1.3 Southern California Bight 2003 Regional Monitoring Program 
In response to the need for an integrated assessment of the condition of the 
southern California coastal ocean, SCCWRP brought together 58 organizations in the 
summer of 2003 to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the ecological condition of 
the SCB. This study, known as Bight’03, was the third regional-scale assessment of the 
SCB by SCCWRP, following earlier related efforts in 1994 and 1998. There also have 
been older studies of the benthic fauna of shelf, slope, and basin habitats throughout 
the SCB conducted by other investigators (Jones 1969, Fauchald and Jones 1978). 
The spatial extent of the SCCWRP-related regional assessments ranged from Pt. 
Conception in the north to the Mexican border. During the 2003 effort, sampling was 
extended to include estuaries and continental slope and basin areas down to a depth of 
1,000 m. Bight’03 included three components: Coastal Ecology, Shoreline 
Microbiology and Water Quality. Shoreline microbiology was not a part of the scope of 
the EMAP study. The Water Quality component of Bight’03 (Nezlin et al. 2007) was 
focused on examination of the effects of storm water runoff on the SCB. Sampling did 
not fall within the EMAP index period and was designed to address a different set of 
research questions, and thus data collected under this component could not be 
integrated with the EMAP assessment. However, water quality data from some stations 
within the SCB were collected by SCCWRP under a cooperative agreement with EPA. 
The Coastal Ecology Component of Bight'03 assessed sediment contaminants and the 
effect of these contaminants on biota in the SCB, and analyzed a set of contaminants 
that were virtually the same as those assessed in the EMAP program (Ranasinghe et al. 
2007). 
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