Abstract
In order to meet a growing need to determine the condition of the nation's ecosystems and how their condition is changing, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) developed EMAP, the Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program. A common survey design serves as the foundation on which to base monitoring of status and trends among diverse ecosystem types. In this paper, we describe the need for a statistically based survey design, briefly summarize the basic EMAP design, describe how that design is tailored for the selection of a probability sample of lakes on which to make measurements of lake condition, and illustrate the process for selecting a sample of lakes in the northeastern United States. Finally, we illustrate how measurements taken on the sample of lakes can be summarized, with known uncertainty, to describe the condition of a population of lakes.
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Larsen, D.P., Thornton, K.W., Urquhart, N.S. et al. The role of sample surveys for monitoring the condition of the nation's lakes. Environ Monit Assess 32, 101–134 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00547131
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00547131