1.0 Introduction 
1.1 Program Background 
Safeguarding the natural environment is fundamental to the mission of the U.S. 
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The legislative mandate to undertake this part 
of the Agency’s mission is embodied, in part, in the Clean Water Act (CWA). Sections of 
this Act require the states to report the condition of their aquatic resources and list those 
not meeting their designated use (Section 305b and 303d respectively). Calls for 
improvements in environmental monitoring date back to the late 1970’s, and have been 
recently reiterated by the U. S. General Accounting Office (U.S. GAO, 2000). The GAO 
report shows that problems with monitoring of aquatic resources continue to limit states’ 
abilities to carry out several key management and regulatory activities on water quality. 
At the national level, there is a clear need for coordinated monitoring of the nation’s 
ecological resources. As a response to these needs at state and national levels, the 
EPA Office of Research and Development (ORD) has undertaken research to support 
the Agency’s Regional Offices and the states in their efforts to meet the CWA reporting 
requirements. The Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) is one 
of the key components of that research. The EMAP Western Pilot program was 
established as a regional research effort to develop and demonstrate the tools needed 
to measure ecological condition of the aquatic resources in the 14 western states in 
EPA Regions 8, 9, and 10. 
The coastal assessment component of the EMAP Western Pilot began as a 
partnership with the states of California, Oregon and Washington, the National Oceanic 
and Atmospheric Administration, and the Biomonitoring of Environmental Status and 
Trends Program (BEST) of the U.S. Geological Survey to measure the condition of the 
estuaries of these three states. Sampling began during the summer of 1999 and the 
initial phase of estuarine sampling was completed in 2000. Beginning in 2000, the 
Western Coastal Assessment efforts became integrated into the EPA National Coastal 
Assessment Program (NCA). 
The NCA is a multi-year effort led by EPA’s Office of Research and Development 
to evaluate the assessment methods it has developed to advance the science of 
ecosystem condition monitoring. This program has surveyed the condition of the 
Nation’s coastal resources (estuaries and offshore waters) by creating an integrated, 
comprehensive coastal monitoring program among the coastal states to assess coastal 
ecological condition. The NCA is accomplished through strategic partnerships with all 
24 U.S. coastal states. Using a compatible, probabilistic design and a common set of 
survey indicators, each state conducts the survey and assesses the condition of their 
coastal resources independently. Because of the compatible design, these estimates 
can be aggregated to assess conditions at the EPA Regional, biogeographical, and 
national levels. Data from this program provide the basis for individual reports of 
coastal conditions for each state (Nelson et al., 2004, 2005, 2007; Hayslip et al., 2006, 
Wilson and Partridge, 2007), as well as providing data for a series of National Coastal 
Condition Reports (U.S. EPA 2001,2004, 2006). 
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