EMPA 2021 Water Quality

The overall goal of the Estuary Marine Protected Area (EMPA) Monitoring Program is to establish a monitoring framework, including data collection, analysis, synthesis, and reporting to determine the health of estuaries in California and the efficacy of MPA designation in estuaries. As part of the initial phases of the program, we developed standard protocols to assess key estuarine features across different estuaries, coupled with standard data templates and guidance on analysis, synthesis, and reporting, focused on four guiding principles: flexibility, comparability, interpretability, and practicality. We developed 14 SOPs and piloted the framework at 15 estuaries in 2021. For more details on the EMPA program and framework, see https://empa.sccwrp.org. This dataset includes the discrete water quality data collected in 2021, as illustrated in SOP 2. At each sampling station within an estuary, discrete water quality samples were taken using portable sensors (YSI). Sensors were used to collect temperature, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, pressure, pH, and salinity at different depths. Replication varied with estuary. For more details, see SOP 2 on https://empa.sccwrp.org. To simplify data usability, fields from both data and metadata tables have been combined to provide the user with a merged dataset. The metadata table is also included in standalone format.