Ecological monitoring is an essential part of managing ecosystems in the 21st century: it helps track changes due to human impacts, assesses pollution and efforts to clean it up, and offers insight into the intricate relationships between living things, both in the monitored area and in general. Scientific monitoring techniques can easily be applied to different regions of the world, but sometimes it’s important to take a step back and make sure that the approach that makes sense for one study is still producing desired results in a different environment. Scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s Office of Research and Development do just that: working on the basic science of developing and testing new sampling methods and making sure techniques used in one environment work just as well in another setting.
AUTHOR
Christina Dierkes, Ohio Sea Grant