Gulf of Maine Projects
Final Report: Evaluation of the Gulfwatch
Monitoring Program
As part of the mission of Gulf of Maine Council, the GOM Monitoring Committee
was charged the development of the Gulf of Maine Environmental Monitoring
Plan. The intent of the Monitoring Plan is to provide environmental resource
managers with information to support sustainable use of the Gulf and allow
assessment and management of risk to public and environmental health from
current and potential threats.
To carry out the Monitoring Plan, a project named Gulfwatch was established,
to measure chemical contamination Gulfwide.
Gulfwatch is presently a program in which the blue mussel, Mytilus
edulis, is used as an indicator for habitat exposure to organic and
inorganic contaminants. Bivalves, such as M. edulis, have been
successfully used as indicator organisms in environmental monitoring programs
throughout the world to identify variation in chemical contaminants between
sites, and contribute to the understanding of trends in coastal contamination.
The reports and data of the Gulfwatch program are
available below:
The recent evaluation of the Gulfwatch program,
Final Report: Evaluation of the Gulfwatch Monitoring Program,
provides a review and recommendations for improvement.
The Evaluation of Gulfwatch reports, from 1994
and 1995 , are currently available in an Adobe
Acrobat 3.0 version. (If you need to download
this software, it is very easy, and free.)
Since these documents are somewhat bulky, here is the Table
of Contents and Introduction. The Gulf of Maine watershed map accompanies
these reports in two image sizes, for each year:
The Gulfwatch data, which details contaminant concentrations
in the blue mussel, is available in three formats: HTML, a tab-delimited
text file, and Microsoft Excel Version 8.0 for PCs.. A table detailing
site information accompanies the contaminant data, and can be accessed
in an HTML file (43K), text
file (5K), or Excel file (28K).
KEY: Links in the table indicate data size. ND indicates
No Data.
NOTE: Excel 8.0 files are binary and will have to be viewed with
Microsoft Excel. Download the Excel files to your local disk by holding
the shift button while clicking on the filename. After you have retrieved
the files this way you may load them into Excel.
NOTE:Tab delimited text files may be downloaded the same way as
the Excel files and then imported into your favorite database/spreadsheet
program.
This program is supported by the Gulf of Maine Council on
the Marine Environment and the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Questions/Comments about data to Steve
Jones, shj@christa.unh.edu
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