coastland. Historically, environmental monitoring of the coastal environment has been temporally intensive, but spatially focused on narrow areas closest to regulated discharges, providing a potentially biased perspective of overall coastal sediment and water quality. Beginning in 1994 and conducted every five years since, nearly 100 regulated, regulatory, non-governmental and academic organizations have joined forces to implement the SCB Regional Marine Monitoring Program (the Bight Program). The Bight Program has affected management actions in the region by focusing current efforts in habitats most impacted by poor sediment and water quality, highlighting the improvements from previous management actions, and characterizing emerging threats to the coastal zone, such as ocean acidification. The most recent Bight program sampled nearly 400 locations, from brackish estuaries to offshore basins >1000m depth, using a probabilistic survey design and measuring multiple indicators of sediment quality including chemistry, toxicity, and infauna, water quality indicators including nutrients, harmful algal bloom toxins, dissolved oxygen, pH and aragonite saturation state, biological indicators of impairment, and indicators of human pathogens. Here we will highlight several key findings from the most recent survey as well as some important trends over the Bight Program’s 25-year history.